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Daria Martin on ‘Sensorium Tests’ and ‘At the Threshold’

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Daria Martin on ‘Sensorium Tests’ and ‘At the Threshold’

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We commonly think people have five senses: sound, sight, smell, taste and touch. Beyond this there are several scientifically recognised senses including pain, temperature and proprioception [the sense of knowing where your body parts are in a space]. Synaesthesia can move between any of these crossings, so there are many permutations.

I have created two films exploring mirror-touch synaesthesia, 'Sensorium Tests' and 'At the Threshold'. Mirror-touch synaesthesia occurs when a visual image of touch evokes a visceral touch on the synaesthete's body. For example, if I were to see you being touched on your shoulder then I would feel that touch on my own shoulder. It's usually experienced in mirror image to what's seen. It's interesting to look at a form of synaesthesia that responds to external social relationships.

Mirror-touch synaesthesia can be conceptualised as a heightened form of physical, and to a degree emotional, empathy. This should place a mirror-touch synaesthete in a strong position to be extremely sensitive to others, very empathic, very kind and helpful. But in practice it often causes synaesthetes to withdraw socially, because our world is not built for such empathy. It assaults our senses.

An ethereal, dreamlike quality

My films explore the mirror-touch synaesthete's way of seeing as one that's immersive and sensitive to touch. I interviewed 13 mirror-touch synaesthetes and gathered information on the social aspects of mirror-touch synaesthesia and responses that people with the condition had to objects. The results of those interviews have filtered into both films.

One of the appeals of film is the way that it can fold into itself painting, music, performance and sculpture. Film creates spaces that are between the mental and the physical. It has an ethereal, dreamlike quality whilst, especially with 16 mm film, there is real evidence of bodies, space and material, and I want that physicality to remain very present in the viewing experience. Films are made of images and sound, but I believe that they can touch us in other ways, including feelings inside and on our bodies. I'm trying to provoke the audience to watch with all of their senses, including a sense of touch.

This immersed way of seeing

'Sensorium Tests' shows the testing of a mirror-touch synaesthete in a lab with a one-way mirror, behind which scientists are watching. One of the scientists is listening to testimonies based on my exchanges with mirror-touch synaesthetes. I've contrasted the synaesthete's haptic (touch-sensitive) and empathic look at things with a rather voyeuristic, objectifying look that is epitomised by the one-way mirror. It's contrasted to make a rhetorical point and to push and pull the viewer between this immersed way of seeing and this more distanced way of seeing. The test within 'Sensorium Tests' is based on the first clinical study of a mirror-touch synaesthete.

'At the Threshold' is about growing up as a mirror-touch synaesthete and what happens if your parent is a mirror-touch synaesthete too. The basic premise of the story is a universal one about coming of age, a teenager wanting to break free and a mother wanting to keep him home. It explores some of the difficulties in social relationships that synaesthetes might encounter and how we imagine empathy to be helpful socially, even though having too much empathy can be detrimental. The film was inspired visually by 1950s melodramas where physical objects in the domestic environment seemed very lively and vivid, which is the perspective of some mirror-touch synaesthetes.

I hope people are moved by these films but, at the same time, I want to create a sense of distancing from the film and that's part of why their set-ups are obviously artificial. They combine highly professional actors, more amateur actors and non-actors. The elements of artifice are there to push away the audience so each person is left to their own devices in thinking about what they've seen.

The lens of empathy

Michael Banissy is a neuroscientist who was one of the first researchers into mirror-touch synaesthesia. We began working together quite early on in this research and he connected me to mirror-touch synaesthetes to interview. In this project there is a triangle between myself as an artist, scientists studying synaesthesia, and the synaesthetes themselves. Both myself and the scientists are very dependent on and indebted to the synaesthetes for sharing their first-hand experiences because, although certain forms of synaesthesia had been documented for about a century, mirror-touch synaesthesia was only 'discovered' around 2005.

