There is a void inside me that I need to fill up by talking, but what I say is always off the mark. Off the mark. Either I am a mirror or a hole. I don’t want to be a reflection of others. A hole is empty but it is real. (Hurriedly, nervously opens eyes) What? (turns only head to left) Has anyone arrived? Anyone there? (Anxious) A visit? (Closes eyes) Hush! Let’s not get nervous. Nobody is here. A voice of something already heard, of something already learned is always repeated when I open my mouth to speak. Indistinct and hazy dark place. Indoor or outdoor space. Words are truly of others, but let’s talk as if we were buried under damp earth. It could be a desert, an olive grove, or the plaza of an empty city in northern Spain. The stage slopes downward. Unless we want the horse to wakes us up, the far is much higher than the near. The ground looks like a hard shoulder, and I have trust in its consistency, but it is eating me. (Pause) Can you hear that buzzing sound? I can tell you cruelly have exit attempts of transformation. You can’t guess how much I want to throw myself into the sea now that I feel the water getting closer and closer. Look at my feet, you will see yourself reflected. I am truly becoming a specter. Total-image, which is to say, death in person1. Here is Sadak climbing from a stone to the leading mountain where the waters are. Not even today. I can’t transcribe it. What? Nothing. (Pause) Do you think this is normal for someone like me? Upside down olive branches are suspended at the top giving the feeling of falling or floating. The flies have stopped buzzing. I might be asleep. Everything deep is absurd. A dim light frames the action. The depths of yesterday sound today like a deception, and we must feel ashamed. It seems nighttime and is cold but it doesn’t feel like December. Words are confusing because they lack of precision and accuracy. Now is Spring. So yesterday…what was it, if not Spring? Something I learned, I can’t remember now. Time passes in a strange way. It’s like I can stretch it out, stir it up, and do whatever I want with it. If I think that everything happens quickly, I truly believe it. But quickly…as for what? At the same speed, of course. Trying to correctly define something must be paralyzing. If words feed the transformations of ideas, they must foster doubt. Synonyms are enemies of the speaker and they make us stutter. (Pause) Has anyone arrived? (Turns his head to the right) Is anyone there? No visits? I want something more. Distractions and made-up words encourage the disuse of a language. People haven’t stopped talking to each other. (Manages to stand up. Annotation of movement, paired silence. Change of light to a lighter one) (Voice of a radio announcer) A magnificent sun is shining in this country. Dawn marvelously, letting go absurd winters. No man’s land, were you born somewhere? If you are children of the Earth, defend the Sun that still shines because there isn’t a body which doesn’t shine in the light. At your side, you will tell him. (Pause) We already know that we do not all share the same opinions. It is purely a geographical problem. You are there and I am here. No, no, no…it can’t be…what can’t be? The more you fight, the more is going to pull you in.  Please help, I am drowning. (Noise of water entering the character’s mouth) Help? I don’t want to have sex with strangers. The Dead! (opening their eyes a lot). The dead, and every day feels like an open (wide eyes open) and close (closes eyes) of eyes. Another day that, suddenly, without realizing, a heart beats differently. The day dawns, and although this noise gets magnified, it helps me speak. Speaking four different languages involves the speaker to stop speaking their mother tongue well. This should be the difference between different and distinct. Exactly. Don’t you think everyone feels the same? Consciousness, conscience, conscience, conscience…While still losing their ideas of metamorphosis. Have you found a movement? Changing, variant and mutable bodies to be truthful to all that change. Accept to stop thinking what has been thought a while ago. Be a faithful unattached host. But for that we should have a sense of control.

Intersticio is proud to present Johanna Odersky’s first solo show in the UK.

Johanna Odersky (Swiss, b. 1993) is a visual artist and musician based in Frankfurt am Main. She is a graduate from the Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule and studied in the class of Judith Hopf. Much of her work revolves around exploring how human experience is organized and embodied and how relationships between body, mind and the external world are always and necessarily situated in discursive power relations. These questions are echoed in her musical work and performances, which she produces under the name of “Iku” Her work has been shown in festivals, galleries and other art spaces across Europe in Japan, Mexico and the US.

