#vibrantmatter

One Are (2021)

100m2 sculpture, soil cast

An are is a unit of area in the metric system, equal to 100 square metres. Today, its multiple, the hectare (which equal to 100 ares), is the principal unit of land measurement for most of the world.

Departing from this basic unit of measurement I transposed one are of land into a 100 m2 floor sculpture. It is a three-dimensional impression of a field used for agricultural purposes, from the South of Slovakia. 

The size and the shape of the work refer to ancient patterns of territorial delimitations, land appropriation and ownership claims, political agro nomy, soil governance policies, crops, framing, outside-inside dictates and this one unit of measured area sets us back to the beginnings of colonization practices. Among the first ancient colonizers, the Romans, in order to divide and allocate the conquered lands, delimited the fields to be divided in lots. The ancient land surveyors (called gromatici or agrimensores) and the Roman system of property boundaries are fundamental to both agricultural and Civil Engineering as we know it today. 

Their most common method of land division was based on the so-called “centuriated grid system”. Centuriation is the act of dividing land into centuries (hundreds) or equal areas — an inherited division pattern, which, translated into metric units, results in “ares” and “hectares”, which we still use in cadastral and agricultural divisions today. The grids consisted of boundaries, often roads dividing the territory into big squares or rectangles, which were then again divided into the individual parcels. The use and purpose of this rigid structure was manifold. It allowed for a kind of ancient zoning of the territory and facilitated the administration of property and the management of tax collection. In other words, it allowed for turning land into capital. The practice of centuriation was not only a system for dividing the land but also a political possession and control of the territory and a conceptual appropriation of the landscape. The installation visualizes the modern persistences of the ancient agrarian territorial boundaries.

The work emphasizes the institutional frame of land and the material constitution of soil at the same time. Based on an investigation of the relationship between the technique and the context (a three-dimensional imprint of the land, that remains ambiguous), the sculpture ensues from mapping of the records of agricultural work, markings and interventions into soil, remnants of cultures, tilling, cracking and erosions. So, the all the imprint pieces are some sort of memories or memorials (commemoration/materialization of what is "not there") and forming the formless. 

Earth is a material that doesn’t actually have a recognizable form. It can be moulded ad infinitum, it constantly changes shape – hydrated, pressed, spread, rolled, tilled, compacted, thumped, torn, cracked, joined again, dried, ripped and hydrated again. The human intervention into soil and the cycle of the seasons impose their rhythm and shapes on the landscape. Because of its malleability, its endless morphing, drying and moisturising, earth is a material of endless possibilities.

Dear sugar, 

when I was a little girl I was fond of everything that tasted sweet. Your presence was a moment of joy and satisfaction, a necessity, a reward. I loved you madly. Then something changed. I got confused, congested and stuck with my feelings for you. Large unwanted information and experiences accumulated and built a separation between us. I started to commonly assume that you, sugar, are primarily concerned with consumerism and materialism. That you work hand in hand with capitalism, that you divided continents, created political and racial conflicts, polemics about imports/exports, nurtured child labour and espoused immigration restrictions. I heard it many times: sugar = slaves, crops, theft, violence, exploitation, big business, Big Sugar, obesity, diabetes, death, blah, blah. Bewitched by language and gaslighted by the discourse of the Glycocene, I thought of you as stable object, as addictive additive to other things, as part of the dull matter that owns, manipulates and kills. I fixed you in a static space–time, seeing you as inert and calculable. I felt guilty. I had moments when I really hated you.

Boy, was I wrong! My perception of you was so shallow! You are so much more than what we ended up making of you. It’s disgusting how we vilified you. What a combination of oblivious, overweening, judgemental and numb we are! We refined you and then blamed you for so many things. We stripped you off your sacredness, raped your complexity and reduced you to a crystalline looking “pure” matter – now seen as a quick cheap fix, high on energy but devoid of any nutrients or substance. You might find these crystals they forced you into kitschy, and you’re right. Even your name, sugar, became a popular word having both treacly meanings and noxious connotations. For many you impersonate the mischievousness of matter. Some are dismayed by the ‘monstrous ways’ in which bodies like you are subverting expectations, resisting or reworking the meanings imposed upon them. Sadly, you have the reputation of being The Enemy. Yet, most people still can’t resist you. And I understand why. You’re ontologically unstable and teleologically disputable, but I adore you for being such a schizosubstance!

They often give you a bad rap, but what about you as polyethylene, the biodegradable plastic? Huh? Or that you sooth a burned tongue, keep flowers fresh, melt ice and snow (yes, it’s not only salt, you can do it even better), heal wounds, cure hiccups, prevent cheese from molding and remove odours? And if that’s not enough, what about you as breakable glass, artificial silk, medical implants, body and face scrub, hair gel, hair remover, grass stains remover, material for sculptures, yeasts, motor fuels, ethylene glycol, synthetic resins, acetone, and other acetate products? Your material promiscuity is so fertile, when I think of you I feel lost in the infinite.