Synaesthesia really represents a place not where artistic exploration has pre-empted scientific exploration, but one in which they converge. We are able to look at mirror-touch synaesthesia through the lens of empathy, and the idea of empathy originates at a nexus between science and art.

New ways of thinking

Something I hoped to capture in 'Sensorium Tests' was the beauty and mystery of the scientific laboratory as this place of total attention, and the exclusion of outside stimuli. There's something valuable about scientists focusing and identifying different types of synaesthesia, which opens up a window to artists and others for exploration. The benefits for scientists of artists coming in and engaging with the subject is that they widen out that narrow focus. Through an artist's engagement with the subject, aesthetic exploration and philosophical reflection, we hope to reflect back to the scientist new ways of thinking about the subject.

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Daria Martin on 'Sensorium Tests' and 'At the Threshold'

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We commonly think people have five senses: sound, sight, smell, taste and touch. Beyond this there are several scientifically recognised senses including pain, temperature and proprioception [the sense of knowing where your body parts are in a space]. Synaesthesia can move between any of these crossings, so there are many permutations.

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Begun in 1924 and left unfinished at the time of his death in 1929, the is Aby Warburg's attempt to map the "afterlife of antiquity," or how images of great symbolic, intellectual, and emotional power emerge in Western antiquity and then reappear and are reanimated in the art and cosmology of later times and places, from Alexandrian Greece to Weimar Germany. Focusing especially on the Renaissance, the historical period where he found the struggle between the forces of reason and unreason to be most palpable, Warburg hoped that the Mnemosyne Atlas would allow its spectators to experience for themselves the "polarities" that riddle culture and thought.

Warburg's combinatory experiments in the Atlas follow his own metonymic, intuitive logic, even as it is propelled by decades of rigorous scholarship. Warburg believe that these symbolic images, when juxtaposed and then placed in sequence, could foster immediate, synoptic insights into the afterlife of pathos-charged images depicting what he dubbed "bewegtes Leben" ( life in motion or animated life). As such, the Mnemosyne Atlas strives to make the ineffable process of historical change and recurrence immanent and comprehensible. More specifically, the Atlas would chart both the afterlife of the classical language of gestures in Renaissance art and beyond as well as the migration of Greek cosmological symbolism up through to the moment when Bruno and Kepler tried to reconcile the legacies of classical and astrological thought with the discoveries of early modern astronomy. The Atlas functions cartographically, too, as it explores how meanings are constituted by the movement of themes and styles between East and West, North and South. Transforming the cartographic and scientific notions of what an "atlas" should be, Warburg creates a dynamic "thought-space" [ Denkraum] where cosmographic and art-historical images reveal how subjective and objective forces shape Western culture.

In its "last version," the Mnemosyne Atlas consisted of sixty-three panels ( Tafeln). Using wooden boards, measuring approximately 150 x 200 cm and covered with black cloth, Warburg arranged and rearranged, in a lengthy combinatory process of addition and substraction, black and white photographs of art-historical and cosmographical images. Here and there he also included photographs of maps, manuscript pages, and contemporary images drawn from newspapers and magazines. The individual panels, in turn, were then numbered and ordered to create still larger thematic sequences.

While in his later years Warburg increasingly deployed such panels in his lectures and presentations (most famously in his Hertziana lecture in Rome in 1929), he also hoped to publish the Mnemosyne Atlas. Indeed, he planned to supplement a volume of plates with two volumes of text, containing historical and interpretive material. However, as he left the Atlas at the time of his death, the balance of word and image is decidedly tilted toward the latter. It is left to us latecomers, then, to carefully supplement the gaps, to connect the Wanderstrassen that Warburg adumbrated. This can be done in myriad ways: by adducing his published and unpublished writings; by further mining and explicating Warburg's own sources; by weighing subsequent scholarship on the artists, the eras, the questions, that fascinated Warburg; by conceiving new ways to map the territories that he first adumbrated; and by deepening and extending his insights and methods, either by applying them to new materials and/or in order to reflect on the nature of historical knowledge and scholarship more generally.