For those far away or unable to attend you can now do an online tour through this link: https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=oB3jwqv96r9

Press Release (PDF)

Artist's CV (PDF)

Intersticio is pleased to present Nora Aurrekoetxea’s first solo exhibition in London.

We access a space where we recognise each other’s absence. The action has taken place; fading bodies, breaths, extinguished flames or, maybe, the preparation of a communion to come. We enter into a fugitive state, a fugitive path, a space for complicit love.¹

Navigating remnants of the domestic, some hard as horse-hair, some soft as feathers², we are witnesses of a conspiracy that still seems to be present.

But who was there?

The central figures were others, the borders are now the centre and, between the absent bodies, we intuit an accomplice who demands not to be one,

to be more than one,
to be other than one.³ 

Vestiges of an epistemology other, that comes from a place that has been denied – a place that is offered so that it may be conquered, to conspire towards its conquest, drawing together a conspiracy without a plot.⁴

The artist offers a complicit scenario, a witness to a run away, to a knowledge in motion, to care and to resistance – a shared space that seeks to bear witness to a radical sociability. To put ourselves in risk, to allow access, to be possessed by a dispossession. A space of escape, in plain sight, without direction or plot.⁵

Between empty mattresses we encounter the remains of moulded bodies no longer present, shaping an obscure narrative through their trajectory of affects.

The artist guides us through latent presences of witches and sorceresses, magicians, the border figure, whose body is neither male nor female, neither animal nor human, neither young nor old, neither alive nor dead.⁶ She offers the scenario of a rite, a detonating, a navigable space for an encounter.

The forms are contained and dissipating. Inks, shapes and traces are made to relate their condition; they are hosts of a story accessible on their inner parts: smooth, soft, permeable, sharp – about to overflow, escaping the iron structures, an entering into a tense dichotomy between support and limitation. Rotted chains on the wall. Condensed forces – from liquid to solid, from gas to liquid – inherited and perverted, palpable on those unlighted candles that anticipate the recommencement of the ceremonial.

Aurrekoetxea invokes a multiplicity inside us, invites us to pause, to choose a space, to get rid of the fear of putting ourselves in danger in this collective conspiracy. Hear the inaudible, feel what has not been felt, never consent to be a single being.⁷

Cristina Herraiz Peleteiro

1 Stefano Harney and Valentina Desideri, “A Conspiracy without a Plot” in The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating, ed. Jean-Paul Martinon (London: Bloomsbury, 2013)

2 Woolf, Virginia. A Room Of One’s Own. (London: Hogarth Press, 1929). p.73

3 Fred Moten, Black and Blur (consent not to be a single being) (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017)

4 Stefano Harney and Valentina Desideri, “A Conspiracy without a Plot” in The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating, ed. Jean-Paul Martinon (London: Bloomsbury, 2013)

5 Idem

6 Timofeeva, Oxana. (2019). What Lenin Teaches Us About Witchcraft. E – flux. (Journal #100) Seen on: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/100/268602/what-lenin-teaches-us-about-witchcraft/

7 Fred Moten, Black and Blur (consent not to be a single being) (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017)

Nora Aurrekoetxea (b. 1989, Bilbao) received her BFA from the University of the Basque Country (Bilbao, Spain) in 2003 and completed her MFA in the Royal College (London, UK) in 2017. She received the Botín Foundation Scholarship (2017) and has been an artist in residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts of Paris (2018) and the Solomon R. Guggenheim of New York (2018). She has been awarded with the ARCO prize of the city of Madrid (2020) and ERTIBIL (2020), and her work is part of the permanent collection of the museum Ca2m (Madrid, Spain). She is opening her first solo show in Madrid in September 2020 at Juan Silio gallery.

For those far away or unable to attend you can now do an online tour through this link: https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=oB3jwqv96r9

Press Release (PDF)