Ruth Höflich, Stones Under Stress (from series), 2020, archival inkjet print

I move to the edge of the wall, touch the surface which is cold and chalky. What house system are you using? Yours is a new house, one you designed yourself. You open the window. I talk about what was on my mind that night. An image of two habits short-circuiting. One stimulated by the other, something being distilled, boiled down. That it was meant to be. You reposition my chair, wipe down the table. That it’s still a region of tissue, strata of flesh and nerves and muscle. I go through my list, I mention resistance training, flexibility, geophysical processes. You pour liquid into a glass. I steady the glass with my hand. I use the other to push the image across and let it drip, discharge onto the wooden surface like some form of glandular secretion. 

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Madison Bycroft, Mollusk Theory: Soft Bodies, Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, 2018.

K-T

Kai is a perky Chinese-Singaporean woman wearing gray shorts, sneakers and a T-shirt adorned with cats. You get the impression she is getting ready for a run rather than a performance. The Ikea stools for the audience are arranged in an arch shape in part of the gallery close to a glass partition. My Brazilian friends, attending the performance with me, feel the audience setup is constrictive, mirroring public spaces in Singapore where any improvised crossing or alternative routes are obstructed by metal barriers and plant fences. It seems I have been in Singapore long enough to no longer pick up on bodily curtailment. 

The text was written and first published in a Dance Mag, The Furor Issue, 2018.

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Detail from Lai Yu Tong’s exhibition It’s strange I feel like I’ve seen this one before at DECK. Photo: Chua Chye Teck

On Lai Yu Tong’s Bandcamp page, under the name cosmologists, the introduction to his music tracks reads, “Proudly made under the depressing yellow-lit nights of Singapore.”  

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Dafne Boggeri, Training Coincidences, 2017. Courtesy Marsèlleria. Photo Sara Scanderebech

Chi è Dafne Boggeri?
i-D è un lavoro del 2006 dove l’artista si presenta in quattro carte d’identità, indossando in ciascuna una maglietta con una scritta diversa; la serie completa compone la frase: trans/lation/some/time. La traduzione non risolve l’enigma che, anzi, si infittisce quando nel campo relativo alla professione nei documenti si legge “astronomo”. Dafne Boggeri si divincola dalle definizioni e si muove agilmente fra una molteplicità di linguaggi.

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Gemma Kearney, smooth space, 2018.

There’s inertia here

A land for our speaker

Linguistic familiarity at gun point

A wonderful retribution to take that language and 

brutalize it

Better at it then those who forced it upon others

A tipsy topsy turvy way of saying things 

An abuse of language 

A lot of onomatopoeia goin on

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I come from Northern Italy, not too far from where Marco Polo started his journey East more than seven hundred years ago, but I now live in Singapore. I travelled there by plane with one big luggage and no immediate return ticket. In Europe my skin is white but gets tanned in summer months, in Asia when I stand in the sun I get ‘sunburnt’ instead. Language reveals a lot of cultural and historical biases.

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Massimo Bottura is a Michelin star chef, his restaurant, featured on Chef’s table, Master of None and many other food and TV programmes, is Osteria Francescana in his hometown, Modena, a city in the centre of Italy where making pasta is considered an art. Bottura is married to Lara, an American woman he met when, in their 20s, they started working on the same day in the same New York restaurant. Lara eventually married the man but also a vision and then a restaurant. She was the one who introduced Massimo to art galleries and contemporary art exhibitions. Those encounters and ideas gradually made their way into dishes, inspired by Bottura’s childhood and traditional Italian family recipes transformed into new creations through conceptual twists often referencing works of contemporary art.

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