But back to the Mnemosyne Atlas. The actual panels of the "last version" are no longer extant; only black and white photographs (18 x 24 cm) of them remain, held in the archives of the Warburg Institute. However, seventy-one years after Warburg's death, Martin Warnke with the assistance of Claudia Brink, produced a magnificent edition of the atlas based on the "last version." [See Der Bilderatlas: Mnemosyne in Warburg's Gesammelte Schriften, II.1 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2000 [reprinted in 2003, 2008]). The other volumes in the Gesammelte Schriften, from the two volumes of Warburg's published writings [I.1-2], the Tagebuch der Kulturwissenschaftlich Bibliothek Warburg [VII] to the just published, Austellungen [II.3], offer other avenues for interpreting and supplementing the Mnemosyne Atlas.] In addition to providing Warburg's draft Introduction to the Mnemosyne Atlas - a key if characteristically knotty fragmentary text - they also reproduce Fritz Saxl's illuminating letter to a prospective publisher regarding the Atlas, while Warnke's own Introduction provides important details about the Mnemosyne Atlas, its genesis, scope, and potential meanings.

We know, then, that Warburg's plan had been to complete at least 79 and perhaps as many as 200 panels. Typically, though, Warburg's vision was not fully realized. As we have it, the Atlas is frozen in a provisional state: panels appear without titles; individual images - there are 971 in all - were for the most part displayed without titles or other identifying information; and while some photographs are matted, most are not. Fortunately, though, in a notebook titled Überschriften: Synopsis of Plates [WIA, III.104.1], Warburg's colleague Gertrud Bing, following her mentor's lead, offers brief headings for each panel, furnishing thereby a kind of conceptual shorthand signposting main subjects and themes. For instance, the headings summarizing the astrological symbolism of panel 22 read: "Spanish-Arabic practice. (Alfonso). Manipulation. The cosmic system as dice table. Sorcery. Lithomancy." Such abbreviated, aphoristic indications of what and how we are to interpret resemble the headings of an encyclopedic entry - albeit an encyclopedia consisting entirely of pictures. Or, if you will, the photographs of the panels serve as a set of post-modern grisailles, a belated memory palace, which invites us to contemplate Warburg's syncretic vision of the afterlife of pagan symbolism and cosmography in medieval, Renaissance, and post-Renaissance art and thought.

This website presents ten of these photographed panels, selected to exemplify both the cosmographical and art-historical content of the Mnemosyne Atlas. Though offering but fragments of a fragment, it is designed to show some of the Wanderstrassen that Warburg pursued in the Atlas. The Warburg Institute has provided new, better scans of the surviving photographs - better, that is, than the images seen in the Gesammelte Schriften volume and other publications (to say nothing of other venues on the Web).

Furthermore, the ability to zoom in and out on the panels and on individual images permits a closer inspection of the material aspects of the Atlas. Alternately, if you click on individual images, a window providing identifying information will appear; frequently links to further iterations and permutations on the same image are also provided. Finally, under the tab "Guided Panels," the user will find interpretations of individual panels by myself and other scholars. Such meanderings, of course, are meant to be at best exemplary, but never exhaustive.
Christopher D. Johnson

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Begun in 1924 and left unfinished at the time of his death in 1929, the is Aby Warburg's attempt to map the "afterlife of antiquity," or how images of great symbolic, intellectual, and emotional power emerge in Western antiquity and then reappear and are reanimated in the art and cosmology of later times and places, from Alexandrian Greece to Weimar Germany.

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"I think photographic literacy is key to survival." Grounded in sculpture, Em Rooney's practice gives weight to photographs in a time when we are swimming in images.

Back in 2018, when I saw Em Rooney's work in MoMA's show Being: New Photography, I was struck by its tenderness. In the two years since the glimpses I've caught of her work have been online, as I've sought out her sculptures in their photo form, processing all their heavy materiality as pixels.

