one-channel video, 12’15’’, 2021
on view continuously, Grosse Halle & online
English with subtitle in English,
German Transcript available
«The margins in a snail body are mediated by slime. Slime is a vibrant matter (J. Bennett) with tangled molecules, both a liquid and a solid depending on its relational description, that creates a sticky infrastructure.»
Remote:
From sensible pools and snail connections
The fascinating water body of the snail Achatinella Apexfulva, or for the matter of any snail or mollusk, inspired a long conversation in which the artists Jeanne Jacob, Riikka Tauriainen and Paloma Ayala, came together to explore the manifold of nods or points of connection that the body of a snail spawns when thinking about and beyond the limits of a body. This process-based performative video explores slime as binding matter and snails as nods of connective tissue.
The three artists shared several texts, stories and personal accounts in order to create this work. The authors or sources are: Gloria Anzaldúa, Donna Haraway, Maria Puig della Bellacasa, Mary Douglas, Susan Leigh Star, Virginie Despentes, Jean Bennett, Thom van Dooren, Kate Rigby, Ursula K. Le Guin, Paul B. Preciado, Ellen Bass, Elizabeth Bishop and Karen Barad.
Thanks to sic! Elephanthouse Luzern for being a shell to our imagined snail body. The host-habitat of the video work happened during the second pandemiic wave, during the exhibition «Intimacy of Strangers» by Riikka Tauriainen, and her concepts developed within the practice of tentacular thinking (D. Haraway). ‘From snail connection and sensible pools’ was conceived as a performance piece where voice and slime would mediate our interactions with the installation constructed by Tauriainen, but Covid-19 regulations forced a rearticulation how to work in collaboration. The video format pushed the conversation to a more intimate setting, much following the proposal of Margulis’ words in Riikka’s exhibition title.
Credits:
Sound, Video and performance: Paloma Ayala, Jeanne Jacob, Riikka Tauriainen
Sound edition:Riikka Tauriainen
Film edition: Jeanne Jacob
Jeanne Jacob (she/her)
1994, lives and works in Biel. Her artistic output comprises mainly painting, performing and drawing. Jeanne Jacobs perspective is inspired by queer-feminist Theories and contemporary sociology. Her work is influenced by her political engagement in social struggle as well as in her everyday life in community.
Paloma Ayala (she/her)
(b.1980, Matamoros, Mexico) is a visual artist interested in empowering the relationship between domestic living strategies and political contexts. She is a diaspora mother and a mestiza daughter whose work fictionalizes historical, ecological or social problematics as means of analysis and critique. Paloma´s projects nourish visions of connection and dreams of emancipation. Her favorite spaces to work range from kitchen to river shore, from international crossing bridge to agricultural land, from community meeting to aquelarre. Paloma’s work is rooted in her home, the eastern MX/US border landscapes, simultaneously blooming in her current base in Zurich.
Riikka Tauriainen (she/her)
is a visual artist born 1979 in Finland. She lives and works in Zurich. In her installations, videos and performances she tackles historical narratives, gender issues, knowledge production and language. She navigates on the boundaries between art and science, between fact and fiction. Since 2018, Tauriainen has been working on the series of works «Hydrocommons», which operates in a posthumanist world of ideas. It explores to what extent our kinship with other bodies can be understood as a deeply materialistic relationality.