MARIOS STAMATIS
GARDEN SHED
MIXED MEDIA, 2023
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What remains of the aesthetics of ruins after Chernobyl and Fukushima? A continent of plastic drifts through the oceans, and the rediscovery of the post-covid province colonizes the last natural spaces. The rural enclosure is a thing of the past. Is inviting artists to the fields enough to turn them into cultivators? Roads that lead nowhere have precipitated a fall into the abyss, and herding people to the ovens is the last vestige of the commonality: what traces do we want to keep of this time? Weeding a library means taking out the books that have been read for those that haven’t (yet) been written. How do we carve out a living space in tomorrow’s open world? The liminal has become an artistic category, a placebo for thought. Between the climatic panic and the discursive void of social networks, between Deleuze’s plateaus and Latour’s targets, can the fragile, transitory and multiple community of an artists’ residency in the middle of nowhere constitute a refuge, or to the contrary expose, augment, divert? In the folds of the mountains, Aragon is an open territory pierced by the ghosts of Ubu-roi and Hugo, Orwell and Tolkien, Goya and Torquemada. Can bringing together dreamers, fabricators, storytellers and inventors of forms, produce anything beside for a certain cold ebullition, a restrained eruption, a stationary excursion into the cluttered space of an adobe hut…
Text by Fabrice Bentot.
Originally presented at Garden Shed.
Curated by Jonathan Hammer.
Villa Bergerie, 2023.
