lengua(S) at fluent – Art Viewer

Artists: Anne Boyer, Queer Correspondence, Anna Halprin and Sasha Litvintseva & Beny Wagner

Exhibition title: lengua(S)

Venue: fluent, Santander, Spain

Date: December 11, 2020 – February 19, 2021

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and fluent, Santander

lengua(S) is an exhibition that examines the logics and regimes of vulnerability. Spanning from its ideological foundations to its ecosystemic functioning, the show questions our binary understanding about sickness and health, hegemony and dissent, productivity and collapse as forms of structural contagion.

In dissecting how, the outlines of life and non–life are constructed, the exhibition is a proposition to expand our understanding of vulnerability from a bodily phenomenon into the realm of ecologies, desires, economies and communities: a living exchange between physical and immaterial transmissions.

Through the work of four artists and thinkers, it sets out to explore contagious ecologies through human systems and more-than-human touching zones. Looking at immaterial compositions in ideology, science, politics and culture lengua(S) is an embodied critique about questions of radical interdependency demonstrating how our utterly specific experiences are inevitably collective.

In Anne Boyer’s The Undying, what the author describes as ‘the ideological regime of cancer’ is a deep exploration on the experience of illness as mediated by digital screens, weaving in ancient Roman dream diarists, corporate lies, the ecological costs of chemotherapy, and the many little murders of capitalism.

In the context of on-going uncertainty –a condition familiar to minority communities, though now made even more palpable to themselves and others by the arrival of Covid-19–, Queer Correspondence (a mail-art initiative) seeks to nurture the indeterminate spaces of possibility that are put forward by subcultural lives.

Anna Halprin is a choreographer, dancer and performance artist considered the mother of postmodern dance. At age 100 she continues to inspire through movement and has extended the boundaries of dance to addressing social issues, community building, fostering both physical and emotional healing, and connecting people to Earth. In the summer of 1966, in collaboration with her husband American landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, she began a series of experimental, cross-disciplinary workshops in northern California that offered a new approach to environmental awareness in relation to the body. Drawn from architecture, ecology, music, cinematography, graphics, choreography, and lighting, Experiments in Environment brought together artists, dancers, architects, and environmental designers in avant-garde environmental arts experiences.

Bilateria by Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner employs the Klein Bottle as a form with which to inhabit the interstices between organisms and environments. The Klein bottle is a mathematical shape that, like the Möbius strip, merges interior and exterior, beginning and end. Here the form is simultaneously a leaky vessel and a projection surface for an array of found video material. Organisms and environments are mapped onto a single metabolic pathway where inside and outside continuously fold into each other in rhythmic pulsations.