Artists: Aapo Nikkanen and Pepo Salazar
Exhibition title: Long Tomorrow
Venue: La Volonté 93, Paris, France
Date: October 20 – 30, 2023
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists
From time to time, our work comes out like to small sentences drifting in space. Dispersed like stars in the night sky, filling only small portions of the vast darkness. Scribbles and dots that we try to make sense of, while drifting in and out, hardly realizing the space in between.
Most of everything in the world is considered to be “nothing in between”. Each atom is 99.9% empty space. If an atom was the size of a football stadium, the nucleus would be the size of a pea, and even the nucleus itself is mainly empty space. You yourself are mostly nothing: there are around 7 billion billion billion atoms in your body, and you replace 98% of them each year.
Some believe that the origin of our being is the union with this gentle emptiness. A mindless and effortless slide, into a place where the inner and outer worlds meet. Yet we find ourselves trying to maintain balance on a chaotic patchwork of infinite objects and desires, trying not to fall into one of the gaps in between. We focus to forget, not remembering, in a primal effort to maintain a sense of the world. In this reality, goosebumps come wrapped in cellophane and people swipe their fingers all over your face.
There’s a curious phenomenon when mainlanders move to islands: some of them start becoming crazy. Just like hands
that shake out matches
act always as if they are burned.
