Artists: Yves B. Golden, Johanna Odersky
Exhibition title: Grace over nature
Venue: Yaby, Madrid, Spain
Date: September 20 – October 19, 2019
Photography: Alberto Vallejo / all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Yaby, Madrid
Picture a braid that becomes a crystal. You may have seen it before somewhere, you recall. Whoever wore it may not live anymore and maybe they are a ghost or maybe they cut it off. Anyway the hair stayed braided forever and is so heavy but it shines now and has a new vitality. The crystals are small but they cover most of it, and if the braid belonged to someone you loved those crystals are diamonds. If the braid belonged to someone who died you pick it out from your memories and carry it with you always because it is pretty, it makes you feel pretty and alive. It’s so perfect.
Picture a desert. Desert roses are made of sand, that’s why they can bloom later than the rest of the flowers — it’s already September and they don’t fear the fall. Their petals are crystallised surfaces of sedimented dust and their thorns are very sharp, like needles that pierce your skin. It’s these crystals that have stuck inside your joints and are making walking a torture. Sedimented dust or petals, rust accumulating or diamonds define all movements, make them strange. You are here but also behind. The body is heavy and legs are dragged leaving grooves in the ground. You try to speak but your tongue is knotted, your tongue is braided, you decompose so that voices that came before and after your death can speak for you.
You can survive without a body and in the shadows of memory. You can survive without time, through the constant potential of actualization of trauma. Crystallize any moment now to invert the order and open up to nonlinear realities. Like a black hole that spirals into itself disintegrating, nature rots all plants and buries them for centuries into carbon and yet diamonds make it out of this dark stuff of the underground. It’s out of all this rotting of previous flowers that new flowers grow gracefully.
Now picture everything breaking. Picture this: in a sanctuary, all these crystals explode in thousands of galaxies; or picture that the dusty storehouse that you regressed into overflows and that all the dust invades you and that you fall asleep in that altar because you have survived death in life. And so you become something terrifying, the greatest fear of oppression: somebody that can live forever (Alexis Pauline Gumbs).
