THE GARDEN

2021


 

To feel oneself, to feel the otherness;
Partly in, Partly out.
A garden in constant metastasis allowing evanescent openings to be felt and be experienced
as flowers bloom yet also fade away.

Gardens have always been regarded as ideal places that remind us of the balanced relationship between humans and nature. The classical interpretation of the garden has been that of a lush and abundant place where passion, desire, pleasure and a manifold of other sensations harmoniously coexist. Apart from its glorified and romanticized connotations, gardens have simultaneously been materializations of purely anthropocentric actions, unveiling a reality of greediness, emotional impoverishment, and ecological injustice towards the Earth, the humans and non-human others. What was before regarded as a utopian ecosystem has now been turned into a terrain of bodies in pain and souls in grief, where even some elements of welfare here and there fail to disguise the strong presence of contemporary micro-dystopias.

Chaos and order, fantasy and reality, utopia and dystopia, gratification and pain, lust and aversion glide from one to the other in an endless interplay of manifestations, inclusions and exclusions. The Garden depicts a primal sonic universe in which the desires of being, the tensions in the becoming and serenity take turns in no chronological order and in which each sound allegorically originates from a library of voiced sounds, such as audible breathing and other nonlinguistic utterances connected to intimate communication.

composition by Farah Hazim
Image by Frederik Grytzmann

Curated by Katerina Gnafaki

Spaces of Faux Intimacies: Act One is the first part of a series of interventions unfolding over a year, exploring intimacy in the wake of the Internet, social media, capitalism and the pandemic.

The exhibition is part of the Vorspiel program of the CTM and transmediale festival 2021 and made possible with the generous support of Musikfonds, by means of the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media

https://fauxintimacies.online/