A constellation of conduits was channelled between us, and our distance became water

About

An aquatic installation is spreading through the gallery space. It makes you move sidelong, curve along its corridors of affect, turn sharp at the next dystopian swelling. It asks you to swim gently across the expanse of water that has taken over the planet. It invites you to eavesdrop on the goings of a flooded city, and the genderless lovers in the centre of it all.

Based on the recent novel Our Distance Became Water by Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (published especially for the exhibition by ERIS press), the installation becomes a body of water, air, sound, text, painting and tubular transparency. The textuality in the core of the work becomes gurglings, air bubbles, primordial sounds and spiced breath, an underwater forest of tubes, floating sheets of carton where our bodies might find solace in this drowning world.

In drawing their interdisciplinary practices together, the artists Robert Cervera and Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos reached a moment of confluence. The work consists of sound pieces performed by Cervera on his tubular organs, composed around the recitations by Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos of extracts of the novel. These pieces accompany the installation of tubes filled with green canal-like water (a performance machine that the artists will explore at various live events) and the layered cardboard paintings by Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos. The spaces of the gallery are cast as an iteration of the theoretical research on Spatial Justice (A. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Spatial Justice, Routledge 2015) which understands law and space as tautologous, animated by human and nonhuman bodies perennially in conflict, vying for the same space at the same time in atmospheres of intense sensorial engineering.