The Organs of This World
Possible Paths Away from Knowledge in the Work of Mariechen Danz
How can one know? (How to know, how to know?) The question underlies the artistic oeuvre of Mariechen Danz. Again and again, she explicitly repeats it in her songs and performances: how can I know? Which means: what is it that imparts itself as knowledge, and how and why does it do this? But which also means: how can I be sure that I know? Is knowledge objective? And do I know what forms of knowledge have shaped me? Can I examine them? Is something eluding my understanding? Can I free myself from acquired knowledge? Do I only know what I can share with others? Where has all the lost and forgotten knowledge of the past centuries gone? According to Wikipedia, there are several different classifications of knowledge, but no single definition. This appears paradoxical in view of existing knowledge systems and sciences, for instance anatomy, astrology, archaeology, geography, and geology.
Is knowledge information? Who or what has informed me, shaped me, left its imprint on me or anyone else? What information has left traces in my (or anyone’s) body, in my (or anyone’s) perception? What processes of exchange occur between my (or another’s) interior and the outside world without my conscious knowledge or choice, and without my being able to understand them in context? What role do signs play in the informed world: in the case of our culture, the alphabet; in others, pictograms? Does reading really offer a collective key to the world? A few centuries ago, reading was an exclusive privilege of the educated class in Europe and elsewhere; to this day nearly 780 million people worldwide are unable to navigate an alphabet. In the course of colonial occupation, non-European writings were violently destroyed, while others have never been deciphered. All living things seek out orientation to survive and employ signs and various cartographies to do so. We live in the Anthropocene Epoch; we know that humankind has become the single most significant factor impacting and destroying the planet’s biological, geological, and atmospheric processes. We live in a modern age that has only been able to preach economic and technological progress because it is still, to this day, founded on the worldwide exploitation of non-modern societies. How can we be sure: how to know?
Mariechen Danz’s works—her sculptures, drawings, installations, and performances—give expression to a meandering through the personal, the other, and the alien within the self; they advocate for an un-learning, an un-mapping, a dissolution of boundaries. Aren’t my bodily organs already beyond the purview of my knowledge? Mariechen Danz examines the various sedimentary layers, imprints, and inscriptions in bodies, in physical matter. She is interested in “cultivated” information carriers and processes of transmission as well as their disappearance, loss, rejection. She operates with physical impressions in various materials, copies of bodily organs, and book-like containers of knowledge, from semi-precious stones created by the pressure of millennia to digital data carriers. She extends temporal and spatial dimensions: viewers can travel along a kind of cosmological course of time-space.
The first exhibition room in the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen resembles a cross between modular construction site and archaeological excavation. 2,000 handmade bricks—Body Bricks—are laid out on the floor and extend partway up the columns. The bricks are of identical size and each carries a different sign, impression, or body print. The signs—on the one hand of feet, hands, fingers, elbows, and various human organ models, and on the other bone impressions—join to form encrypted pictorial narratives. The work was originally conceived in 2019 for the Biennale in Istanbul. The Bricks were intended to reference and reactivate the bricks of Ottoman shipyard architecture in the Istanbul Shipyards. Shortly before its renovation/gentrification, the fifteenth-century Haliç shipyard, with what were once more than 120 docks, had to be abandoned as a Biennale location on short notice, and since this time, Mariechen Danz has been carrying its imitative traces into other spaces and transferring its constituent energy processes between times and locations by means of fired and (in)formed clay.
These are not just any bricks, not just a few hundred, but thousands that have been transformed into Body Bricks. They can be laid out in different patterns of movement and narration, often in a collective act. The aspect of repeating and reactivating carries throughout many of Mariechen Danz’s work groups and songs. Repetition entails leaps in time and space—from the early days of the Ottoman Empire to Mesoamerican glyphs (on the first floor of the Kunsthalle), from fifteenth-century Persian depictions of the circulatory system to Renaissance muscle studies, from Indian chakra models to reproductions of the interstitium, newly discovered in 2018 as the third vascular system of the human body. Repetition means to retrieve something from the past or the forgotten. It also implies insistence, almost like a drum beat: do not forget that there were other times and other places with different knowledge, with different mental images. The repetition of elements, for instance of human organs and body prints, postulates a modular system of signs and transmissions from a variety of cultures not otherwise identified. Repetition also means to compare, i.e. different eras that have generated different knowledge, corrections of previous representational models, new discoveries (such as the mesentery, which has been considered an organ for a few years now, because it redefines the function of the intestine as an immune system). The materials Mariechen Danz employs to create her impressions, castings, and signs can be separated into “cold” (metal, stones) and “warm” (earth, clay), as well as synthetic substances (castings). All materials that are informed and/or bear signs have been touched, held, designated, and shaped. Information is work.
Molded footprints point the way through rooms and times and connect the three exhibition floors of the Kunsthalle as fragments of possible paths. They were inspired by map reproductions from Mesoamerican civilizations with glyphs embodying interrelated positions, gestures, and organs, i.e. communication systems. There are footprints of poured resin containing semi-precious stones, and those made from earth, concrete, and refuse. The former are more a reference to the temporal dimension and play on fossilization, while the ones made of earth refer to geographic zones and geological depths. (What’s interesting in this respect is that material testimonies to the Earth’s history older than 10,000 years are termed “fossils.” In linguistics, however, the term “fossilization” is used when language acquisition remains at a fixed stage of development.) The movement of the feet is linear and not modular; the steps point in a single direction, the paths provide orientation. How and to where do we direct our steps? How do we navigate? Standing in the field of Body Bricks is a gigantic sextant, also adapted on a scale of one-to-one from the Ottoman collections in Istanbul. Sextants are used to measure the angle of elevation of the sun and stars for astronomical navigation at sea. Transposed to this location, it reads almost like a monument to mapping, measurement, and cartography in the midst of artistic practices of unmapping and decoupling, of a removal and release from ascriptions. Yet it also stands for the history of navigation and migration, of people, rocks, soils, signs.
If one wishes to apply the concept of transmission not only to knowledge or mechanical processes, but also to their subjective and emotional counterparts, then the notion of “touching” may be more appropriate. It combines a haptic effect with an affect. During the act of touch, something occurs between people and/or things; it triggers something. A touch can entail pressure that is tender or heavy, brief or prolonged. Mariechen Danz’s life-sized sculpture Womb Tomb asks to be touched. Womb Tomb combines the beginning and end of human life and seeks out a connection with the living. It is a body into which biological and geological processes, cultural categorizations and technological developments are inscribed. At the same time, it is a body in an ongoing process of “becoming,” well before any sexual differentiation (which, incidentally, only begins in fetuses after hormone development sets in). The surface coloration of this prone body changes when touched or when the room temperature varies, and its subcutaneous and internal organic microstructures become visible as the heart, lungs, and intestines light up. Mariechen Danz maps a body like a landscape because both are subject to ongoing change. The organs, from the skin to the intestines, are media of exchange and transformation. As a thermal sculpture that reacts to contact while also having its own internal heat source, the body visualizes this interaction by changing color. Heat triggers processes between inside and outside, reason and emotion.
On the upper floor of the Kunsthalle, Mariechen Danz has devised a space-time that resembles Plato’s cave, with the course of history casting shadow drawings on the walls. In between them, organs grow out, poised on wavy metal rods and dancing choreographically in the space. These are isolated organs without bodies, organs that have become independent, autonomous entities. They are reflected in the murals and drawings, as if they were casting shadows. Between them are three life-sized, upholstered, digitally printed fabric shapes, bodies whose surfaces evince collections of specimens, the “Common Carrier Cases” (knowledge transporters). Their skin is made of a papery fabric that falls in skin-like folds. As in a medical history museum, these specimen carriers are shown upright, protected by two enclosing sheets of acrylic glass. They are covered with thermal images of tropical storms, anatomical images of varying origin, empty speech bubbles. In the midst of this psycho-organic theatrical world, they stand like mute, headless guardians. Along the walls and pillars, clay slab modules embossed with body and organ prints demarcate sections of a fragmented territory. In the midst of this constellation of illustrated body shells and organ objects that have broken free of their respective systems are book sculptures, also installed at eye level. The transparent pages of the Open Book: Vessel Veins are covered in a single repeated pictogram of a kneeling figure in profile. Some of these pictograms are accompanied by a black shadow and contain drawings. These refer to one other and to a history of medical illustrations dating from before the invention of paper in the Egyptian, Babylonian, Indian, and Chinese cultures. Others are blank, empty, with nothing drawn on them. The pictogram is borrowed from Mesoamerican codices and refers to the bloody strategies of hegemonic colonial powers that violently destroyed these cultures and their technologies of communication and orientation. On the left-hand page of the book, the drawings, made with paint, blood, and saliva, contain symbols of speech, an oral history, while on the right are a brain and intestines, organs of “digestion” and transformation, transmission, and excretion, in both the physiological and figurative sense.