In Rooney's practice, photographs are given a stillness that the images we scroll through online are not afforded. They are treated with care, enshrined in resin or dressed up with pewter; they are also weighed down, embedded in books or strapped to the walls with steel brackets. Rooney's role as an educator (she has taught a range of subjects, including humanities and photography, for the last ten years) emerges in the material generosity of her sculptures.

Rooney had a solo show titled You, Too, Know That You Live at Galerie Fons Welters last year, and most recently exhibited in Bodega's online viewing room for Art Basel. I spoke with the artist about the erotics of metalworking, taking personal photographs, and why photographic literacy is "key to survival".

In You, Too, Know That You Live you made multiples of works and gave them as gifts. What brought you to that as an idea?
My professor in college was the collage artist Robert Seydel. He was working in a moment where DIY and mail art was becoming an ethos of making. He was so charismatic and influential that this idea worked itself into my thinking from a young age: you could send something to somebody and the act of sending could be art; intentions and actions and things that are imperceptible, a feeling or a description of a feeling, could be art. That was really revelatory to me.

I saw this Julie Ault show in 2013. She had collected things that members of Group Material had sent to each other as gifts. It was amazing. It has something to do with the archiving of artists' relationships, and people building their own universe between each other, through this kind of sharing that's outside of the canon, outside a certain type of approval that you would get from capitalism or the art market. It's anti-capitalistic, that's what was so moving for me.

I've been making things for friends that I think of also as art for a while, but for that show, Tim Rollins' project with Kids Of Survival was influential. Rollins had this ongoing collaboration with kids in the Bronx. It's not always my instinct to work collectively with my students but I loved that idea: doing an edition of gifts was more a framework, a way to think about how to make a series of sculptures.

As an artist you're always finding ways to situate your impulses relative to your work. So, even though there's a lot of care and community-building in my practice (things outside of what I do alone in my studio), weirdly, that show is almost not that at all. It's there and it helped me make that show, but the show is less about the intimacy of those objects and more of a way of thinking about how to make sculpture.

In the MoMA show you had a frame with text (Sarah with a Portrait of Her Own Eyes). What can a frame do without a photo in it?
That frame actually did have a photo in it, it was just turned to the wall. I think that's an important distinction, because for my practice a frame without a photo doesn't mean anything. What made that piece meaningful was that the content is latent; in there but invisible, like a piece of undeveloped film. It has a photograph, but it hasn't come into existence yet, so the meaning is the way you know something is there but it's not accessible to you, like an urn filled with ashes or a locket that doesn't open.
That sounds really linked to desire. I've been reading Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet. Does that resonate with you, desire being a part of your work?
So much. In so many ways that I don't even know where to begin. The first thing that comes to mind is a piece that I saw at Matthew Brannon's studio, probably in 2016: big abstract silk screens. The stretchers had slots inside them, and in each slot was a novel he had written, they were all pornographic novels. It connects to this idea of the envelope, which is a thing very connected to desire. You need to see what is inside it, you need to rip it open. I brought my students to look at our college's artist's book collection and Anne Carson's Nox was there. It ended up being very influential on one of my students who wrote her final paper on Carson, the envelope and desire. A beautiful paper.

Anyway, definitely those Matthew Brannon pieces lodged in my brain and influenced some of these pieces I made that had text on the back. The text would be more honest and open than the piece itself, and it would be something very few people would ever have access to because the piece would never be shown from behind... except that it was at MoMA!

When I was in a university class, the artist Kathryn Elkin showed us a film by Chick Strand called Soft Fiction. There's a bit where a woman speaks about seeing a metal railing and having an erotic reaction to it, a desire to become the railing and to let her bones go soft. I was wondering what working with metal is like for you, if it's connected to that?
That's a really great comparison. I totally think about that, I've always thought about that. A while ago I made a zine with Good Press called Love Is In The Flowers, a bunch of photographs and a text I'd written about when I worked as a fabricator for a year. I worked in the metal shop, which was almost all women, and for a while it was just women. All three of us are queer, so it was about the phenomenology of working with metal and all the various incantations, what happens when you apply things to the surface and see chemical reactions, how it gets hot and how it bends, the erotics of using the drill press.

