Catalogue essay for Who Cares? Ferrara Residency 2017
Published by ︎︎︎resina (2017)

Ferrara Residency began with a trail of invitations. One by one, the project slowly expanded over the course of two years from a dialogue to a conversation; from a concern to a point of departure. The conception of organising an artist residency in the Italian city Ferrara was born out of anxiety and frustration over the material conditions of living in the fast-paced, megalopolis that is London. And secondly, the need to assemble and reconnect friends and colleagues despite geographical separation. Ferrara emerged as the third place, somewhere in between; a temporary site where we could host an artist residency where we would have the time and focus to discuss the role of artists and curators within post-Fordist societies, which demand ever-greater emotional stakes in the game of chance which is art and society. Maybe there is a connection between the Swedish term for gambling hasardspel, which derives its etymology from the French word hasard, meaning chance or coincidence. In English hasard reminds us rather of hazard – signifying risk, even danger. Maybe it is no coincidence then, that Ferrara is situated close to the European birthplace of the first-known casino, namely Il Ridotto in Venice.¹

It is often said that the contemporary artist is the post-Fordist worker par excellence: always flexible, available, and ready to put herself at risk for fear of losing out in the game. The question of resistance and care arose within this context; how Ferrara Residency could become a place for reflecting on self-care as a mode of resistance to an increasing sense of precarity. How could we become a site for collective thoughts and actions? Of opting in or dropping out? Or – is there even a possibility for action?

The notion of six degrees of separation was first introduced by the Jewish-Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy, who in 1929 published the text Everything is Different, a collection of short stories which would come to popularise the notion of six degrees of separation.² The idea was straight-forward; due to the increasing speed of technologies of communications and travel, the modern world would “shrink”.³ Highly influential for later developments in network theories, Karinthy predicted that the contraction of the world would increase the interconnectedness of living beings; social distance would decrease despite geographical displacement. Paradoxical then, is that the same utopian drive behind his social network theory is also what propels globalization and the very possibilities of the post-Fordist labour conditions which underpin globalized networked capitalism.



Never black or white, Ferrara Residency also teeters on this paradoxical edge: the logic behind the participant invitations to the project were also based on six degrees of separation. One of the project founders invited one artist who in turn invited another artist… Before the residency we also founded the Ferrara Residency Library – this functioned in the very same way, every participant brought or suggested a text, art work or project which later came to be part of the library. We reasoned that a chain of invitations to the residency was an act of care, of not feeding into the art system’s exploitative matrix of open calls, application processes and never-ending rejections.

With this text, I would like to give a background and contextualisation of the first iteration of Ferrara Residency. This short essay aims to reflect on the themes around care and labour under networked capitalism, and how some of the participating artists responded to these questions in relation to the cityscape of Ferrara. Inviting the artists, we didn’t specify what we would like them to do during the residency; there was no prerequisite to produce any new work, or even to contribute in any material way, except a willingness to socially engage in conversations and meetings. However, within the framework of the politics of care and abstract work, the social and emotional engagement of the artists functions is a form of labour, indeed. As already mentioned in the introduction, Ferrara Residency is an infrastructure which within its very own system, functions according to those very forces we also aim to criticise. Transversally, the notion of care which was this year’s theme, represents support, yet also internalises a certain set of contradictory power relations. Important to express here, is the fact that Ferrara Residency edition 1, is actually edizione 0: meaning zero budget. The project was made possible by the free labour of the organisers and artists, the organisers’ friends and families in Ferrara. Without their time, energy and labour put towards the project, it would not have been possible.

