August 4 – September 5, 2021

Natalia Jordanova

Naive enough to have concerns about one’s own happiness when others have no seals to pet, 2019.

11’19”, Full HD, stereo. Text co–written with Walter Götsch. Camera/drone pilot: Pierre–Clément Nivière. Typeface – Serifbabe: Charlotte Rohde. Courtesy the artist and Structura Gallery, Sofia

Selected by Tiago de Abreu Pinto

Chapter 7

(Underdressed writing a message on the phone)

It was difficult to disentangle some of the phrases I was reading at the time I watched your video. “Those were the days, when we were all at sea.”, says Sadie Plant at the beginning, referring to a state of being that any term or concept that we debate nowadays really “meant anything at all”. We were in a way connected, “strings of inseparable sisters”, all at once, “indistinguishable one from the other”. The characters of your video were also inseparable in a way, right? But, distant and distinguishable. I wonder if they would know if we were only strings of letters. How are we distinguishable? Like now. Temporality also. “No future, no past” if we really immerse into the stream, immunes “to insignificant questions because of the ultimate defence”. But we know what happened: “free exchanges, microprocesses finely tuned, polymorphous transfers without regard for borders and boundaries.” It really seems nobody really cares, as you say. But I feel more and more inside these worlds “made out of words, hyperlinked to other worlds”. Is it something without an end? Resonating Fredric Jameson, Slavoj Žižek and Mark Fisher (“that’s what he & he & he & he & he & he said”): “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of…” Anyway, are we going backwards? “The third one always comes before the second one”. If going back is to have at least a little bit of patience and generosity I would want that, to tell you the truth. Because many of the things I see nowadays are “someone else’s problem”. Here I am, from my hand to my head and back to tell you so many things that can’t fit this message. Which world is really the one we are living in? There is “nothing to hang on to, nothing to be grasped, nothing to protect or be protected from. Insides and outsides did not count”. And Plant was right, we really didn’t pay attention: “it was all for free”. Now, it backfired.

(✓Seen 00:25 am)

Natalia Jordanova, Naive enough to have concerns about one’s own happiness when others have no seals to pet, 2019, (video still), 11’19”, Full HD, stereo