Apr 2023 A constellation of conduits was channelled between us, and our distance became water / Danielle Arnaud London
A constellation of conduits
was channelled between us,
and our distance became water
Danielle Arnaud Gallery London, 25 March to 29 April 2023
A collaborative show with Robert Cervera
This is what’s left of our city. A manic precarity jutting out of a liquid smoothness, desperately trying to stay up, erect, glimmering. But the glow of glass and metal has been overshadowed by the flatness of the waters, already invading the second floors of most large buildings. The old imperial dream, that concentration of colonial sighs and capitalist saliva, is slowly sinking. Its foundations have now been replaced by aquatic life, unexplained sudden gurgles, steady corrosion, liquidity.
An aquatic installation is spreading through the gallery space. It makes you move sidelong, curve along its corridors of affect, turn sharp at the next dystopian swelling. It asks you to swim gently across the expanse of water that has taken over the planet. It invites you to eavesdrop on the goings of a flooded city, and the genderless lovers in the centre of it all.
Based on my recent novel Our Distance Became Water (published especially for the exhibition by ERIS press), the installation becomes a body of water, air, sound, text, painting and tubular transparency. The textuality in the core of the work becomes gurglings, air bubbles, primordial sounds and spiced breath, an underwater forest of tubes, floating sheets of carton where our bodies might find solace in this drowning world.
In drawing our interdisciplinary practices together, we reached a moment of confluence. The work consists of sound pieces performed by Cervera on his tubular organs, composed around recitations by me of extracts of the novel. These pieces accompany the installation of tubes filled with green canal-like water (a performance machine that we explore at various live events) and my layered cardboard paintings . The spaces of the gallery are cast as an iteration of my theoretical research on Spatial Justice (A. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Spatial Justice, Routledge 2015) which understands law and space as tautologous, animated by human and nonhuman.
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