ODD and ALERT studio are proud to present Pinching the Earth, This Measuring Touch, an exhibition and a book featuring new works by artist Theodore Ereira-Guyer and writer Giulia Damiani. The title talks of the reflection on the notion of weight carried out in the one month residency in Bucharest titled What Weight.
This subject has been chosen because of its inconsistency. Because of its open nature, always debatable, always in transit. Because weight is discussed through comparison, compressed by words and numbers which translate this property into something other than itself. Weight can be the language of our innermost feelings. It is the consequences of dictatorships surfacing on the body. It is the tournament of associations where nothing prevails and the centre doesn’t hold; borrowing from George Yeats’ whirl-pooling poem The Second Coming ‘the centre cannot hold/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world (…)’.
When thought upon, this concept is digested through sensations becoming perceptions and thinking within infinite scenarios. When I say ‘stone’ I say something bigger than a pebble which would be possibly strenuous to pick up; I say a unit of measure equal to 6.35 kg; I say Mick Jagger’s heart of stone which his little girl will ‘never break, never break, never break’; I say the Medusa’s gaze, turning her nosy watchers into stone.
Any repositories for definitions of weight are displaced. This word can only be told as the subtle joint that seals corporality and cerebral activity. It is the connective cartilage. When considering it one can’t help envisioning it through images. If there is a conceptual understanding of this subject it is necessarily derived from a sensual experience.
This stage that we have been creating ‘here and now’ makes use of language and the arts to seduce intellect and actions into new critical horizons. We have re-developed our practices to accustom them to this theme-voyage. The work of this residency made us lose ourselves in order to become a manifestation of the corporeal reasoning cocooned in weight. Between objects lifted up and mental tensions; between things dropping down and light-headed writing.
It is in this suspended meeting of possibilities that we stumbled across this weighty matter. Contingency considered as a philosophical concept has decided the direction of the project. As for other contingent subjects, weight is the chance of something that is so, without having to be so. There is no fixed or permanent vision entailed by weight, but thousands of lines of escape which depart from it. There is no hierarchy, no focal point, only multifarious meanings that are voiced at the corners of our existences; weight is the fine dust over our perceptions.
Pinching the Earth, This Measuring Touch is a collection of words and artworks which will be added to with new explorations in the coming years.
Photos by Theodore Ereira-Guyer.
Biographies
Giulia Damiani
Giulia Damiani is an award-winning writer and editor based in London whose practice investigates the peripheries of culture and the arts. She is regularly published in art and cultural magazines such as E.R.O.S Journal and Art Selector. In the last two years she contributed as writer and editor to 3 published books: As is the Sea (2014), Ends Meet: Essays on Exchange (2014) and Ark: Words and Images from the Royal College of Art Magazine (2014). She has lectured on her research in institutions such as Goldsmiths University of London, Royal College of Art and The White Building (London). Her recent work includes devising and writing for the exhibition First Movement (London, 2015), for which she considered the potential of the notion of ‘the reverse’ in language. Currently developing descriptions of future antiquity, she is writing narratives for a book that amplifies women’s art and history.
Theodore Ereira Guyer
Theodore Ereira Guyer is a London based Artist working within the media of print, photography, video and sculpture. He is a Graduate of the Royal College of Art, Norwich University of the Arts and Central Saint Martins, currently he is a tutor at the Art Academy in London. He has exhibited throughout the UK as well internationally, most recently in Hong-Kong, China. In 2013 he held a residency at the Poustinia Sculpture Park in Belize, Central America. In 2014 he won the Helen Chadwick Award as a multi-disciplinary artist; his works appear in several public and private collections notably the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum.