This exhibition showcases the work of the artists Pau Lorenzo, Carmen Borges, Phil le Fou, Neo Nor, Sara Skenderija and Karin Vrbek. They generously accepted the invitation to participate with us, Maša Knapič, an artist, and Carmen Santesmases, a poet, (together they are 2orde). We understood each other and felt that we shared the same conflicts. We are brought to cities that, we suspect, are not prepared to provide for us with a job, a home, a life. But we all understand our position as one of rebellion against the establishment, which we believe to be dead but still in power. Furthermore, we question the consequences of the rejection of the the established social norms. In doing so, we are still able to find a reason to move, to create, to have faith and to stop swaying in the wind like a field of ripe corn. This exhibition here and now is an attempt to offer a temporary solution to our common problems.
Is there something that we (or any of us) – as participants in the exhibition, but also you as a person here – can call a community in which we participate? Is there a group of individuals with whom you meet, with whom you share ideas, views, fears, and hopes?
(Modern/contemporary) museums have taken on the role of creating a kind of “community”. Museums, as public institutions, should belong to the people and they could be occupied by an unsupervised and willingly participating crowd. Museums should understand their responsibility in creating a group of works and organising activities that generate a collection. Their task is to build up the memory of the future. Our task, on the other hand (that of the viewer, the artist, the human being), is to try to have a sense of faith – to believe in something we haven’t seen. This is where our first questions arose: How do these places (museums) take care of newcomers – especially young artists, because that is what we are right now? And what can we, these newcomers, do with it? Is there a possibility of a functional symbiosis between us?
The letter forever unwritten is a problem that we want to solve temporarily. In part, this exhibition is a written letter that wants to leave a trace, continuing a long list of initiatives that have the same aim: to build long-term relationships to secure our queer futures. To look into a triangle of questions that provoked us during the process of making this exhibition: /faith (hope) – community – museum\. Do we feel we are a part of something we can call a community? Do we have hope? Do we share it with something/someone? And how does all of this translate into an exhibition / how do we relate to the institution?
A question of faith: José Esteban Muñoz in his book Cruising Utopia proposes the notion of the utopia coming from the notion of hope as a possibility for queer futures grounded in past events: special things that happened that are important to know and repeat. Historiography – the study and writing of history– shows how important it is to have the past present, to recognise the powerful things that have happened and that are useful to remember. For it is this knowledge of the past that will guide through the future. From a deep belief in the revolutionary potential of the arts, we share a critical power. This power allows us to reformulate our own discourse with different questions, constantly aware of these changes and adapting to better forms of protest, of critique, appropriation and love. The political imagination is a space of activism, of militancy.
In this exhibition, the past is brought by each of us, from our local contexts. It takes the shape of a similar understanding of art production and the artistic condition. The past, the history, is brought here through our singularly unique political inscription, intertwined with everything else.
Queer futures is an idea that we understand here as a chance for everyone to do things in a certain way that acknowledges our differences. The term queer refers to the historical other that has been kicked out of the narrative. It is a term that recognises everyone’s agency to reclaim their knowledge and to reclaim their voice. Queer means believing that your story is worth telling and that your knowledge is actually knowledge. It also means legitimising yourself through your own channels and not through the channels of power. This is how we redirect the historical imbalance and the historiographical effort towards imagining collective futures.
Let’s try to accept the contradictions, the unknown, the ugly, the rotten and everything that is okay and actually have it work. Let us evaluate whether this system was really built with good intention directed at us. Let’s experiment with this word in a way that presents a new opportunity to those whom history forgets. Let’s try to create new rules for our game, let us embrace subjectivity and objectivity. Let us seek instability, awkwardness, mistakes. We know some new things, and we are unaware of some of the old ones. We are better than the past, but we are also worse than the past.
There is a need for a displacement. There is space for instability. One reason moves things from their original place to translate them into something else. We accept being an elastic organism that bends, fills, breathes and even self-destructs if necessary. In this case, artists from Madrid, Ljubljana and Celje, (Spain and Slovenia > unit-e-s) have personally moved here or have made their works move, in order to convey and share their meanings. To speak of unimaginable relationships and immersions, to speak about the consequences of transitions, to embrace the failure, to explore the identity, the dirt, the underbelly of the glittering reality, towards the sensory, the prime, the sound, not to be afraid to look into the unknown, to search for the unheimlich, liminal, and in general to lurk in the void of countless reinventions of realities. A mismatch of words that makes the collective being possible. We are trying, to get somewhere with this writing, although it is never the ultimate letter. But we have been given a chance to appreciate each other’s work, to trust in working together. We have hope and we have been given trust. Many things still remain unsaid.
And for what it’s worth,
Wherever this exhibition may take you,
it still remains a letter, forever unwritten.
with <3
2orde
Zavod Celeia Celje – Center for Contemporary Arts
Supported by: Mestna občina Celje
Curators: 2orde (Maša Knapič & Carmen Santesmases)
Text: 2orde (Maša Knapič & Carmen Santesmases)