Apart from a comprehensive collection of books on anatomy and copies of world maps from all eras and cultures, Mariechen Danz also keeps medical organ models (brains, livers, lungs, hearts, stomachs, intestines, kidneys, pancreases ...), which she uses for castings and prints. She regards the organs as metaphors for various functional processes of learning, such as conveying, digesting, breaking down, eliminating, etc. She explicitly designates these as Learning Organs in a dual sense: on the one hand, that they were made for educational purposes, but more figuratively, that they are themselves educated organisms capable of learning. Some of these organ sculptures are cast from marble dust, others made of transparent polyurethane with inlaid semi-precious stones, and still others depict meteorological thermal images on their surfaces. All are hybrid objects in a cross between scientific reproduction and subjective appropriation. In a certain sense, learning—whether voluntary or coerced—is a process of transmitting, accepting, and adopting. Unlearning would mean interrupting these chains of transmission. Indeed, Mariechen Danz was already working with the Learning Cubes around ten years ago, which she used in workshops with children invited to paint or draw on them. They were developed from the classic teaching tool, the wooden building blocks that familiarize playing children with the alphabet. Now, the Learning Cubes appear on the upper floor of the Kunsthalle as seating units for visitors. In addition to the cubes bearing signs and texts, there are also several cubes that consist of layers of soil representing geological deposits. If Mariechen Danz works with teaching material, she wants to create disorder in this knowledge, reject hierarchies, enable communication and transmission. She inspires an (almost childlike) amazement in viewers, who pass through works and rooms that short-circuit micro- and macro worlds while embodying a new, rhizomatic, fragmentary narrative of the world that releases viewers from ingrained patterns of perception and infuses them with other possibilities to experience the world.
On the upper floor of the Kunsthalle, works of the installation Ore Oral Orientation, which was originally produced in 2017 for the main pavilion of the Venice Biennale, are joined by screens on which several performances are projected. If the brick architecture of the vast Arsenale in Venice offered a setting with a more archaeological feel, Ore Oral Orientation is shown here in a white space with a recently exposed window covered only by foil. Large sheets of perforated aluminum (produced in collaboration with Genghis Khan Fabrications Co.) hang in rusty frames from the ceiling like gigantic antiquated data carriers at a distance to the walls. The perforated shapes of these transmission bodies derive from industrial templates for cans, plug systems, and ventilation slits; they also call a series of punctuation marks to mind. Mariechen Danz applies another level of pictorial information to this abstract sign system: once again, these are stylized planispheres, historical world maps, and anatomical images. And again, foot prints mark Possible Paths. The Dig of No Body (Organ*isation) stands on its own in the space like a rotating drawing: it is a non-body without volume or mass that consists solely of bodiless organs. Attached to skeletal rods, these small, colored sculptures can be turned and viewed individually, as in a classroom geology model. You can see what’s hiding within the closed bodies and beneath their visible surfaces.
The room is filled with sound, with song and voices whose acoustic waves carry to all floors of the Kunsthalle and resonate throughout all its rooms. It’s as though the voice were connecting the works shown, making them vibrate, enlivening them, touching them and the viewers in the space. The voice, the oral, the subjective issuing forth from the body carries and communicates. All of Mariechen Danz’s performances are basically voice performances in which she and her fellow actors become living media for the works: they don costumes, some of them elaborate (and some of which are shown in exhibitions), they interact and refer to the work on site: “explain the logic of the existing info I have”—explicate and comment on it, in order to later integrate prelingual articulations. In Knot in the Arrow, a series of interrelated performances conceived for the Biennale di Venezia and then further evolved for the Haus der Kunst in Munich, among other venues, the address to the audience begins with a statement: “We are inside a map. The walls have folded in on themselves. We are here with multiple vessels. Carrier of symbols. The hurricane. A collapsed globe, in motion, mid-motion, in one location—moving, swirling around themselves.” The text evokes a scenario in which orientation in time and space collapses. Only then does the lyrical voice begin with a ballad-like repetition: “How to know and how to let go. Know, NO NO NO NO NONONONONONOO.” As the choral performance continues, the actors refer to the sculptures in the space, but also to language itself. There is a voice before language, without an alphabetical text, a bodily voice consisting of loud breathing and throaty sounds that are nearly mute, repeated over and over again. It’s impressive how this collective vocal, wave-shaped narration changes the perception of the space and one’s own self. Something spreads out, becomes grounded in a simultaneity of references and refusals, harmony and dissonance, touch and wonderment. From Mariechen Danz’s notes (translated): “[...] How does language transform from the immaterial flow of words in the air to something that is contained and preserved in books? How do we internalize a library? From body signals to body system—how do you control yourself? How can I draw knowledge from my body? Where do you locate the knowledge of your feelings? [...]” Questions that echo throughout her sculptures, installations, and performances.
In 2013, Mariechen Danz initiated a group exhibition in the Villa Romana artists’ house in Florence titled Renaissance resistance. Resistance renaissance. Resistance Resistance. Two years later, she organized an international symposium titled UNMAPPING the RENAISSANCE. Both events referenced a book published twenty years earlier by Walter D. Mignolo, director of the Center for Global Studies at Duke University in Durham, USA: The Darker Side of the Renaissance, and followed by two more volumes of a trilogy: Local Histories/Global Designs (2000) and The Darker Side of Western Modernity (2011). Among other things, Mignolo inquires into the role language and cartography played in colonial conquests and the destruction in Central America and its consequences. Postcolonial theory examines the role of hegemonic media such as the Latin alphabet, letterpress printing, and cartography, which were always accompanied by processes of dispossession, disenfranchisement, subjugation, and devastation. In a dialogue between science and art, the symposium UNMAPPING the RENAISSANCE examined this critical inquiry into the mental map of a canonical and canonizing understanding of culture and epoch: performative practices went beyond established academic formats and delved into the connections between dominant sign systems, imagination, and (de-)colonial practices. This critical post-colonial discourse is present, embodied in Mariechen Danz’s artistic work, and yet—as a position with a so-called critical, intellectual distance—it’s absent as an explanatory commentary. Mariechen Danz works with empirical presence, repetition, disorder. She brings together knowledge carriers, transmitters of information from different regions and times. She does not instruct the viewer in what’s right or wrong; rather, she levels out any signs of hierarchy, any illusion of progress (which always comes at a high price). She offers to organs, fragments, and bodies a present tense that is subjectively formatted while bearing objective inscriptions. She works with open constellations of meaning, net-like or modular reading processes and their possibilities as well as limitations. She invites us into broad, multi-dimensional, intuitive, inclusive coordinate systems that no longer exude an exterior because we already, in one way or another, carry it within ourselves.
Published in: Mariechen Danz, Clouded in Veins, Edited by Kunsthalle Recklinghausen, Berlin 2021
Possible Paths Away from Knowledge in the Work of Mariechen Danz
How can one know? (How to know, how to know?) The question underlies the artistic oeuvre of Mariechen Danz. Again and again, she explicitly repeats it in her songs and performances: how can I know? Which means: what is it that imparts itself as knowledge, and how and why does it do this? But which also means: how can I be sure that I know? Is knowledge objective? And do I know what forms of knowledge have shaped me? Can I examine them? Is something eluding my understanding? Can I free myself from acquired knowledge? Do I only know what I can share with others? Where has all the lost and forgotten knowledge of the past centuries gone? According to Wikipedia, there are several different classifications of knowledge, but no single definition. This appears paradoxical in view of existing knowledge systems and sciences, for instance anatomy, astrology, archaeology, geography, and geology.
Is knowledge information? Who or what has informed me, shaped me, left its imprint on me or anyone else? What information has left traces in my (or anyone’s) body, in my (or anyone’s) perception? What processes of exchange occur between my (or another’s) interior and the outside world without my conscious knowledge or choice, and without my being able to understand them in context? What role do signs play in the informed world: in the case of our culture, the alphabet; in others, pictograms? Does reading really offer a collective key to the world? A few centuries ago, reading was an exclusive privilege of the educated class in Europe and elsewhere; to this day nearly 780 million people worldwide are unable to navigate an alphabet. In the course of colonial occupation, non-European writings were violently destroyed, while others have never been deciphered. All living things seek out orientation to survive and employ signs and various cartographies to do so. We live in the Anthropocene Epoch; we know that humankind has become the single most significant factor impacting and destroying the planet’s biological, geological, and atmospheric processes. We live in a modern age that has only been able to preach economic and technological progress because it is still, to this day, founded on the worldwide exploitation of non-modern societies. How can we be sure: how to know?
Mariechen Danz’s works—her sculptures, drawings, installations, and performances—give expression to a meandering through the personal, the other, and the alien within the self; they advocate for an un-learning, an un-mapping, a dissolution of boundaries. Aren’t my bodily organs already beyond the purview of my knowledge? Mariechen Danz examines the various sedimentary layers, imprints, and inscriptions in bodies, in physical matter. She is interested in “cultivated” information carriers and processes of transmission as well as their disappearance, loss, rejection. She operates with physical impressions in various materials, copies of bodily organs, and book-like containers of knowledge, from semi-precious stones created by the pressure of millennia to digital data carriers. She extends temporal and spatial dimensions: viewers can travel along a kind of cosmological course of time-space.
The first exhibition room in the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen resembles a cross between modular construction site and archaeological excavation. 2,000 handmade bricks—Body Bricks—are laid out on the floor and extend partway up the columns. The bricks are of identical size and each carries a different sign, impression, or body print. The signs—on the one hand of feet, hands, fingers, elbows, and various human organ models, and on the other bone impressions—join to form encrypted pictorial narratives. The work was originally conceived in 2019 for the Biennale in Istanbul. The Bricks were intended to reference and reactivate the bricks of Ottoman shipyard architecture in the Istanbul Shipyards. Shortly before its renovation/gentrification, the fifteenth-century Haliç shipyard, with what were once more than 120 docks, had to be abandoned as a Biennale location on short notice, and since this time, Mariechen Danz has been carrying its imitative traces into other spaces and transferring its constituent energy processes between times and locations by means of fired and (in)formed clay.