And there was this really charged, kinetic feeling because of the crassness or rawness that can happen when you're working with your community members and it feels really safe-this queer female-bodied version of shop-talk, relative to these really strenuous material things we were doing. That's why I love working with metal, because it's so much more like the body than wood or any other material.

I read that your practice works "against the ubiquity of the photograph". What does that mean to you?
So much of our engagement with the world is through photographic, pixel-based images. All day we're interfacing with pictures, so I'm talking about that. Traditional processes can get discussed in relation to nostalgia, but I don't relate to them in that way. I really think about the material world: things that are yours and things that you can hold, things that aren't held hostage by corporations, which so much of our image content is now, even when we make it for ourselves. And because of photography's historical and contemporary ties to imperialism, colonialism, oppression and racism, there are so many nefarious uses for photography, and many are related to its current ubiquity.

Fighting against this ubiquity is learning to take photographs that are nuanced and self-reflective and actually personal. I don't mean personal like taking photographs of your loved ones necessarily. The past five years I've been photographing people on the street with my camera, which I used to feel uncomfortable doing. It's about how to do that while holding the history of photography in your mind, making it personal in that you're accountable to your own politic in the images you make. And it slows the process of production.

In The Social Photo, Nathan Jurgenson writes about photography now being seen more as a language than an art form: on social media you're taking pictures just to send a message. Is that a problem?
Hito Steyerl wrote about the democratising of photography in her essay In Defense of the Poor Image. To oversimplify one of her points: when we're not obsessed with high-quality images, and when everybody has their hands on this technology, a person can really see things through photographs in a new way.

We're seeing now bystanders, and organisers using it to record police brutality, documenting the murder of unarmed Black civilians, bringing together masses of people in protest. If you trace that back to what the photograph of Emmett Till did, adding fuel to the fire inside of the civil rights movement, I think that positive uses of technology are many, and they have just grown from media-controlled newspaper images to civilian sharing via Twitter, Instagram, Facebook.

But ultimately, outside of those instances... so much of photographic technology gets utilised by the military, gets weaponised. I have very little optimism around technology and its uses of pixel-based images.

And the apps we use are owned by corporations who are so ready to sell your data...
At this time it's complicated to talk about, because I'm somebody who doesn't immediately need to access data that is going to be life-saving. Situate what I'm saying inside the knowledge of my own privilege around that, and the necessity and positive impact of that technology in the ways we already discussed.

But I have a friend at the ACLU who posted some bullshit statement that Amazon put out about their support of Black lives. The ACLU reposted it, saying, "Thanks a lot Amazon, why don't you stop selling facial recognition software to the military?" I talk a lot about facial-recognition software as a sort of continuum of terrorism.

After I was in college, when laptops became more common, everybody taped over their webcam. This was before we knew about data mining, there was just this mistrust-anything you're engaging in on your computer, someone's watching and you don't want them to be. Fast-forward fifteen years and everyone's doing face app shit and all of that data is being mined and sold.

I also think about how images can disguise material inequality.
That's why I take the teaching of photography really seriously. I think photographic literacy is key to survival. To be able to decode those messages is hard to do.

I think about that relative to how I take and share photos; who I share them with and what the context of sharing is. For a long time I've been really fearful of co-optation. There's this idea that, because of modernism and its entrails, we still expect the artist's subjectivity to be irrelevant: you can just look at the work and get everything that you need from it. That still propels a lot of artists to withhold intention, meaning, or their personal life. I think that that's not a great leftover from modernism-it doesn't serve a very holy purpose.

But there's another type of withholding that's self-protective. There's an Édouard Glissant text I read with my students called For Opacity. It's not specifically about images, but how understanding is a type of imperialism, that there's a right that people have to opacity. A lot of my work is tied very personally to who I am, my life and my deepest thoughts, and any moments of withholding are more to do with self-protection and not wanting to be fully understood, because I don't know that everybody has the right to think that they could fully understand anybody.