When entering the public park Parco Massari in Ferrara, one is greeted on either side of its entrance on Corso Porta Mare by two enormous Cedrus Libani – commonly known as cedars of Lebanon. The park was conceived of in 1780 by the Ferrara-born architect Luigi Bertelli for the Marquise Camillo Bevilacqua. Many of the trees in the park are more than a century old, except for the two cedars of Lebanon at the entrance. However, what struck me about them, as I crossed the park on my way to exhibition venue Gate/Porta, were the enormous scaffolding structures which were holding up the sprawling branches of these cedars. Emerging as disjointed spiders, the branches hover in a state of stasis; a moment of suspension. In one of the books brought to Ferrara Residency, the artist Celine Condorelli writes about support structures in relation to the scaffolding devised to support the crumbling architecture of Milo in the face of Etna’s volcanic activities. The verb puntellare, she explains – signifies the act of propping up or supporting something.⁴ Exploring the notion of care, I saw in these support structures something akin to what I consider to be the politics of care. Drawing on these thoughts, Condorelli maintains that these support structures uphold a status quo. In her text, she writes that  “[t]he scaffolding props up and works to avoid or at least to delay the process of failure and collapse.”⁵ In comparison to the politics of care, we find that caring for something or someone, it maintains a situation, upholding and nurturing; but if one revokes the practice of care, the support structures tumble to the ground like a game of spillikins. The support structures, Condorelli adds, “[s]tretches the moment of crisis to our present, as a tangible, unwelcome companion to the city.”⁶ Echoing the work of the residency participant George Jepson and his work Either Native or Naturalized, I find a striking resemblance between his reading of Ferrara’s Renaissance fortifications and Condorelli’s thesis. The infrastructure of the fortress maintains and reproduces the support structures necessary for the conditions of life within the city itself. However, Jepson also makes the vital point that the implicit logic of maintaining a constant state of crisis; the citadel, the work suggests, “induces a state of constant siege” while also it “anticipates wars to come”.⁷ Support, then, is the day-to-day life of existing in close proximity to the anticipation of a collapse to come. The practice of care, I argue, functions in accordance; as long as one cares for something – the status quo remains by the virtue and labour of the caregiver.

A second, and final aspect, which forms the paradoxical infrastructure of care, is the notion that care and support is oftentimes gendered.⁸ Care, and in particular the practice of care work, was brought up through the work of many philosophers, such as Silvia Federici and Nina Power, throughout the residency. Several of the artists at Ferrara Residency brought up the question of care as the extraction of affect and energy through commodity-producing patriarchy and neoliberal labour conditions. I will bring up two examples here of artists at Ferrara Residency who investigated this, although I am keen to mention that there were many more examples than this text allows for. The artist and curator Marianna Feher spent a month in Ferrara investigating the gendered politics of the Renaissance building Palazzo Schifanoia in the Byzantine castrum. Erected in the 14th Century, Marianna Feher researched the role of women in Palazzo Schifanoia and its history through her performance Schivar-La-Noia And Its Double. Her work focused on how capitalism is predicated on the forced separation of spheres, public/private, productive/non-productive, and extraction of affective labor from women, which was developed in her work as a performance in which she provided a set list of one-on-one services to those who visited her work. Here, the separation of physical structures and women’s affective labor is importantly one of the fundamental support structures of capitalist economy, but also, Feher points out, the staving off of boredom; a form of stasis.

Lastly, the artist duo Sandi Francis-Hudson and Athene Greig collaboratively filmed the work Every Day, Now. In the film, we as the viewers, see Antonella Notarnicola making pizza at the family-run restaurant Mordi&Fuggi in Ferrara. The painstaking handcraft is evident in observing her hands in preparing the components of pizza: dough, tomato sauce, toppings. Using a dramaturgical technique which reminds me of Nicolas Winding Refn’s film Bleeder from 1999, the work is accompanied by the recorded frailty of the Gregorian chants of nuns in the Monastery of Sant’Antonio in Polesine. The juxtaposition of the sacral soundtrack with habitualised gestures of labour, imbues the handiwork with renewed significance. Refusing the simplistic valorization of female work as prosaic, Francis-Hudson and Greig point out the amount of care and skill which goes into the makings of pizza. The conditions of affective labour are pronounced in Every Day, Now, where the saturated tomato-reds and fluorescent eggshell walls draw my mind yet again to the colourscape of Bleeder, providing the much needed foil for reflecting on the implications of anxiety and vulnerability with the politics of care.

In conclusion, the participating artists in the first edition of Ferrara Residency found a myriad ways of investigating and engaging with the politics of care and infrastructures of support. The framework of Ferrara as a city proved to be a bountiful site for thinking about the separation between public and private spheres, and how the distribution of power relations can be negotiated within this. Through the lense of this year’s theme Who Cares?, we found ways to imagine, discuss and depict how the practice of care choreographs bodies, infrastructure and politics through its Janus-like nature. The support of Ferrara as a material base and affective set of relations will come to be further explored in the coming edition of the residency. Despite the difficulties and anxieties we face in the current political climate, where the president of the United States may be as close to us as a gondolier in Venice, we will continue the work of Ferrara Residency. I say: let’s put our cards on the table, and let the chips fall as they may.

REFERENCES¹  Bjørn Thomassen, Liminality and the Modern: Living Through the In-Between (New York;US: Routledge, 2016), 159-160.

