Waking up from our collective state of insanity is terrifying as the daily regimen of the majority of people is characterized by a burdensome and contrived nature, resulting in a limited engagement with the actual world.
Generations that strive to find something truly foundational, constantly gaslighting ourselves that we are asking for too much, settling and desensitize ourselves, instead of choosing to find meaning, people, connections that reciprocate our care, encouraging our growth, while becoming a familiar place, a support network that celebrates the mundane and trivial, making the softest, most intimate memories with each other.
We are captivated – or repelled – and our perceptual windows are purified, as articulated by William Blake. There is an urgent need to revisit the physical and mental places, as there is an endless glitching between what is established as attainable and our current state of cultural insanity.
The crushing presence of media discourse, the unbearable weight of neo-liberal labour and the capitalism of energy, cloud our vision. In a state of mental, emotional, spiritual, communal, singular, sociopolitical and digital emergency, care as a methodology, comes in service of ideas and connections, not for an expected capitalised outcome.
Rooting in the same latin word, tendere, meaning “to stretch”, tension and tenderness are antagonistic impetuses. Yet tenderness and softness, the act of extending gentle attention, may feel like something being stretch out, extending and becoming taut. These words, synonymous with spanning beyond oneself, enlarging, signify a form of ex-tension.
The exhibition following a Jungian thought, seeks to provide the option of ‘enlargment / stretching’ over meaningless labour of self-curation and maybe synthetic happiness. Seeking to make connections that do not ask whether this makes us happy, but whether our interactions, connections and choices, stretch us and enlarge us or diminish us.
Asking us to realize that in such systems, we need to remember that paying attention is not merely realizing where our gaze is focused, but discerning why it is focused there.Decolonizing care, researching its mechanisms and functions, developing a new methodology that centres on it, the exhibition, is a radical call for tenderness, compelling us to pay true, genuine, soft yet undivided attention to the non-verbal world of culturally uncontaminated consciousness. Proposing care as a methodology used within labour, relationships, ecologies, sociopolitics and philosophy, the exhibition reminds us of Dostoevsky’s words: ‘for all is like an ocean, all is flowing and blending; a touch in one place sets up movement at the other end of the earth’.
This methodology reminds us that when we are done tending to each other and to our loved ones and possessions, telling our stories and enlarging ourselves and our communities, we are no longer I, and you are no longer you, we briefly merge into one. Ever since, we carry a bit of each-other, even if we both not tend any more.
The exhibition poses a question: Should we escape into ourselves, or do we choose to confront, and therefore connect with others? Beyond a mere interest and practice of resilience, this exhibition brings forward how we can move through this world with reciprocal tenderness.
Curated by Evagoria Dapola
Participating Artists: Raissa Angeli, Georgia Christou, Marietta Mavrokordatou
Opening: 23 of March, 18.00 – 22.00
Duration of the exhibition: 23.3.2024- 22.4.2024
Address: 6-8 Adamantiou Korai Str., 1016 Nicosia, Cyprus
Open: Monday & Tuesday 16.00-18.00, Saturday 10.00-12.00 and by appointment