These are not just any bricks, not just a few hundred, but thousands that have been transformed into Body Bricks. They can be laid out in different patterns of movement and narration, often in a collective act. The aspect of repeating and reactivating carries throughout many of Mariechen Danz’s work groups and songs. Repetition entails leaps in time and space—from the early days of the Ottoman Empire to Mesoamerican glyphs (on the first floor of the Kunsthalle), from fifteenth-century Persian depictions of the circulatory system to Renaissance muscle studies, from Indian chakra models to reproductions of the interstitium, newly discovered in 2018 as the third vascular system of the human body. Repetition means to retrieve something from the past or the forgotten. It also implies insistence, almost like a drum beat: do not forget that there were other times and other places with different knowledge, with different mental images. The repetition of elements, for instance of human organs and body prints, postulates a modular system of signs and transmissions from a variety of cultures not otherwise identified. Repetition also means to compare, i.e. different eras that have generated different knowledge, corrections of previous representational models, new discoveries (such as the mesentery, which has been considered an organ for a few years now, because it redefines the function of the intestine as an immune system). The materials Mariechen Danz employs to create her impressions, castings, and signs can be separated into “cold” (metal, stones) and “warm” (earth, clay), as well as synthetic substances (castings). All materials that are informed and/or bear signs have been touched, held, designated, and shaped. Information is work.
Molded footprints point the way through rooms and times and connect the three exhibition floors of the Kunsthalle as fragments of possible paths. They were inspired by map reproductions from Mesoamerican civilizations with glyphs embodying interrelated positions, gestures, and organs, i.e. communication systems. There are footprints of poured resin containing semi-precious stones, and those made from earth, concrete, and refuse. The former are more a reference to the temporal dimension and play on fossilization, while the ones made of earth refer to geographic zones and geological depths. (What’s interesting in this respect is that material testimonies to the Earth’s history older than 10,000 years are termed “fossils.” In linguistics, however, the term “fossilization” is used when language acquisition remains at a fixed stage of development.) The movement of the feet is linear and not modular; the steps point in a single direction, the paths provide orientation. How and to where do we direct our steps? How do we navigate? Standing in the field of Body Bricks is a gigantic sextant, also adapted on a scale of one-to-one from the Ottoman collections in Istanbul. Sextants are used to measure the angle of elevation of the sun and stars for astronomical navigation at sea. Transposed to this location, it reads almost like a monument to mapping, measurement, and cartography in the midst of artistic practices of unmapping and decoupling, of a removal and release from ascriptions. Yet it also stands for the history of navigation and migration, of people, rocks, soils, signs.
If one wishes to apply the concept of transmission not only to knowledge or mechanical processes, but also to their subjective and emotional counterparts, then the notion of “touching” may be more appropriate. It combines a haptic effect with an affect. During the act of touch, something occurs between people and/or things; it triggers something. A touch can entail pressure that is tender or heavy, brief or prolonged. Mariechen Danz’s life-sized sculpture Womb Tomb asks to be touched. Womb Tomb combines the beginning and end of human life and seeks out a connection with the living. It is a body into which biological and geological processes, cultural categorizations and technological developments are inscribed. At the same time, it is a body in an ongoing process of “becoming,” well before any sexual differentiation (which, incidentally, only begins in fetuses after hormone development sets in). The surface coloration of this prone body changes when touched or when the room temperature varies, and its subcutaneous and internal organic microstructures become visible as the heart, lungs, and intestines light up. Mariechen Danz maps a body like a landscape because both are subject to ongoing change. The organs, from the skin to the intestines, are media of exchange and transformation. As a thermal sculpture that reacts to contact while also having its own internal heat source, the body visualizes this interaction by changing color. Heat triggers processes between inside and outside, reason and emotion.
On the upper floor of the Kunsthalle, Mariechen Danz has devised a space-time that resembles Plato’s cave, with the course of history casting shadow drawings on the walls. In between them, organs grow out, poised on wavy metal rods and dancing choreographically in the space. These are isolated organs without bodies, organs that have become independent, autonomous entities. They are reflected in the murals and drawings, as if they were casting shadows. Between them are three life-sized, upholstered, digitally printed fabric shapes, bodies whose surfaces evince collections of specimens, the “Common Carrier Cases” (knowledge transporters). Their skin is made of a papery fabric that falls in skin-like folds. As in a medical history museum, these specimen carriers are shown upright, protected by two enclosing sheets of acrylic glass. They are covered with thermal images of tropical storms, anatomical images of varying origin, empty speech bubbles. In the midst of this psycho-organic theatrical world, they stand like mute, headless guardians. Along the walls and pillars, clay slab modules embossed with body and organ prints demarcate sections of a fragmented territory. In the midst of this constellation of illustrated body shells and organ objects that have broken free of their respective systems are book sculptures, also installed at eye level. The transparent pages of the Open Book: Vessel Veins are covered in a single repeated pictogram of a kneeling figure in profile. Some of these pictograms are accompanied by a black shadow and contain drawings. These refer to one other and to a history of medical illustrations dating from before the invention of paper in the Egyptian, Babylonian, Indian, and Chinese cultures. Others are blank, empty, with nothing drawn on them. The pictogram is borrowed from Mesoamerican codices and refers to the bloody strategies of hegemonic colonial powers that violently destroyed these cultures and their technologies of communication and orientation. On the left-hand page of the book, the drawings, made with paint, blood, and saliva, contain symbols of speech, an oral history, while on the right are a brain and intestines, organs of “digestion” and transformation, transmission, and excretion, in both the physiological and figurative sense.
Apart from a comprehensive collection of books on anatomy and copies of world maps from all eras and cultures, Mariechen Danz also keeps medical organ models (brains, livers, lungs, hearts, stomachs, intestines, kidneys, pancreases ...), which she uses for castings and prints. She regards the organs as metaphors for various functional processes of learning, such as conveying, digesting, breaking down, eliminating, etc. She explicitly designates these as Learning Organs in a dual sense: on the one hand, that they were made for educational purposes, but more figuratively, that they are themselves educated organisms capable of learning. Some of these organ sculptures are cast from marble dust, others made of transparent polyurethane with inlaid semi-precious stones, and still others depict meteorological thermal images on their surfaces. All are hybrid objects in a cross between scientific reproduction and subjective appropriation. In a certain sense, learning—whether voluntary or coerced—is a process of transmitting, accepting, and adopting. Unlearning would mean interrupting these chains of transmission. Indeed, Mariechen Danz was already working with the Learning Cubes around ten years ago, which she used in workshops with children invited to paint or draw on them. They were developed from the classic teaching tool, the wooden building blocks that familiarize playing children with the alphabet. Now, the Learning Cubes appear on the upper floor of the Kunsthalle as seating units for visitors. In addition to the cubes bearing signs and texts, there are also several cubes that consist of layers of soil representing geological deposits. If Mariechen Danz works with teaching material, she wants to create disorder in this knowledge, reject hierarchies, enable communication and transmission. She inspires an (almost childlike) amazement in viewers, who pass through works and rooms that short-circuit micro- and macro worlds while embodying a new, rhizomatic, fragmentary narrative of the world that releases viewers from ingrained patterns of perception and infuses them with other possibilities to experience the world.
On the upper floor of the Kunsthalle, works of the installation Ore Oral Orientation, which was originally produced in 2017 for the main pavilion of the Venice Biennale, are joined by screens on which several performances are projected. If the brick architecture of the vast Arsenale in Venice offered a setting with a more archaeological feel, Ore Oral Orientation is shown here in a white space with a recently exposed window covered only by foil. Large sheets of perforated aluminum (produced in collaboration with Genghis Khan Fabrications Co.) hang in rusty frames from the ceiling like gigantic antiquated data carriers at a distance to the walls. The perforated shapes of these transmission bodies derive from industrial templates for cans, plug systems, and ventilation slits; they also call a series of punctuation marks to mind. Mariechen Danz applies another level of pictorial information to this abstract sign system: once again, these are stylized planispheres, historical world maps, and anatomical images. And again, foot prints mark Possible Paths. The Dig of No Body (Organ*isation) stands on its own in the space like a rotating drawing: it is a non-body without volume or mass that consists solely of bodiless organs. Attached to skeletal rods, these small, colored sculptures can be turned and viewed individually, as in a classroom geology model. You can see what’s hiding within the closed bodies and beneath their visible surfaces.
The room is filled with sound, with song and voices whose acoustic waves carry to all floors of the Kunsthalle and resonate throughout all its rooms. It’s as though the voice were connecting the works shown, making them vibrate, enlivening them, touching them and the viewers in the space. The voice, the oral, the subjective issuing forth from the body carries and communicates. All of Mariechen Danz’s performances are basically voice performances in which she and her fellow actors become living media for the works: they don costumes, some of them elaborate (and some of which are shown in exhibitions), they interact and refer to the work on site: “explain the logic of the existing info I have”—explicate and comment on it, in order to later integrate prelingual articulations. In Knot in the Arrow, a series of interrelated performances conceived for the Biennale di Venezia and then further evolved for the Haus der Kunst in Munich, among other venues, the address to the audience begins with a statement: “We are inside a map. The walls have folded in on themselves. We are here with multiple vessels. Carrier of symbols. The hurricane. A collapsed globe, in motion, mid-motion, in one location—moving, swirling around themselves.” The text evokes a scenario in which orientation in time and space collapses. Only then does the lyrical voice begin with a ballad-like repetition: “How to know and how to let go. Know, NO NO NO NO NONONONONONOO.” As the choral performance continues, the actors refer to the sculptures in the space, but also to language itself. There is a voice before language, without an alphabetical text, a bodily voice consisting of loud breathing and throaty sounds that are nearly mute, repeated over and over again. It’s impressive how this collective vocal, wave-shaped narration changes the perception of the space and one’s own self. Something spreads out, becomes grounded in a simultaneity of references and refusals, harmony and dissonance, touch and wonderment. From Mariechen Danz’s notes (translated): “[...] How does language transform from the immaterial flow of words in the air to something that is contained and preserved in books? How do we internalize a library? From body signals to body system—how do you control yourself? How can I draw knowledge from my body? Where do you locate the knowledge of your feelings? [...]” Questions that echo throughout her sculptures, installations, and performances.