²  Frigyes Karinthy, “Chain-Links” in Everything is Different (1929). Accessed February 9, 2018: https://djjr-courses.wdfiles.com/local–files/soc180%3Akarinthy-chain-links/Karinthy-Chain-Links_1929.pdf

³  Karinthy, “Chain-Links”, 1.

⁴ Celine Condorelli, “Exergue,” in Facing Value: Radical Perspectives from the Arts, eds., Maaike Lauwaert and Francien van Westrenen (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2017), 397.

⁵ Condorelli. “Exergue,”  398.

⁶ Ibid., 397.

⁷ George Jepson, Either Native or Naturalized, (2017).

⁸ Not only is care work gendered, it is also racialized. This aspect is not covered here, but needs to be maintained.

Exhibition essay for Munish Wadhia’s Smoke in the Eye: Rupture in the Colonial Archive at the Matchstick Museum in Jönköping, Sweden
Written with Amanda Ferrada
Published by ︎︎︎Brand, issue 1 (2021)

Den svenska tändsticksindustrin var under 1800-talet ett globalt, kapitalistiskt imperium som inte bara exporterade en produkt utan även ett specifikt synsätt. På Tändsticksmuseet i Jönköping har konstnären Munish Wadhia arbetat med att granska och kommentera museets arkiv under 2020. Det ledde fram till en utställning där de koloniala idéer som de arkiverade tändsticksetiketterna representerar hamnar i fokus.

Arkivet är en plats där fragment av berättelser och röster läggs i ordning. Med ”i ordning” menar vi att de placeras på ett sätt som gör att människor kan se, röra, läsa och förstå de narrativ som finns där. Filosofen Achille Mbembe skriver i texten “The Power of the Archive and its Limits” (2015) att arkivets funktion är att genom denna ordning beskriva vad som tas för sant och vad som beskrivs som falskt.

Konstnären Munish Wadhia bjöds in av Tändsticksmuseet i Jönköping för ett konstnärsresidens under våren 2020 som nu mynnar ut i utställningen Smoke in the eye: Rupture in the colonial archive. Made in Sweden. I utställningen bildar arkivets tändsticksetiketter och de industriella maskiner som användes för att massproducera och paketera tändstickor en tablå över Sveriges koloniala och kapitalistiska historia. Likt en tändstickas låga kastar Wadhia ljus över arkivets undanskymda sidor, där frågor kring ansvar och våld slutligen kan träda fram.

Munish Wadhias utställning börjar med en undersökning av Tändsticksmuseets arkiv och bilder. Han visar till exempel hur tändsticksetiketternas motiv och bilder har tagits för givet. Wadhias intervention består huvudsakligen av en skulptural installation på Tändsticksmuseets övervåning samt en ljudinstallation i den historiska samlingen.



Solstickan skapades som en hjälpinsats för att med varje såld ask stödja utsatta barn och gamla i samhället. Samtidigt existerade en parallell verklighet där tändsticksindustrin använde sig av billig barnarbetskraft från olika delar av världen för att finansiera produktionen. Med exemplet Solstickan förändras bilden av framgångssagan om ”Tändstickskungen” Ivar Kreuger och visar istället industrins exploatering av arbetskraft. Genom att inte ifrågasätta de historiska och politiska sammanhang tändsticksaskarna kom till i, undanhålls andra berättelser. Dessa berättelser hamnar i skuggan av fascination för maskiner, den mytomspunna ”Tändstickskungen” och etiketter med exotiska djur och människor från andra världar. Utställningen ställer frågan: Vad händer om vi istället för att hålla isär, länkar samman de skönmålade bilderna med sin rättmätiga historia?

I utställningssalen ser vi stora hängande pappersblad med röda pigmentsymboler som leker med betraktarens igenkänning och förståelse av symbolernas olika betydelser. Ur ett perspektiv bildar det röda pigmentet ett lejon och palmträd, som å ena sidan kan få vara just det, men som också kan representera hinduismens gudar eller symbolen för Great Britannia. Det röda ämnet skulle även kunna vara typisk Falu rödfärg, som präglar den idylliska bilden av Sverige, eller sindoor, ett färgglatt pulver som används inom hinduismens ritualer. Till de olika röda nyanserna introduceras även venetiansk röd som traditionellt används inom renässansens måleri. Wadhia upprättar en dialog mellan museets egna bilder och dess historia. De stereotypa omslagsmotiven av växter, djur och människor från utomeuropeiska länder tas ut ur arkivets stilla kontext och får smälta samman utan förklaring. I Wadhias konst konfronteras betraktaren med olika sanningar och kan förlora sig själv i verkets tolkningsmöjligheter. Tändsticksetiketterna belyser den “svenska neutralitetens” paradox, där produktionen och spridningen av koloniala föreställningar lägger sig som en skugga bakom den historia som hittills fått ligga orörd inom museets väggar.