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Em Rooney Explores the Photograph as Something to Be Held - ELEPHANT

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"I think photographic literacy is key to survival." Grounded in sculpture, Em Rooney's practice gives weight to photographs in a time when we are swimming in images. Back in 2018, when I saw Em Rooney's work in MoMA's show Being: New Photography, I was struck by its tenderness.

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Endless House is a conceptual work of architecture by Frederick Kiesler. Kiesler used the project to express an elaborate, personal metaphysics based on the concepts of 'connectivity', 'correality' and 'biotechnique'. The project was an attempt to merge the spiritual and practical into a new housing typology.

Although the structure was never built to scale, a miniaturized version was constructed for the "Visionary Architects" exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, which included Louis Kahn, Frank Lloyd Wright, Buckminster Fuller, and Le Corbusier. Kiesler departed in many ways from the modernist ideals of his contemporaries, objecting to pre-fabrication, rationalism, and orthogonal designs in favor of a curvilinear structure. Reception of the "Endless House" was mixed, garnering the praise of such contemporaries as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, while receiving criticism for ideas that were considered to be impractical and outlandish. The "Endless House" concept also appeared in the Japanese publication Bokubi in 1963, and Kiesler's posthumously published artistic journals, titled "Inside the Endless House."

The Endless House model is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The Endless House consists of reinforced concrete over a wire, mesh frame. Its shape is roughly that of a flattened sphere. The structure was elevated on 4 broad pilotis, with two staircases leading to the ground. The layout includes a kitchen/dining room, a living room, a parent's bedroom, a children's bedroom, and a space for seclusion. Windows punctuate the design, and are made of semi-transparent plastic. Different types of flooring throughout the house include sand, grass, terra cotta tile, and pebbles. Kiesler's design is biomorphic; he intended to create an organic space, rather than a geometric, linear one.

Kiesler's Endless House was intended to communicate his personal views of metaphysics. In terms of architecture, he included abstract aspects of 'connectivity', 'corealation', and 'biotechnique'. These terms describe abstract ideas, rather than being specific architectural terms.[citation needed ]

To show connectivity, Kiesler included curvilinear structure that is built of one material, concrete, with no structural seams in the building. Correalism, the continual interaction between man and nature, meant that Kiesler thought of the rooms of his house as extensions of the bodies of its inhabitants. He explained this in his 1940 article "On Correalism and Biotechnique", published in the Architectural Record.[citation needed ]

The Endless House was originally commissioned to be built in full scale in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art. However, a new wing was planned for the museum, which meant that the completed building would only have stood for one year. Instead, Arthur Drexler, director of the museum's department of architecture and design, invited Kiestler to build a scaled down version for his "Visionary Architects" show, which exhibited 20th century architecture that was considered "too revolutionary to build." The exhibit, which opened on September 29, 1960, featured an 8-foot model of the "Endless House", a full-scale photographic mural of the house, and a series of drawings and sketches.

The original plans for Endless House were presented in Vienna in 1924. At that time, Kiesler was active in the European avant-garde, and a member of the De Stijl group. "Endless House" was influenced by Kiesler's interaction with this group, and aimed to comingle art and life by creating an environment that encouraged the occupant's natural inclination towards art.

When Kiesler moved to New York City in 1926, he took part in the Surrealist movement, which strove to use art to achieve a healthier, natural mental experience. Kiesler's "Endless House" sketches were not determined by any artistic or architectural conventions, and suggested no particular use of the space: rather, they simply attempted to convey a biomorphic shape, open to the possibilities of its inhabitant's intent.[citation needed ]

Kiesler, although often paired with Modernist architects, was an outspoken critic of Modernism and the International Style. He was especially critical of the Modernist invocation of functionality, which assumes a specific use for a space according to present conceptions of use and value. He considered his biomorphic design to be not only more natural than Modernists who strove for organicity, but also more practical for future use, due to its indeterminacy. Although "Endless House" was presented in 1960 alongside definitively Modernist architecture projects, it was an implicit critique of Modernism.[citation needed ]

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Endless House is a conceptual work of architecture by Frederick Kiesler. Kiesler used the project to express an elaborate, personal metaphysics based on the concepts of 'connectivity', 'correality' and 'biotechnique'. The project was an attempt to merge the spiritual and practical into a new housing typology.

