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"Memory Shop" at Casa Wabi Curated by Nicolás Bourriaud.
Curated by Nicolas Bourriaud
April 24th 2021 - January 9th 2022
Some places have their own magic, and provide a specific mental ecosystem. When Casa Wabi invited me to curate an exhibition from the collection of « logs » given by the artists at the term of their residency here, I first tried to understand the logics of their activities. What did obsess them ? How did they achieve to materialize their stay here into an object or an image ? How did they translate into forms their encounter with Oaxaca, with the roaring Pacific ocean, with the communities around the foundation ? I isolated a series of patterns within this collection of works : first, a strong interest for the local vegetation ; the gesture of picking up things, collecting, classifying small items ; building totemic forms, somehow celebrating the basic elements of life ; and, last but not least, the will to inscribe the passing of time onto invented calendars. Those four obsessive patterns turned into the four sections of the exhibition. They sometimes melt or overlap. But they all constitute a kind of ephemeral temple to the petrified memories of a residency. I turned it into a paradox : memories, or experience, cannot be bought, not even fully represented — but this exhibition is structured as a shop. Those four themes also correspond to the stakes of our era, the anthropocene. They are associated to the moving situation provided by climate change. Recycling, harvesting, reconnecting with a totemic way of thinking, reinventing time, are amongst the most fundamental problematics in today’s art, and Casa Wabi is a place where those issues become a way of living and producing. But shall we not say, rather than « producing », that those artists are intervening, or immerging themselves into a reality they know they belong to ?
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CURRENT
TALK: EMANUELE COCCIA AND ROMANA LONDI DETRUIRE, DIT-ELLE PLANET B, Climate Change And The New Sublime, Curated by Nicolas Bourriaud "Memory Shop" at Casa Wabi Curated by Nicolás Bourriaud. 'I AM THE BEAT' DESIRE NIGHTS AT IMMA MUSEUM 'GAIA HAS A THOUSAND NAMES' at ELGIZ MUSEUM curated by Tara Londi CASA WABI RESIDENCY Mademoiselle, Le Centre Régional d'Art Contemporain, Sète [July 2018 - January 2019] Rhapsodies @ PingPing, Brussels [September 2018] Played, Galerie Ebensperger [July 2018 - August 2018] Skinscapes @ Unit 1 Gallery [September 2017] Interview in ARTEVIST [September 2017] Art Night @ Whitechapel Gallery [July 2017] THE TIMES THEY ARE A’ CHANGIN’ (I WAS HERE, ME IN PLACE AND THE PLACE IN ME) (June 2017) The House of Penelope [January 2017] The Blue Hour, October 2016 Hestitika Magazine – Interview with Romana Londi [July 2016]
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