In 2013, Mariechen Danz initiated a group exhibition in the Villa Romana artists’ house in Florence titled Renaissance resistance. Resistance renaissance. Resistance Resistance. Two years later, she organized an international symposium titled UNMAPPING the RENAISSANCE. Both events referenced a book published twenty years earlier by Walter D. Mignolo, director of the Center for Global Studies at Duke University in Durham, USA: The Darker Side of the Renaissance, and followed by two more volumes of a trilogy: Local Histories/Global Designs (2000) and The Darker Side of Western Modernity (2011). Among other things, Mignolo inquires into the role language and cartography played in colonial conquests and the destruction in Central America and its consequences. Postcolonial theory examines the role of hegemonic media such as the Latin alphabet, letterpress printing, and cartography, which were always accompanied by processes of dispossession, disenfranchisement, subjugation, and devastation. In a dialogue between science and art, the symposium UNMAPPING the RENAISSANCE examined this critical inquiry into the mental map of a canonical and canonizing understanding of culture and epoch: performative practices went beyond established academic formats and delved into the connections between dominant sign systems, imagination, and (de-)colonial practices. This critical post-colonial discourse is present, embodied in Mariechen Danz’s artistic work, and yet—as a position with a so-called critical, intellectual distance—it’s absent as an explanatory commentary. Mariechen Danz works with empirical presence, repetition, disorder. She brings together knowledge carriers, transmitters of information from different regions and times. She does not instruct the viewer in what’s right or wrong; rather, she levels out any signs of hierarchy, any illusion of progress (which always comes at a high price). She offers to organs, fragments, and bodies a present tense that is subjectively formatted while bearing objective inscriptions. She works with open constellations of meaning, net-like or modular reading processes and their possibilities as well as limitations. She invites us into broad, multi-dimensional, intuitive, inclusive coordinate systems that no longer exude an exterior because we already, in one way or another, carry it within ourselves.
Published in: Mariechen Danz, Clouded in Veins, Edited by Kunsthalle Recklinghausen, Berlin 2021
Farkhondeh Shahroudi
give something of yourself
How do you talk to yourself when you have nothing to say?
Even in the early paintings of Farkhondeh Shahroudi from the 90s, text is inscribed on the picture ground. Since then, writing/text/language has accompanied her artistic work, first in images, then as embroidery on objects and bodies, as a sculpturally formulated exclamation, as left-handed notation on sheets of paper and fabrics, as a book within a book, as the title of sculptural works, as a pamphlet on clothing and banners, as recitations in performances, written on walls outdoors, embroidered at bus stops. Who's speaking?
The materials that Farkhondeh Shahroudi uses for her sculptural works (anthropomorphic bodies, hands, flags, body-related objects, and textiles) and installations are soft, textile, woven, knotted, braided. The text is handwritten, only the illegible Farsi texts are embroidered into fabric, pinprick by pinprick. At the beginning of each character is the dash – the "I" / Ich or Alif, the first letter of the Arabic alphabet. What follows or precedes that is beyond control.
A black, voluminous OH—two letters sewn from fabric—is leaning against a tree. An AH is placed in space. One would like to have heard the breath of these exclamations. They are reactive exclamations of something that remains unknown yet can be anything. Something must have preceded the anonymous exclamation, activated it. Now two letters activate the imagination.
Farkhondeh Shahroudi's works are inspired by experiences and memories, articulating mute exclamations, eloquent invocations, fantastic and poetic imaginations: the elephant's golden prosthesis, the liveable woman…Anna Marmaid, a carpet weaver brought to Arnhem from one of the Dutch colonies and there worked as a nanny at Zypendaal Castle: do you hear / tears of Anna / black eyes Anna / sky night ship sea ... In the summer of 2021, the space between the red flags in Sonsbeek Park will become a silent space for conversation, a space for addressing an unknown counterpart, what is absent becomes present in the invocation.
slugging potting soil from a to z very cheap, collect beer bottles, porcelain vases, butterflies, delicious giant wings from the five star restaurant near tauben strasse berlin mitte, advise artists who suffer from chicken eyes that steal candy. I think of my knees, have no roof over my head, but a heaven to cry on. This is how the text of one leaflet ends that Farkhondeh Shahroudi distributed on the occasion of her performance of the same name "I think of my knees” in the Summer of 2022 at the Villa Romana. It was generated in a process of "automatic writing”—from the perspective of a homeless woman in Berlin.In so few lines she blends an enormous density of life experience, criticism, humour, hardship, banality, pathos, subjectivity and resistance.
Farkhondeh Shahroudi titled one set of books with left-handed manuscripts and drawings (since 2008) as glossolalia. A term that appears in the Bible as "tongues", a (divinely) inspired speaking in an incomprehensible language. Farkhondeh Shahroudi knows which language she deliberately uses incorrectly or uncorrected. She articulates resistance to language and conformity norms, lets the voiceless speak:
Voices that free themselves from shame, exclusion, oblivion, the erratic, emotional, humorous tales that get to the heart of social discrepancies in a few half-sentences, that refuse to be speechless and I and you blur away. Farkhondeh Shahroudi acts as a medium of the excluded, creating resonance spaces for the voiceless.
Allegedly, even before the literary experiments of the Surrealists, automatic writing was used as a therapeutic process by a French psychotherapist named Pierre Janet at the end of the 19th century to set the unconscious free, to let lost things ring in words, to transform experiences into memories, making room for wordlessness. Farkhondeh Shahroudi describes all of her works as “spatial poetry”. In their dark core they harbour pain. A shared pain that makes no distinction between one’s own and that of others, for example in works that commemorate the tens of thousands who have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea over the past three decades.
Farkhondeh Shahroudi's texts and sculptural and installation works are always preceded by something that is rescued from individual and social speechlessness, to which she gives resonance and gives body. Farkhondeh Shahroudi articulates anonymous interjections and short stories that change the world—and how we hear or read it. Behind every word and wordlessness hides voices. They are addressed in the text and come among us.
Published in: Farkhondeh Shahroudi, Hannah-Höch Förderpreis 2022, Berlin 2023
give something of yourself
How do you talk to yourself when you have nothing to say?
What is language about? How does she get to me?
As a fragment, as an imitation, as a flash of inspiration, as an illusion?
Written with the left hand, what does it testify to?
Or placed plastically in the room.
Can language open spaces?
Or lock?
Am I speaking for others or with whom?
Speech dies away.
Writing is a line drawn with a sharp pen or needle.
Handwriting is body trace.
Even in the early paintings of Farkhondeh Shahroudi from the 90s, text is inscribed on the picture ground. Since then, writing/text/language has accompanied her artistic work, first in images, then as embroidery on objects and bodies, as a sculpturally formulated exclamation, as left-handed notation on sheets of paper and fabrics, as a book within a book, as the title of sculptural works, as a pamphlet on clothing and banners, as recitations in performances, written on walls outdoors, embroidered at bus stops. Who's speaking?
The materials that Farkhondeh Shahroudi uses for her sculptural works (anthropomorphic bodies, hands, flags, body-related objects, and textiles) and installations are soft, textile, woven, knotted, braided. The text is handwritten, only the illegible Farsi texts are embroidered into fabric, pinprick by pinprick. At the beginning of each character is the dash – the "I" / Ich or Alif, the first letter of the Arabic alphabet. What follows or precedes that is beyond control.
A black, voluminous OH—two letters sewn from fabric—is leaning against a tree. An AH is placed in space. One would like to have heard the breath of these exclamations. They are reactive exclamations of something that remains unknown yet can be anything. Something must have preceded the anonymous exclamation, activated it. Now two letters activate the imagination.
Farkhondeh Shahroudi's works are inspired by experiences and memories, articulating mute exclamations, eloquent invocations, fantastic and poetic imaginations: the elephant's golden prosthesis, the liveable woman…Anna Marmaid, a carpet weaver brought to Arnhem from one of the Dutch colonies and there worked as a nanny at Zypendaal Castle: do you hear / tears of Anna / black eyes Anna / sky night ship sea ... In the summer of 2021, the space between the red flags in Sonsbeek Park will become a silent space for conversation, a space for addressing an unknown counterpart, what is absent becomes present in the invocation.
slugging potting soil from a to z very cheap, collect beer bottles, porcelain vases, butterflies, delicious giant wings from the five star restaurant near tauben strasse berlin mitte, advise artists who suffer from chicken eyes that steal candy. I think of my knees, have no roof over my head, but a heaven to cry on. This is how the text of one leaflet ends that Farkhondeh Shahroudi distributed on the occasion of her performance of the same name "I think of my knees” in the Summer of 2022 at the Villa Romana. It was generated in a process of "automatic writing”—from the perspective of a homeless woman in Berlin.In so few lines she blends an enormous density of life experience, criticism, humour, hardship, banality, pathos, subjectivity and resistance.
Farkhondeh Shahroudi titled one set of books with left-handed manuscripts and drawings (since 2008) as glossolalia. A term that appears in the Bible as "tongues", a (divinely) inspired speaking in an incomprehensible language. Farkhondeh Shahroudi knows which language she deliberately uses incorrectly or uncorrected. She articulates resistance to language and conformity norms, lets the voiceless speak:
Voices that free themselves from shame, exclusion, oblivion, the erratic, emotional, humorous tales that get to the heart of social discrepancies in a few half-sentences, that refuse to be speechless and I and you blur away. Farkhondeh Shahroudi acts as a medium of the excluded, creating resonance spaces for the voiceless.
Allegedly, even before the literary experiments of the Surrealists, automatic writing was used as a therapeutic process by a French psychotherapist named Pierre Janet at the end of the 19th century to set the unconscious free, to let lost things ring in words, to transform experiences into memories, making room for wordlessness. Farkhondeh Shahroudi describes all of her works as “spatial poetry”. In their dark core they harbour pain. A shared pain that makes no distinction between one’s own and that of others, for example in works that commemorate the tens of thousands who have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea over the past three decades.
Farkhondeh Shahroudi's texts and sculptural and installation works are always preceded by something that is rescued from individual and social speechlessness, to which she gives resonance and gives body. Farkhondeh Shahroudi articulates anonymous interjections and short stories that change the world—and how we hear or read it. Behind every word and wordlessness hides voices. They are addressed in the text and come among us.
Published in: Farkhondeh Shahroudi, Hannah-Höch Förderpreis 2022, Berlin 2023
Subjectivization and Resistance
Ketty La Rocca’s most radical work 1964 - 1976
Ketty La Rocca’s artistic work emphatically unites criticism and desire with radical consequence: critique of the external world (of Western power politics, of the manipulative force of the mass media, of the disenfranchisement of the woman et al.) but ultimately also criticism of their articulation, of language, of a language, of the visual language as well, which always pushes itself in front of the essential and thus distorting it. Ketty La Rocca was a perceptive, analytical, feminist, media-critical artist. And despite the numerous significant exhibitions shown during her lifetime, she was not a maverick who went down in art history as a video pioneer nor did she align herself with the feminist movement when fighting for “autocoscienza”, the self-awareness of women in Italy around and after 1970. Ketty La Rocca worked with collages, photography, video, text, drawing and performance. She was concerned with the difference between sign and translation, between metaphor and reality. She sought expression in the blank spaces between these differences, sought what language omits. The driving force behind her oeuvre that rapidly developed over the course of only a single decade is a resistant desire, a desire from a distance, a desire to annul this very distance. It is a female desire and an impossible desire that frequently articulates itself, creating meaning throughout the various phases of her work that veers between image and sight, text and gesture, imagination and dissolution, evocation and exhaustion. At the time when the heteronymous and voiceless “Second Sex” laid claim to using the first person, her focus gradually shifted to that intermediate zone where “I” ends and “you” begins, or where one person becomes alienated in the other.
Ketty La Rocca, born 1938 in La Spezia, never studied at an art academy. Moving to Florence at the age of eighteen, she soon came into contact with Pietro Grossi (1917–2002) and his S 2F M (Studio di Fonologia Musicale di Firenze) as well as the protagonists of “Gruppo 70” who organised initial conferences on “Art and Communication” (1963) and “Art and Technology” (1964). Inspired by “Poesia Tecnologica”, Ketty La Rocca began working on collages in 1964, a visual poetry in which images and text fragments from magazines are cropped and critically recontextualised. With these works she passionately references social conflicts and their linguistic and medial-oriented representation: the Vietnam War, the obscenity of the film industry, the so-called Third World, the exploitation of the female body, and the tedious banality of the everyday environment, which she summarised in the bitter sentence: Life is something else. Ketty La Rocca would later take up the cropping technique deriving from commercial graphics again in her photographic works and videos as a bottomless/groundless pictorial concept. Her sceptical relationship towards an expropriated language, towards the “crisis of communication”, accompanied Ketty La Rocca all her artistic career. At the same time she wrote texts, poems, magazine essays, and scripts for performances. During a 1967 festival she distributed evocative poetry fragments in the form of pamphlets in the streets of Florence. The abstract language of the external world (media, politics) is subjectified in a distributing body. A year earlier, Ketty La Rocca found out that she had been diagnosed with cancer.
Beginning in 1967, Ketty la Rocca’s works increasingly assumed a short-term political diction. She explored the efficacy of the alphabetic text, its instructional force, its forms of transport, formulating strategies of refusal and rejection. She operated with picture supports such as traffic signs, contrasting the characteristic style of public directives with narrative “information bits” (Ketty La Rocca) that are in part charged with emotion, expectation and formulated in the first person. Fragments of speech are cropped as a means of articulating the divergence between interior and exterior, public discourse, and one’s own voice. Around 1970 – only a few years before her death – Ketty La Rocca succeeded in taking the parallel steps that would lead to the most important groups of works in her oeuvre. The problematic of language, the “Meta language”, is split into diverse “tools” or action levels: a self-referential nonsense text – initially conceived as a manifesto – led to the “Riduzioni” series; the figure of the speaker is projected onto an objectified “J” and temporarily enters the space; afterwards only the hands, the gestures, speak; they enter the picture.
Ketty La Rocca already exhibited a singular group of mirror objects outside the Forte di Belvedere in Florence in 1967. Circular mirrors on the cut surface of obliquely-shaped cut black metal cylinders reflect the surrounding space, including the viewers. Signs now no longer reference the public space and its guidelines but bodies reflect bodies instead. The “addressed” viewer himself enters the images, sees himself as “you”. Later, when she was working with gestures and employed text as gesture, Ketty La Rocca obsessively frequently invoked this reflected and defamiliarised self in writing. But before the “you” (that is always held on the page, in the text, in the image), the self emerges in a foreign language, appearing in the space, black and fragile, as a free-standing three-dimensional French “J”, a slender plastic body that maintains its equilibrium without a word. The production of group of works (on two undated photographs Ketty La Rocca can be seen lying in bed with this “J” as if with a partner) remained limited to the brief period of time when written language simultaneously imploded in ambitious nonsense, slurring into a caricature of claims to meaning and power.
In 1970, Ketty La Rocca wrote the textual salvo “Dal momento in cui” on quadratic supports. She wrote by hand on a small piece of paper, also printing the text in the same format and transferring it in white on black onto a large photo canvas. It is an extremely dense text assembled from found footage, quasi a satire of all forms of art criticism. Ketty La Rocca’s art criticism, however, does not describe works of art but rather their material representations in images: the figurative motifs on the photograph are released, as it were, from pictorial logic, reappropriated by hand, her microscopically tiny handwriting, which already negates the described on the next sheet, dissolving into a nearly nonrepresentational drawing. In the 1970s, she produced a large number of these so-called “Riduzioni” (Reductions) based on photographic motifs in her personal possession which she selected from the great historical Alinari archives or from the media. The text describing all motifs in such a way that it itself dissolves is: “Dal momentio in cui”. It would become a kind of text matrix for her: she recited it at the 1975 performance “Le mie parole. E tu?” at the University of Florence’s Faculty of Architecture, published it in NAC magazine, and otherwise frequently made use of it for the description of the photographs.
During the latter half of the 1960s, Ketty La Rocca examined the legacy of visual poetry and her own harsh criticism of the expropriated Meta languages, taking a position between attack and self-referentiality in order to formulate a different, non-dominant language in art. But only when her hand not only merely writes but also enters the picture itself and communicates will it find the property that led her to her final large complex of works. She worked in parallel on the following: the language of gestures, radiographs, and the large-scale “Riduzioni” series. It is no longer the “hardworking women’s hands” (Ketty La Rocca) that entered the picture in the early 1970s but rather performative hands that individually or in groups perform simple, dramatic, or playful gestures. They are male and female hands, her own hands, which communicate. And there are hands on the “mechanical images”: “I accept these mechanical images as occurrences, i.e. real” (Ketty La Rocca). She occupied herself at that time with the gestural language of deaf-mutes and worked on an experimental format for Italian television, “I nuovi alfabeti”, that was broadcast for the first time on 20 March 1973. For the first time the news did not have to be read from the announcer’s lips but were also translated into sign language – an affective language for Ketty La Rocca that can communicate without connections.
This body language focussed on hands, handling, and grasping manifests itself in three large complexes of works: the book “In Principio erat” that Ketty La Rocca presented at the Galeria Flori in Florence in 1971, even before her participation at the 1971 Venice Biennale, the video “Appendice per una supplica” with its subsequent complex of photographs, and the performative and photographic works in conjunction “Le mie parole, e tu?” Her work with gestures was restricted to 1971/1972; that same year she began with the drawings of the “Riduzioni”. The gesture is then no longer in the image but is embodied in the performative hand that outlines images, reproduces afterimages, and creates kinds of echo spaces. In the “Riduzioni” series, Ketty La Rocca compresses her criticism of the expropriation of images through millionfold reproduction, of the reproduction of “meta language” in alphabetical texts, and of art criticism. It assumes the form of processual sequences.
Beginning in 1971, Ketty La Rocca made use of X-rays of her own skull as a picture as well as a support. The X-ray image is the matrix on which she inscribed herself or “you”, on which she identifies and defamiliarises herself, articulating resistance as well as desire: Photographs of her hand – a clenched fist, the palm of the hand, or even a single finger – penetrate the skull, filling the cavity. Repeated time and again, the small case “you” delineates the contours of her skull, occasionally tracing the lines of the eye sockets and mouth. The X-ray generates into a battlefield of appropriation attempts and otherness, of internal and external invocations, of invasion and retreat. Head and hand interlock iconographically, a cold skull and a warm hand, two “mechanical” images. The “Craniologies” (X-ray images) are complex dramatic self-portraits. It was only in 2010 that one of these radiological images was acquired for the collection of self-portraits in the Vasari Corridor of Uffizi Gallery.