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17/11/2020,

Today begins the discussion at the french assembly around the Article 24 of the text, carried by the deputy Jean-Michel Fauvergue, former boss of the RAID ("Search, Assistance, Intervention, Deterrence"), thus provides for one year in prison and a fine of 45,000 euros in the event of dissemination, "by any means whatsoever and whatever 'in being the support', of the 'image of the face or any other element of identification' of a police officer or a gendarme, when he is on duty - the text speaks more precisely of a police operation.

I knit while my mother protests in front of the French assembly for the right to images.
She is a journalist,
we both believe in freedom of speech, expression and belief (mostly me) as well as the right for witnessing.
Is this "now" really science fiction?
Because I do not see any style in the description of the events.
If this law passes, we will not be able to describe the horror of (a democratic state) power.
In other words, the horror of power.
(cf: Power of horror, Kristeva)
The historicisation of abuse, violence and oppression will become illegal while I knit waiting for my mother to return.
[I would have never thought of a journalist as Ulysses.
My second name is Penelope.
I recently watched a conspiracy documentary.]
It is evening during lockdown, I can hear the sirens,
sirens in French means mermaids.
But we are far from a fluid state.
I can not draw the difference in tune between repression and protection.

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it won't let me link to the instagram page for some reason...

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Artist-run project space in Brockley, London

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Zona Mista presents AUTO curated by Hadas Auerbach and Kate Fahey. The exhibition is the second of their curatorial projects inspired by the surrounds of South Bermondsey. Featuring Saelia Aparicio, Charlie Duck, Nicholas Pankhurst, Berry Patten, Jim Woodall and Nooshin Askari.

PV 11TH OCTOBER 2PM-8PM with an outdoor performance by Jim Woodall in conjunction with @wolf_southeastcustomz

OCT 12th - 18th 2020

In compliance with government guidelines we will maintain social distancing and the rule of six within the project space and outside areas. Please join us and wear a mask.

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Jean Cocteau's Orphée receives otherworldly messages through the radio of his Rolls Royce, which he listens to from the driver's seat with the car in park. Orphée, a frustrated poet, is transfixed by these speech fragments, transmissions from one of death's angels, in which he hears the promise of a future. Radio and Rolls alike become instruments of divination and deferral.

Cocteau's original angel was the poet Raymond Radiguet, who died
at twenty after contracting typhoid from a bad oyster. It is said that Radiguet visited Cocteau only once, as Heurtebise, angel of "supernatural symmetry",1 and that this visit inspired Cocteau's subsequent lifetime
of work. Heurtebise appears in Orpheé as death's chauffeur.

Yukio Mishima wrote an essay I don't like much where he compares the actor James Dean's "beautiful death," at 24, in a horrific car accident, to Radiguet's. Learning about the latter as a child caused Mishima to wish that his own death be mourned as "sorely"-but "as it happens," he writes, anachronistically, "nothing happened."

In his essay on the Orpheus myth, Maurice Blanchot suggests that impatience is a mistake made by those who wish to escape the absence of time, but patience is a trick of a different kind, an attempt to create time out of nothing.

When I read back on these examples, I realize I am writing about the difficult condition of being nostalgic for the future.

Meanwhile, Eurydice waits in the smoke for Orpheé's doomed attention. 1 Cocteau, J., 'L'Ange Heurtebise,' Prevallet, K. (Trans.) Chicago Review, Volume 47-48

IMAGES

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Zona Mista presents AUTO curated by Hadas Auerbach and Kate Fahey. The exhibition is the second of their curatorial projects inspired by the surrounds of South Bermondsey. Featuring Saelia Aparicio, Charlie Duck, Nicholas Pankhurst, Berry Patten, Jim Woodall and Nooshin Askari.