I ett annat rum möts besökaren av den amerikanske författaren och aktivisten James Baldwins röst från en debatt på Cambridge University Union år 1965. I verket bjuder Munish Wadhia in Baldwin som samtalspartner när han reflekterar över hur importen av den Europeiska vithetsnormen format det amerikanska samhället. Baldwins ord belyser de koloniala idéer och rasistiska nidbilder där människor, djur och kulturer blir rekvisita för den vita överhöghetens fantasier om “den andre”. Dessa bilder bevarar ojämlika maktförhållanden genom att reducera rasifierade kroppar och kulturer till ovärdiga karikatyrer av sig själva. I utställningen sätts den etablerade historieskrivningen om den svenska tändsticksindustrin ur spel. Den synliggör våld mot rasifierade kroppar, våld mot kvinnor samt utnyttjande av barn och billig arbetskraft. Den framgångsrika svenska tändsticksindustrin byggdes inte med hjälp av, utan på bekostnad av människor.

När röken så sakteliga skingras över det koloniala arkivet, riktar vi blicken mot de stundtals smärtsamma frågeställningar som väntar. Hur vi tar oss an historien är aldrig neutralt eller naturligt, formandet av ett museum bygger på specifika historiska och politiska konstruktioner. Vilket ansvar ligger hos en kulturinstitution att gentemot besökare förmedla och bevara vissa delar av historien och utesluta andra? Vilken ideologi upprätthålls genom museets samlingar? Vilka kroppar representeras i arkiven och utställningssalen? Vilka exkluderas? Hur välkomnar museet kroppar och identiteter som är icke-normativa? I dialog med Munish Wadhias undersökning och utställning ser vi att historien inte är ett statiskt väsen, utan utvecklas i takt med vår samtid och brännande politiska frågor. Det finns ett behov av att bjuda in nya röster och kritiska perspektiv till våra verksamheter och arkiv för att levandegöra berättelser och synvinklar som inte tidigare hörts eller synts. Konstens roll i detta sammanhang kan bli en katalysator, en gnista för att undersöka museers samtida relevans och framtida institutioners möjlighet.

Exhibition text for Viltė Bražiūnaitė & Tomas Sinkevičius ,and Vika Prokopaviciute at Galerija Vartai in Vilnius
Published by ︎︎︎Galerija Vartai

An Odd Attractor enters the gallery space. It’s empty, but it doesn’t seem to realise that the exhibition doesn’t open until tomorrow. Its many long swivelling tendrils touch the gallery walls tentatively, little suction cups and swirling fractals touch the room as it crosses the threshold. The Odd Attractor seems to be a little annoyed and disoriented, but as it walks up to the sunflower photographs Honies, a flicker of a smile appears in its many eyes. You meet the gaze of the Odd Attractor, and at first you see two little button-shaped dark eyes looking at you. In a matter of seconds, the eyes are multiplied like a kaleidoscope and a pattern of irises like a tarantula appears in a place which seems to be a face.

You know yesterday, I actually took a trip to the sunflower field. I didn’t see you there, and they told me you quit to start vlogging. I heard that it’s a precarious business - but then what isn’t? I’ve been bending over backwards - quite literally. I have been a bit out of sorts lately. Time has felt like it’s melting over backwards into my everyday life, and I am not quite sure which day it is any longer. The days seem to be the same, with tiny, tiny variations. They haunt me like beads on a never-ending string of pearls that are more or less the same, but nevertheless quite different. Do you know what I mean, Sunflower? It’s like Edge of Tomorrow, but I’m never getting better at this game.

The lifeform slouches closer to a monitor and finally melts on the pile of boxes in front of the video Sunflower. Twitchy tendrils extend around the Odd Attractor, like a thousand vibrating flagella. Suddenly, a third head appears out of the figure and what seems to be an ear emerges to listen to the voice speaking from the video.

