finding pleasure in unarticulated forms Event

Eröffnung: 11. Mai, 18:00, mit nora aaron scherer
Finissage: 16. Juni, 18:00, mit La Terre’

nerea gonzález und Irene Landa, mit Beiträgen von nora aaron scherer und La Terre’

As a liminal consistency viscosity surrounds, trespasses and permeates binary oppositions lubricating them, blurring their limits and making the transition between them slippery as well as sticky. Between solid and liquid, not being fully quite one or the other, but installed in a constitutive in-betweenness, viscosity materializes an ambiguous state of being. Rather than choosing to resolve this contradictory state, we engage with the viscous as a way of thinking through matter that doesn’t deal with ambiguity as a transitory event to be overcome by either staying in the security of solidity or embracing liquidity as an unbounded freedom that escapes that fixation. In this unresolved state we dream of ambiguity as a place/space to be (and get comfy at).

‘finding pleasure in unarticulated forms’ opens a material speculation on the disruptive potentialities of viscosity to re-imagine the ways we think about queer identity, the boundaries of our own bodies, the way we relate to others, and the social and political anxieties about inhabiting an ambiguous state in which the established binaries of self/other, women/men and toucher/touched, liquid/solid are stirred. Problematizing clear distinctions, the ambiguity of slimy consistencies often brings a sensation of uncomfortableness, a troubling uncertainty that arouses an ambivalent reaction between a playful curiosity and a fearful disgust. Daring to touch the slimy, the exhibition interrogates the pleasures that might be found in building intimacies with unarticulated and ambiguous forms, in getting in-touch with what’s uncertain, unknown and unclear.

The space is occupied by an installation of pieces made of different viscous materials (resin, silicone, wax, slime) that, situated in the concrete temporality of the exhibition, and perhaps signaling the ungraspable excess of the viscous, bear the contradiction of displaying the viscosity in an evocative stillness, capturing only a moment of their escapist shape-shifting behavior. As viscoelastic bodies, the pieces hold and accumulate traces of the impressions over them, in a material-body relationship. As an encounter space, in its center, the fountain is a social sculpture collectively activated with layers of objects and wishes to be engulfed. As a living device, filled with slime, the fountain becomes a public pool of encounters in which viscosity as a matter as well as a conceptual and political figure is on the center of re-thinking and re-imagining our own bodies, our boundaries and our memories.

The malleability and mutability of viscosity is explored through the activation of the space in three phases; a sedimentation of traces through a performative ritual, the doing of sensual theory through a viscous reading-encounter and the lubricated playfulness of a slimy pool party.