I want to apologize for being so short sighted and for taking me so long to look properly at your sensual matter. No, you’re not mere matter, you are an event. Now I know you’re an expression of relational materialism at large. I accept the fact that you have multiple materialities and very specific temporalities and spatialities. You are endowed with agency. You participate lively in the articulation of all dynamic assemblages. Look at you, you’re everywhere! It’s miraculous how you appear from nowhere through the astounding process of photosynthesis. And then you’re making ‘things’, you’re a poietic agent for both life and non-life. Actually, ALL life depends on you and we just lurk at the margins of your being. Radical emergence is a feature of your reality. You, my friend, have a big role to play here. Whether it’s organs and organisms, policies and politics, spirit and spirits.

Now every time I think of you, I revere you as a gift coming from the deep space and deep time. I always had a bemusing feeling about you. And then, one day, I found it in a NASA press release: “First Detection of Sugars in Meteorites Gives Clues to Origin of Life”. You appeared in interstellar space and landed on prebiotic Earth. You have been here way before the beginning, allowing for life on Earth to start. You were one of the builders of the primordial molecule, the key component of the RNA world. Your particles travelled the entirety of space for aeons to reach my cells, and will continue to caress me till the end of my days. It’s not only love, or tenderness, or affection, it’s life itself, my life, that I found in your carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms. You’re such an harmonious assemblage of macronutrients! A revolution in evolution! It's easy to measure time using human lifespans, but peering down the billions of years of your history gives me vertigo. When I imagine you could be the key to abiogenesis, I feel like licking rocks. I have the sweet taste from your lips in my mouth. Oh, sugar, the whole Universe just gets sweeter when I think of you! You are so awesome you make me want to fly to the stars right now. You know why? You evoke such a possibility and a magic about looking to the Cosmos that I think, hell yes, it’s possible.

I know that you’re all about free play and dissolution, but I need you to be serious for a minute. My feelings for you are just so entirely intense and complicated, so laden with exaltation, sorrow, ecstasy, bliss and I need to tell you all this. You are that terrible relationship a girl goes back to again and again, no matter the ripping pain every time she does. I know you prefer to feed yeasts to the point of becoming infections and also inflammations or cancer tumours. I know you fuel plaque and bacteria causing tooth decay. I know you affect cognition, accelerate ageing, increase stress, and make me fat. But there is this fulfilment and the feeling of belonging. You stimulate me. My dopamine goes feral when I have you. I can’t resist you. I want to transcend your voluptuous matter. You have the capacity to feed me, to delude me, to modify me, to seduce me, to conquer me, to be me. It’s so difficult to see where you end and where I begin.

You want the truth? All are obsessed by you. They use both your presence and absence to talk about you every day. Regardless if you occur or not, you’re there! Mentioned and used as a slogan or topic or spell. You’re loved when you are and you’re great when you’re not. Creation through disintegration, presence through absence, fullness through emptiness—such paradoxes inspire your existence in the world. It’s so revolting how human-centered and gluttonous we are and then just pointing fingers towards you, holding you responsible for all the crap that happens to us: +kilograms, bad teeth, bad mood, bad economy and what not! To me you’re not “the white death”, “sweet poison”, “sweet killer”, “toxic”, “bad”. No, you’re alive, beautiful, you’re indispensable and I don’t want to live without you. You’re love’s digestible form. My muscles want you, my brain needs you, my nerves rely on you, my blood depends on you. I cannot always see you, but I know you’re there. My mind is the idea of your body.

The only thing I wish is we all take the trip on the side of The Unseen to discover you in your infrastructural and ultrastructural order, in your protomaterial and metamaterial existence. I hope such trip will generate a more subtle awareness of the entanglement of matter and an enhanced receptivity of the complicated web of dissonant connections between (you and all) bodies. You are productive, unpredictable, self-creative, active, you’re an excess force.

You’re giving me the sense that my appetite is primal. My heart, mind and body hold on you because you promise happiness and make me (feel) alive. I hope I don’t sound too corny for trying to see the world in a grain of sugar. But the sweet lust for life, I can only feel it with you.

I need you, and you never disappoint. And that, my friend, is why I love you.

B.O.R.E.D.G.A.Z.I.N.G

B.O.R.E.D.G.A.Z.I.N.G is an ongoing project dealing with the current circumstances in Europe. Now the impact of web technology in our daily lives is greater than ever before.

In our performance we use Zoom to connect ourselves - Olga Uzikaeva in Belgrade and Jolon Dixon in Berlin. Zoom was originally intended for business communication. In these present times, it has become a social space and a medium for performance and art. Many performers engage with audiences and most of us feel the need to be social and fill up our time.

In some ways, Zoom replace aspects of ordinary life through microphones and cameras. We become close and make hybrid spaces; Our windows sit next to each other and the backgrounds are often intimate. A group video chat becomes a collage or jigsaw puzzle made of our living rooms, kitchens and bedrooms.

On them other hand, it can be distancing: there is lag, the glitches of data compression and echo correction and the transformation of our presence through microphones, lenses and circuitry into 2-dimensional digital images and monaural sound, which can remind the viewer of the spaces and temporality of cubism.

Verbing the Material: plaster cast with efflorescences

(from the growing sculpture series) 

re-imagining materials