Oh, excuse you, I didn’t see you sitting there! However, as I was saying. I had a date with myself yesterday in the sunflower field. It seems like really hard work photosynthesising like that all the time. The field, I heard from some gossiping bees, has also turned more acidic recently due to a new fertiliser. Fertiliser, rather more like enterpriser, monopoliser! The field conditions are not very good, they say. Sunflower, it really sucks to see that the UV rays have been so unkind to you. I guess in this day and age it’s not so strange. But hey, do you know what I saw on #dermaTok recently? Apparently, retinoids are really good for you. It might even reverse solar exposure damage on your epidermis. This planet’s epidermis has been out of joint for a while too, it makes me anxious just thinking about it. My epidermis has been off too… A new layer appears all the time, before I’ve even shed the last. But hey, things have been a bit weird for me, not like you were asking though.



The Odd Attractor sighs sadly and whispers across the room to a series of paintings on the wall. They are of various sizes, large and small, with geometric and organic patterns. The Odd Attractor moves closer, peering with its many curious eyes at the mesmerising figures. It seems to be temporarily shaken out of its ennui. A faint boredom had been haunting its tendrils, but at the sight of the sinuous multiplications on the canvases, it audibly giggles.

When I was lounging on my shower curtain next to the sunflower field, I saw the moon. Yes, I know, I should’ve brought a romantic blanket and woven basket, but I just grabbed the first thing at hand. As I looked at the daytime sky and the pale moon, the sky started to softly whirl and twirl into soft geometric shapes. I almost, kind of, felt a bit moved, I suppose? The only fixed thing was the moon, it felt like a benign pin holding the cloud formations in place. Like slow fractals unfolding across the sky. It kind of reminds me of these paintings, don’t you think? I particularly gravitate towards this one, Hyperboloid Gaze. After catching up with the field sunflowers and the bees, I found this tiny blade of grass. I peered at it - and it peered back at me! Little beads of sweat were gently rolling across its stem; it was as if I could softly look into its structure. As if it was gently inviting me inside, cell upon cell upon cell... I sat there for many hours just looking at it.

Gently edging closer, the Odd Attractor moves up against three small-format paintings. FN Brush Twist, FN Shadow Twist and FN Double Warp. Its eyes bulge slightly out of its other head, looking intently and breathing against the canvases. Its tendrils warp and move, mimicking the twists, turns and sinews of these three paintings. A low humming noise emanates from the Odd Attractor.

This planet is running out of chronos, I feel. However, I must not succumb to paranoia. On the other hand, perhaps this sense of paranoia that has been haunting me for these last few days amongst these terraforms may be reparative? An act of resistance, a modality of survival? Sunflower, time is running out, and just like a neural network gone rogue - I see that the too-big scenes of Capital and Anthropos have taken hold here. Maybe, but just maybe, we urgently need new stories of terra survival - of stories that multiply and twist and turn in a myriad of chaotic braids and cylinders, just like these paintings. A reverse shock treatment to jolt this story out of its current hegemony, don’t you think?

The Odd Attractor begins to softly change colour into a ripple of hues: aureolin, celadon and magenta. Time is starting to run out for the creature, the multi-scalar, interstellar calls for its return. The moment has come for it to depart. Soft droplets begin to emerge out of its crepuscule epidermis. Small at first, growing bigger with each breath. The creature seems to be weeping, large tears in shapeshifting hues. You understand that the Odd Attractor is performing cosmosis to leave this space. With every bulb of liquid, the creature disappears more and more from view. A wistful last wisp of a tentacular feeler, and the Odd Attractor exits the scene.

REFERENCES
Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, in Benjamin, Walter Illuminations (1968). New York: Schocken Books.

Butler, Octavia E. Dawn. New York: Warner Books, 1997.

Haraway, Donna. “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene - Journal #75 September 2016 - e-Flux.” e, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/75/67125/tentacular-thinking-anthropocene-capitalocene-chthulucene/. Accessed 15 November 2021.

Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is about You” in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (ed.) Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (1997). Durham: Duke University Press. s. 1–37.

Text for Tentative Transmits
Written with Marianna Feher
Published by ︎︎︎Tentative Transmits

Tentative Transmits: The Radio as G/Host

2020-2025

“A QUALITY OF IMPROVISATION, OF A CONJECTURE THAT DOES NOT DISTORT THE FACTS BUT EXPLORES THEIR ECHOES, RESIDUES, IMPLICATIONS, SHADOWS.”

_{Tentative Transmits, 2020-2025}

_{Tentative Transmits, 2020-2025}