Artist: Nina Kettiger
Exhibition title: I ride, solitaire by mission
Venue: Lateral Roma, Rome, Italy
Date: October 25 – November 26, 2023
Photography: ©Luana Rigolli / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Lateral Roma, Rome
It’s like this tall mountain. And, you know, from the get go, that you’re not going to have an ensemble view. It is very dark and narrow and very strange. And inside of this structure, it is built like a staircase, each room going a bit higher than the other one. Historical monuments of the mind. Like a house where people lived. But there was no one. They let us be there. They hold us, but we’re never with them. We are not of the city.
The further I stepped away, the more and more it became like a mirage. The place that you inhabit has to give you something back that sustains life in a way that is coherent or something like, it has, like, you know, it has. It has a greater narrative thread of coherence. Whereas the Dweller, he’s kind of. There, you know and. You don’t dwell too long in the same place. There are people that are there because it feels to them that it would be significant. Of living.
I think of interiors as this double entendre because of objects that are part of the interior life with the home and interior design, as in the makeup of one’s own inner person, one’s inner life. The city itself becomes the interior in a way, because you’re constantly outside and you’re sightseeing and you’re doing all of these things and you occupy the space in a very, in a way that is very constant. Not as a way to get from A to B.
In France, early on in literature class you talk about the different narrators. So you have the I narrator, you have the external narrator, and then you have the omniscient narrator, the one that has this. This zoomed out view and that knows what everyone is feeling. Then there is this different position because you are the I narrator, the external narrator, and the omniscient narrator all at the same time, but not based on any factual reconstruction.
I see people posting things such as repost or you’ll have bad luck for a month, you know you’ll repost and it’s kind of. It has no real meaning beyond yourself and that you have done it, but you’ve only done it because you’ve been incited to do it by other people. Needed it to work.
Permanently and uh. What do we keep?
This is often how we learn with the long line and the other little lines, crossing it with dates.
Reconciling with different forms of idealisms and realisms.
Yeah, of a certain. Gaze, which is always my gaze.
Move a button across and then the whole thing disappears.
—Nina Kettiger, 2023