Published in: Ketty La Rocca. You - works and writings 1964-1976. Edited by Angelika Stepken, Berlin 2017
Ketty La Rocca’s most radical work 1964 - 1976
Ketty La Rocca’s artistic work emphatically unites criticism and desire with radical consequence: critique of the external world (of Western power politics, of the manipulative force of the mass media, of the disenfranchisement of the woman et al.) but ultimately also criticism of their articulation, of language, of a language, of the visual language as well, which always pushes itself in front of the essential and thus distorting it. Ketty La Rocca was a perceptive, analytical, feminist, media-critical artist. And despite the numerous significant exhibitions shown during her lifetime, she was not a maverick who went down in art history as a video pioneer nor did she align herself with the feminist movement when fighting for “autocoscienza”, the self-awareness of women in Italy around and after 1970. Ketty La Rocca worked with collages, photography, video, text, drawing and performance. She was concerned with the difference between sign and translation, between metaphor and reality. She sought expression in the blank spaces between these differences, sought what language omits. The driving force behind her oeuvre that rapidly developed over the course of only a single decade is a resistant desire, a desire from a distance, a desire to annul this very distance. It is a female desire and an impossible desire that frequently articulates itself, creating meaning throughout the various phases of her work that veers between image and sight, text and gesture, imagination and dissolution, evocation and exhaustion. At the time when the heteronymous and voiceless “Second Sex” laid claim to using the first person, her focus gradually shifted to that intermediate zone where “I” ends and “you” begins, or where one person becomes alienated in the other.
Ketty La Rocca, born 1938 in La Spezia, never studied at an art academy. Moving to Florence at the age of eighteen, she soon came into contact with Pietro Grossi (1917–2002) and his S 2F M (Studio di Fonologia Musicale di Firenze) as well as the protagonists of “Gruppo 70” who organised initial conferences on “Art and Communication” (1963) and “Art and Technology” (1964). Inspired by “Poesia Tecnologica”, Ketty La Rocca began working on collages in 1964, a visual poetry in which images and text fragments from magazines are cropped and critically recontextualised. With these works she passionately references social conflicts and their linguistic and medial-oriented representation: the Vietnam War, the obscenity of the film industry, the so-called Third World, the exploitation of the female body, and the tedious banality of the everyday environment, which she summarised in the bitter sentence: Life is something else. Ketty La Rocca would later take up the cropping technique deriving from commercial graphics again in her photographic works and videos as a bottomless/groundless pictorial concept. Her sceptical relationship towards an expropriated language, towards the “crisis of communication”, accompanied Ketty La Rocca all her artistic career. At the same time she wrote texts, poems, magazine essays, and scripts for performances. During a 1967 festival she distributed evocative poetry fragments in the form of pamphlets in the streets of Florence. The abstract language of the external world (media, politics) is subjectified in a distributing body. A year earlier, Ketty La Rocca found out that she had been diagnosed with cancer.
Beginning in 1967, Ketty la Rocca’s works increasingly assumed a short-term political diction. She explored the efficacy of the alphabetic text, its instructional force, its forms of transport, formulating strategies of refusal and rejection. She operated with picture supports such as traffic signs, contrasting the characteristic style of public directives with narrative “information bits” (Ketty La Rocca) that are in part charged with emotion, expectation and formulated in the first person. Fragments of speech are cropped as a means of articulating the divergence between interior and exterior, public discourse, and one’s own voice. Around 1970 – only a few years before her death – Ketty La Rocca succeeded in taking the parallel steps that would lead to the most important groups of works in her oeuvre. The problematic of language, the “Meta language”, is split into diverse “tools” or action levels: a self-referential nonsense text – initially conceived as a manifesto – led to the “Riduzioni” series; the figure of the speaker is projected onto an objectified “J” and temporarily enters the space; afterwards only the hands, the gestures, speak; they enter the picture.
Ketty La Rocca already exhibited a singular group of mirror objects outside the Forte di Belvedere in Florence in 1967. Circular mirrors on the cut surface of obliquely-shaped cut black metal cylinders reflect the surrounding space, including the viewers. Signs now no longer reference the public space and its guidelines but bodies reflect bodies instead. The “addressed” viewer himself enters the images, sees himself as “you”. Later, when she was working with gestures and employed text as gesture, Ketty La Rocca obsessively frequently invoked this reflected and defamiliarised self in writing. But before the “you” (that is always held on the page, in the text, in the image), the self emerges in a foreign language, appearing in the space, black and fragile, as a free-standing three-dimensional French “J”, a slender plastic body that maintains its equilibrium without a word. The production of group of works (on two undated photographs Ketty La Rocca can be seen lying in bed with this “J” as if with a partner) remained limited to the brief period of time when written language simultaneously imploded in ambitious nonsense, slurring into a caricature of claims to meaning and power.
In 1970, Ketty La Rocca wrote the textual salvo “Dal momento in cui” on quadratic supports. She wrote by hand on a small piece of paper, also printing the text in the same format and transferring it in white on black onto a large photo canvas. It is an extremely dense text assembled from found footage, quasi a satire of all forms of art criticism. Ketty La Rocca’s art criticism, however, does not describe works of art but rather their material representations in images: the figurative motifs on the photograph are released, as it were, from pictorial logic, reappropriated by hand, her microscopically tiny handwriting, which already negates the described on the next sheet, dissolving into a nearly nonrepresentational drawing. In the 1970s, she produced a large number of these so-called “Riduzioni” (Reductions) based on photographic motifs in her personal possession which she selected from the great historical Alinari archives or from the media. The text describing all motifs in such a way that it itself dissolves is: “Dal momentio in cui”. It would become a kind of text matrix for her: she recited it at the 1975 performance “Le mie parole. E tu?” at the University of Florence’s Faculty of Architecture, published it in NAC magazine, and otherwise frequently made use of it for the description of the photographs.
During the latter half of the 1960s, Ketty La Rocca examined the legacy of visual poetry and her own harsh criticism of the expropriated Meta languages, taking a position between attack and self-referentiality in order to formulate a different, non-dominant language in art. But only when her hand not only merely writes but also enters the picture itself and communicates will it find the property that led her to her final large complex of works. She worked in parallel on the following: the language of gestures, radiographs, and the large-scale “Riduzioni” series. It is no longer the “hardworking women’s hands” (Ketty La Rocca) that entered the picture in the early 1970s but rather performative hands that individually or in groups perform simple, dramatic, or playful gestures. They are male and female hands, her own hands, which communicate. And there are hands on the “mechanical images”: “I accept these mechanical images as occurrences, i.e. real” (Ketty La Rocca). She occupied herself at that time with the gestural language of deaf-mutes and worked on an experimental format for Italian television, “I nuovi alfabeti”, that was broadcast for the first time on 20 March 1973. For the first time the news did not have to be read from the announcer’s lips but were also translated into sign language – an affective language for Ketty La Rocca that can communicate without connections.
This body language focussed on hands, handling, and grasping manifests itself in three large complexes of works: the book “In Principio erat” that Ketty La Rocca presented at the Galeria Flori in Florence in 1971, even before her participation at the 1971 Venice Biennale, the video “Appendice per una supplica” with its subsequent complex of photographs, and the performative and photographic works in conjunction “Le mie parole, e tu?” Her work with gestures was restricted to 1971/1972; that same year she began with the drawings of the “Riduzioni”. The gesture is then no longer in the image but is embodied in the performative hand that outlines images, reproduces afterimages, and creates kinds of echo spaces. In the “Riduzioni” series, Ketty La Rocca compresses her criticism of the expropriation of images through millionfold reproduction, of the reproduction of “meta language” in alphabetical texts, and of art criticism. It assumes the form of processual sequences.
Beginning in 1971, Ketty La Rocca made use of X-rays of her own skull as a picture as well as a support. The X-ray image is the matrix on which she inscribed herself or “you”, on which she identifies and defamiliarises herself, articulating resistance as well as desire: Photographs of her hand – a clenched fist, the palm of the hand, or even a single finger – penetrate the skull, filling the cavity. Repeated time and again, the small case “you” delineates the contours of her skull, occasionally tracing the lines of the eye sockets and mouth. The X-ray generates into a battlefield of appropriation attempts and otherness, of internal and external invocations, of invasion and retreat. Head and hand interlock iconographically, a cold skull and a warm hand, two “mechanical” images. The “Craniologies” (X-ray images) are complex dramatic self-portraits. It was only in 2010 that one of these radiological images was acquired for the collection of self-portraits in the Vasari Corridor of Uffizi Gallery.
Published in: Ketty La Rocca. You - works and writings 1964-1976. Edited by Angelika Stepken, Berlin 2017
Unsettlers
Jeremiah Day and the Test of Art’s Institutions
In December 2015, when Jeremiah Day hosted the event Tea & Darkness at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin, I stood for the first time across from a soldier who had recently fought in a war, not one from the era of my parents or grandparents. The encounter shocked me, beyond the way Aaron Hughes, the American soldier now turned anti-war activist and artist, reflected on his experiences and shared them with the audience.
I froze in shame for the fact that I had only followed the wars of the last thirty years on screen and had always felt solidarity with the victims. I had never met a soldier who had experienced war with their body, spirit, and soul. Is my focus and awareness still trapped in the narrative of the demilitarized West German post-war era? What does this mean for my political consciousness and actions today?
