Have you catastrophized about your extremities? Have you imagined your toe getting caught in a door or on a splinter, the nail being split or damaged, the appendage’s smallness always making it vulnerable to being cut or scraped or mangled, pierced or torn apart? Have you played that imagined moment over and over in your mind, sickened and aroused by its strangeness? And if that appendage extended impossibly out along the floor, curling around itself and reaching far in front of its body, would that make this uncomfortable pleasure greater? I.e. can vulnerability be scaled, compared, somehow measured, enjoyed?
Read MoreLet us imagine, for a moment, that two geographies that seem to have very little in common, can be linked by physical matter. That, despite their differences in latitude and longitude, in political history and language, that they might be bound (at least for an imagined instant) by something as subtle as the seasonal pattern of rain, as insidious as the unplanned sprawl of urban development, or as seemingly unremarkable as mud.
Read More1. In his 2017 exhibition at Trama, Edgar Calel includes a new body of work, all marked by red mud. The work derives from his recent travels along the border between Paraguay and Brazil. While there, Calel offers his hosts seeds of maize and squash from his home in Comalapa. In return, members of the guaraní kaiowa community in Brazil offer him a gift: standing barefoot in the area's reddish soil, they step on page after page of Calel's notebook, leaving their footprints for him to carry home. He exhibits these pages unaltered; i.e. his exhibition is the remaining evidence (a video, these prints on paper) from an affectionate exchange between a group of people and an artist.
Read MoreDear you:
I am writing to you right now, just as you are reading my words right now, too.
What's the new news? we stutter.
New news is old news now. And now. And now.
Reem says: we always rush toward the future, or we look at the past like it was some special magic thing that we wish we could find again.
Read MoreSeen from above, a girl spins and twirls, her Converse sneakers beating a rhythm on the concrete pavement below her, her body making an introspective choreography, inside and outside, around, through, and below a plastic hoop. The hoop twirls on her wrist, encircles her waist. It becomes an extension of her body, a cipher for her imagination. It contains her even as she controls its spiraling movements. Filmed in black & white Super-8, Johanna Unzueta's Dinamarca: Mercurio y Hula Hoop (2016) is a joyful and introspective meditation on line and space, on drawing with the body, on containment and elegant solutions to its imposition.
Read More