‡

            

Until This I Mean This

Obelus, Berlin

May 11 - June 23 2024

exhibition press release & works list
Mea, Precious Angel: Provocations Toward a Moudlarity of the Abyss - companion text to Until This I Mean This Contemporary Art Library

Photos by Marjorie Brunet Plaza

---

Until This I Mean This is essentially a collection of ornaments. Functioning as edges, doodles, sketches, traces of a journey of flight—or perhaps, of landing—five drawings decorate the main exhibition space, fashioned as a lovers bedroom (un’alcòva in Italian). The intimacy of pillow feathers has expanded to take over the entire floor. Above the bedpost, light comes in through a window stained with film stills extracted from footage of a mouth pronouncing the word ‘Loss’. Mysterious clusters of words ornate and block the electrical outlets on the walls.

Mea, Precious Angel: Provocations toward a Modularity of the Abyss, the companion text to the show, is the journey Until This I Mean This refers to. An experiment in falling disguised as an attempt to fly, Mea draws on the notion of the erotic articulated by Audre Lorde in her seminal 1978 speech Uses of the Erotic to eventually develop into a psychotic presentation-speech introducing ‘the limic’: a further, undefining feeling of deep erotism. Limic logic, we learn, is a kind of devotion to the lush, rampant space—the limit—flourishing between two whose individuation and identification are suspended. In the narrative, identification and identity are understood in connection to their shared Latin root, idem, meaning 'sameness', standing in contrast to the unbridled diversity of experience. The text weaves together a tapestry of references from academic sources to poetry and literature, eventually linking the logic of the limit to ‘the alcove’, tracing back objectification to the intimate, (I)ndividual realm of daily life. Mea's conclusion is unforgiving: that dimension whereby the unknown is casted into nothingness—the abyss, is modular, meaning, essentially a-semantic: it originates within a subjectual intimacy antecedent to and more profound than discoursive categories such as gender, race, sexuality, religion, or economic class. The text playfully experiments with a contemporary reimagination of the “pasquinata tragica” form, a public and provocative mode of institutional critique original of early medieval Rome.