On that evening, the Iraq War veteran Aaron Hughes spoke as an artist and activist who tours interna- tionally, from audience to audience. The HKW in Berlin is a cultural institution with an explicitly political/intellectual approach. Tea & Darkness took place in a niche of a congress hall—built in 1957 as a contribution of the United States of America to the Interbau building exhibition in Berlin—in a space not normally used for events. In his 2017 dissertation A Kind of Imagination That Has Nothing to Do with Fiction: Art in Public Life, Jeremiah Day writes that he prefers performing in cultural institutions, as does his mentor, American per- former Simone Forti. The evening with Aaron Hughes and Jeremiah Day started off with a conversation with Meike Capps-Schubert, who founded the Clearing Barrel Café in Kaiserslautern in 2012 together with US veterans, a cafe located until 2017 next to one of the largest US garrisons in Germany. In the final part of the program, Day performed To a Person Sitting in Darkness (Bagram, Kaiserslautern, Bethesda) (2014–16), a work depict- ing this very café in Kaiserslauten, where it had also been once present- ed. Thus, on this evening at HKW, two men from differing experiential backgrounds expressed themselves in a contemporary, culturally coded language and an activist sought to engage the audience in discussion. Central to the evening were the questions: Whether and at what point does the “neutrality” of cultural institutions shift towards an unspoken complicity with the “war on terror,” which at that time had been going on for fourteen years. Who contributes which experiences, and what kind of (artistic) language are these experiences translated into? How can these experiences establish a political basis or create a political public realm from the “bottom up”? And what added value does an artistic articulation have relative to a critical, verbal discussion?
When Jeremiah Day performs, he threads disparate fragments of history into an open-ended narrative. He speaks or recites texts that relate to personal encounters, political research, and historical events. When quoting other people, he sometimes addresses the public directly. As his thoughtful voice speaks, his body uses a different, slower alphabet, whose code is difficult to decipher. His body moves but is still centered. A body in motion presents itself to the audience. Additional elements of his performances include projected photographs in which he uses the indexical quality of the medium (the trace of the real) and the emotionally moving ambient live music of an electrical guitar. The result is a complex constellation that overwhelms the viewer. Various time periods (memories) are placed in relationship to one another; different media are employed simultaneously in the same space, giving rise to a range of sensory perceptions. The spaces of speech, memory, the body, and sound cross and overlap with the realm of vivid imaginations.
The underlying tone of the narrative is melancholy; the story is about appearances and disappearances, things never voiced and things that have been shut out. What were we told? What are we talking about? What can we say? What do we have to say? What has been kept silent? The narrative has a meandering, wandering quality, feeling its way, overcoming gaps in space and time, surmounting political and medial boundaries. The appeal resounds across expansive landscapes and horizons. Is this an American perspective?
Jeremiah Day’s artistic actions constitute a sensory-intellectual practice. In contrast to hegemonic, “divide and conquer” practices, he interrogates evidence and witnesses, uses questions to set things in motion, and attempts to make tangible and present things that have been discarded, excluded, or forgotten. In his work, personal tension and inner conflict are revealed in highly concentrated form. When Day speaks while moving, he simultaneously activates the motoric and linguistic centers of his brain. A coexistence within a single person, a coexistence of various people in one place and time.
Almost anything can be said and shown in the context of art, which is why “artistic freedom” is such a highly prized ideal. Within democratic society, the institutional space that frames and legitimizes art protects even the most political content from “real” consequences. This is the zone in which Western, capitalistic worlds can symbolically lend expression to individual experiences, social paradoxes, and things that are considered politically unquestionable. Public space, a golden cage? Jeremiah Day repeatedly asks: Can art play a role in public life? And how? Or why not? In his works he engages with familiar political topics that are rarely negotiated (and not in this way) in art contexts. He draws on a series of works by Simone Forti, the News Animations that she developed in the 1980s. In these performances she “embodied” news texts, conveying intuitively and reflexively through her body details about a conflict-laden social reality, a world that she herself could not access. The work addresses the question of how an individual engages with something that he or she knows or could know but which cannot be shared as a personal experience. This capacity for empathy is the measure of democratic societies. At the same time, it also demands on principle that every individual experience has the possibility of being articulated within a social discourse, of being publicly communicated, of creating a public realm, that is to say of going beyond the narrow confines of one’s one body, of showing oneself and communicating. This needs to be learned, and it must be permitted. The art context has established itself as a social realm with its own entry qualifications in terms of intellectual, cultural, habitual, and financial property. It thrives on critical assessments, or what one could call valuation “auctions.” Emerging along with the rise of the middle class and capitalism, art shares their abstractions and hierarchies. Accordin to this model, art and everyday life are far removed from each other—and that is how things are supposed to be.
Jeremiah’s invitation to Aaron Hughes and Meike Capps-Schubert to share a joint evening with the audience demonstrated this. Poised between an artistic performance (Jeremiah Day) and a dialogue about activist practice (Meike Capps-Schubert) was Aaron Hughes, who brought to the con- stellation his traumatizing, subjective life experience as a US soldier in the second Iraq War, one not easily conveyed in symbolic terms. Within this juxtaposition of different voices, most moving (to me) was the encounter with a living body whose voice often goes unheard—a body that does not usually appear in the art world because there is no foreseen place for it. I am reminded of events at Villa Romana where we invited young refugees to talk about their real experiences of their flight to Europe. Morteza Khaleghi, a young stateless Afghan who grew up without any residency rights in Golshar, the largest Afghan refugee settlement in Iran, talked about his months-long flight to Europe, his weeks in a Greek prison, and his experiences of violence. He began his story with a picture of Alighiero Boetti, the Italian artist who had deep ties with Afghanistan, stating that his home country was and is part of the art community, too. Bassel Saadi, a Syrian sculptor, who applied for—and soon received—asylum for himself and his children in Italy after a two-month residency at the Villa Romana, used his lecture not to talk about his own steel sculptures and collages but about the practice of an artist friend who was holding out in Damascus, and how his work had changed over the last ten years. The audience grew still and was close to tears, as Bassel conveyed how a life under a dictatorship and war can destroy the core of the human soul, when there is no more public space for people to share. There are so many other voices like these, even if less dramatic, which never get close to being heard or penetrating our comfort zones.
Jeremiah Day is an American artist who came to Europe in 2003. Before this he lived in California, where he began to shape his artistic practice and engagement with politics and social justice through encounters and collaborations with Simone Forti and the Hannah Arendt working group of Fred Dewey. In his dissertation, Day reflects on his practice along theoretical lines; among his inspirations he names the US poet, playwright, and political activist Amiri Baraka, who died in 2014, and his combination of intellectual, emotional, poetic, and polemical approaches. He also mentions the undervalued artist and theorist Allan Kaprow (1927–2006) and his interactive action-art. Day has personally met both. Day does not limit his own work to performance formats alone, but also employs installation, photography, public lectures, radio pieces, open letters, writings, and self-curating. In terms of content, his own list of concerns include: the African- American freedom struggle, commemoration; the commemorative, freedom, gentrification/dislocation, improvisation, political repression, responsibility, republic/republican- ism, the European project.
Art institutions are protected, publicly accessible spaces. The Clearing Barrel Café in Kaiserslautern also provided a “safe space” for anti-war activists and for advising soldiers. It was located near the Ramstein Airbase with its daily flights to Afghanistan and other areas of US and NATO conflict. It is also close to a medical center in Landstuhl, which is a hub for wounded soldiers from global battlefields. The question concerning institutionalized security zones—whether in an art or social context—is: To what extent do these reflect the needs of the individual as experienced bodies and facilitate access for them (as a speaker or a listener) to such spaces? Or do they act by means of an abstract mission, perverting themselves as attractions for an anonymous audience? Artists are always individuals, even when they work together in groups. Anyone entering an art space offers themselves as an (alien) resonating body, full of expectations. Transmitting what is yours to someone unknown and the other way around are understood as a social model in art and in its spaces of the imagination, a model of a republic of people who give form to their experiences and who can and wish to share them. Practically speaking, many are not able and do not wish to do this.
How can artists create situations that encourage people to experience their (respective) distance from the larger world as a poetic zone of commonality, and thus also a political realm? The question is also whether we are talking about the realities of the time in which we are actually living, or do we tend to lose ourselves in rhetorical loops of self-referentiality and repetition? Maybe it is not just about us, the people who live in the geographies of prosperity that rely on exploiting the rest of the world, and further educating ourselves or taking in a dose of “poetry.” Instead it is about looking onto the present from the future, hearing the voices of “the others” who are kept at the bottom of the hierarchies in this political system, listening to them, and sharing their imaginations and embodied struggles with them. It is not about trying to speak for some- one else or “do-good” politics but about involving real people in the potential of the public, as we value it. As Jeremiah Day proposes, it is about laying open resistive actions as they are subjectively manifested and made evident in images, texts, and body language. In this case, it is exclusively the role of institutions to guarantee safe spaces for unsettling, as long as there is no safe, human public sphere—a republic—for all.
Published in: JEREMIAH DAY, “If It’s For The People, It Needs To Be Beautiful,” She Said. Edited by Jeremiah Day with Will Holder, Dijon 2021
Jeremiah Day and the Test of Art’s Institutions
In December 2015, when Jeremiah Day hosted the event Tea & Darkness at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin, I stood for the first time across from a soldier who had recently fought in a war, not one from the era of my parents or grandparents. The encounter shocked me, beyond the way Aaron Hughes, the American soldier now turned anti-war activist and artist, reflected on his experiences and shared them with the audience.
I froze in shame for the fact that I had only followed the wars of the last thirty years on screen and had always felt solidarity with the victims. I had never met a soldier who had experienced war with their body, spirit, and soul. Is my focus and awareness still trapped in the narrative of the demilitarized West German post-war era? What does this mean for my political consciousness and actions today?
On that evening, the Iraq War veteran Aaron Hughes spoke as an artist and activist who tours interna- tionally, from audience to audience. The HKW in Berlin is a cultural institution with an explicitly political/intellectual approach. Tea & Darkness took place in a niche of a congress hall—built in 1957 as a contribution of the United States of America to the Interbau building exhibition in Berlin—in a space not normally used for events. In his 2017 dissertation A Kind of Imagination That Has Nothing to Do with Fiction: Art in Public Life, Jeremiah Day writes that he prefers performing in cultural institutions, as does his mentor, American per- former Simone Forti. The evening with Aaron Hughes and Jeremiah Day started off with a conversation with Meike Capps-Schubert, who founded the Clearing Barrel Café in Kaiserslautern in 2012 together with US veterans, a cafe located until 2017 next to one of the largest US garrisons in Germany. In the final part of the program, Day performed To a Person Sitting in Darkness (Bagram, Kaiserslautern, Bethesda) (2014–16), a work depict- ing this very café in Kaiserslauten, where it had also been once present- ed. Thus, on this evening at HKW, two men from differing experiential backgrounds expressed themselves in a contemporary, culturally coded language and an activist sought to engage the audience in discussion. Central to the evening were the questions: Whether and at what point does the “neutrality” of cultural institutions shift towards an unspoken complicity with the “war on terror,” which at that time had been going on for fourteen years. Who contributes which experiences, and what kind of (artistic) language are these experiences translated into? How can these experiences establish a political basis or create a political public realm from the “bottom up”? And what added value does an artistic articulation have relative to a critical, verbal discussion?
When Jeremiah Day performs, he threads disparate fragments of history into an open-ended narrative. He speaks or recites texts that relate to personal encounters, political research, and historical events. When quoting other people, he sometimes addresses the public directly. As his thoughtful voice speaks, his body uses a different, slower alphabet, whose code is difficult to decipher. His body moves but is still centered. A body in motion presents itself to the audience. Additional elements of his performances include projected photographs in which he uses the indexical quality of the medium (the trace of the real) and the emotionally moving ambient live music of an electrical guitar. The result is a complex constellation that overwhelms the viewer. Various time periods (memories) are placed in relationship to one another; different media are employed simultaneously in the same space, giving rise to a range of sensory perceptions. The spaces of speech, memory, the body, and sound cross and overlap with the realm of vivid imaginations.
The underlying tone of the narrative is melancholy; the story is about appearances and disappearances, things never voiced and things that have been shut out. What were we told? What are we talking about? What can we say? What do we have to say? What has been kept silent? The narrative has a meandering, wandering quality, feeling its way, overcoming gaps in space and time, surmounting political and medial boundaries. The appeal resounds across expansive landscapes and horizons. Is this an American perspective?
Jeremiah Day’s artistic actions constitute a sensory-intellectual practice. In contrast to hegemonic, “divide and conquer” practices, he interrogates evidence and witnesses, uses questions to set things in motion, and attempts to make tangible and present things that have been discarded, excluded, or forgotten. In his work, personal tension and inner conflict are revealed in highly concentrated form. When Day speaks while moving, he simultaneously activates the motoric and linguistic centers of his brain. A coexistence within a single person, a coexistence of various people in one place and time.
Almost anything can be said and shown in the context of art, which is why “artistic freedom” is such a highly prized ideal. Within democratic society, the institutional space that frames and legitimizes art protects even the most political content from “real” consequences. This is the zone in which Western, capitalistic worlds can symbolically lend expression to individual experiences, social paradoxes, and things that are considered politically unquestionable. Public space, a golden cage? Jeremiah Day repeatedly asks: Can art play a role in public life? And how? Or why not? In his works he engages with familiar political topics that are rarely negotiated (and not in this way) in art contexts. He draws on a series of works by Simone Forti, the News Animations that she developed in the 1980s. In these performances she “embodied” news texts, conveying intuitively and reflexively through her body details about a conflict-laden social reality, a world that she herself could not access. The work addresses the question of how an individual engages with something that he or she knows or could know but which cannot be shared as a personal experience. This capacity for empathy is the measure of democratic societies. At the same time, it also demands on principle that every individual experience has the possibility of being articulated within a social discourse, of being publicly communicated, of creating a public realm, that is to say of going beyond the narrow confines of one’s one body, of showing oneself and communicating. This needs to be learned, and it must be permitted. The art context has established itself as a social realm with its own entry qualifications in terms of intellectual, cultural, habitual, and financial property. It thrives on critical assessments, or what one could call valuation “auctions.” Emerging along with the rise of the middle class and capitalism, art shares their abstractions and hierarchies. Accordin to this model, art and everyday life are far removed from each other—and that is how things are supposed to be.
Jeremiah’s invitation to Aaron Hughes and Meike Capps-Schubert to share a joint evening with the audience demonstrated this. Poised between an artistic performance (Jeremiah Day) and a dialogue about activist practice (Meike Capps-Schubert) was Aaron Hughes, who brought to the con- stellation his traumatizing, subjective life experience as a US soldier in the second Iraq War, one not easily conveyed in symbolic terms. Within this juxtaposition of different voices, most moving (to me) was the encounter with a living body whose voice often goes unheard—a body that does not usually appear in the art world because there is no foreseen place for it. I am reminded of events at Villa Romana where we invited young refugees to talk about their real experiences of their flight to Europe. Morteza Khaleghi, a young stateless Afghan who grew up without any residency rights in Golshar, the largest Afghan refugee settlement in Iran, talked about his months-long flight to Europe, his weeks in a Greek prison, and his experiences of violence. He began his story with a picture of Alighiero Boetti, the Italian artist who had deep ties with Afghanistan, stating that his home country was and is part of the art community, too. Bassel Saadi, a Syrian sculptor, who applied for—and soon received—asylum for himself and his children in Italy after a two-month residency at the Villa Romana, used his lecture not to talk about his own steel sculptures and collages but about the practice of an artist friend who was holding out in Damascus, and how his work had changed over the last ten years. The audience grew still and was close to tears, as Bassel conveyed how a life under a dictatorship and war can destroy the core of the human soul, when there is no more public space for people to share. There are so many other voices like these, even if less dramatic, which never get close to being heard or penetrating our comfort zones.
Jeremiah Day is an American artist who came to Europe in 2003. Before this he lived in California, where he began to shape his artistic practice and engagement with politics and social justice through encounters and collaborations with Simone Forti and the Hannah Arendt working group of Fred Dewey. In his dissertation, Day reflects on his practice along theoretical lines; among his inspirations he names the US poet, playwright, and political activist Amiri Baraka, who died in 2014, and his combination of intellectual, emotional, poetic, and polemical approaches. He also mentions the undervalued artist and theorist Allan Kaprow (1927–2006) and his interactive action-art. Day has personally met both. Day does not limit his own work to performance formats alone, but also employs installation, photography, public lectures, radio pieces, open letters, writings, and self-curating. In terms of content, his own list of concerns include: the African- American freedom struggle, commemoration; the commemorative, freedom, gentrification/dislocation, improvisation, political repression, responsibility, republic/republican- ism, the European project.
Art institutions are protected, publicly accessible spaces. The Clearing Barrel Café in Kaiserslautern also provided a “safe space” for anti-war activists and for advising soldiers. It was located near the Ramstein Airbase with its daily flights to Afghanistan and other areas of US and NATO conflict. It is also close to a medical center in Landstuhl, which is a hub for wounded soldiers from global battlefields. The question concerning institutionalized security zones—whether in an art or social context—is: To what extent do these reflect the needs of the individual as experienced bodies and facilitate access for them (as a speaker or a listener) to such spaces? Or do they act by means of an abstract mission, perverting themselves as attractions for an anonymous audience? Artists are always individuals, even when they work together in groups. Anyone entering an art space offers themselves as an (alien) resonating body, full of expectations. Transmitting what is yours to someone unknown and the other way around are understood as a social model in art and in its spaces of the imagination, a model of a republic of people who give form to their experiences and who can and wish to share them. Practically speaking, many are not able and do not wish to do this.
How can artists create situations that encourage people to experience their (respective) distance from the larger world as a poetic zone of commonality, and thus also a political realm? The question is also whether we are talking about the realities of the time in which we are actually living, or do we tend to lose ourselves in rhetorical loops of self-referentiality and repetition? Maybe it is not just about us, the people who live in the geographies of prosperity that rely on exploiting the rest of the world, and further educating ourselves or taking in a dose of “poetry.” Instead it is about looking onto the present from the future, hearing the voices of “the others” who are kept at the bottom of the hierarchies in this political system, listening to them, and sharing their imaginations and embodied struggles with them. It is not about trying to speak for some- one else or “do-good” politics but about involving real people in the potential of the public, as we value it. As Jeremiah Day proposes, it is about laying open resistive actions as they are subjectively manifested and made evident in images, texts, and body language. In this case, it is exclusively the role of institutions to guarantee safe spaces for unsettling, as long as there is no safe, human public sphere—a republic—for all.
Published in: JEREMIAH DAY, “If It’s For The People, It Needs To Be Beautiful,” She Said. Edited by Jeremiah Day with Will Holder, Dijon 2021