SpiRIT(E) Eva Faché & Jet Pascua

About

“What happens when the goal of collaboration is not to find a third voice, but rather to call attention to the uncomfortable incursions, invasions, and impositions that go along with the good faith and excitement of shared ideas and common space?” (Hameed, 2012)*
 
Eva Faché and Jet Pascua’s exhibition SpiRIT(e) presents a series of sculptures, photographs, drawings, paintings and a video installation. When observing the artefacts in the gallery space, the first sensation is that this exhibition is conjugated in the first person plural: it is “us”, “we” not “I” nor “me”. This is not only because it is a collaboration between two artists. This is something art has done for decades, but it does not automatically ensure communality.

It is something that has to do with the embodiment that inhabits the images and objects, the sounds and the shadows of this exhibition. In fact, the declination in plural is the only possible way for an out-reach of the profound interrogation that is the basis for these works. An interrogation that may sound like: Is a ritual a human practice that allows a possible discovery of a common spiritual aspiration? Or is it all living beings’ spirituality that forges rituals in order to be discovered, enacted and shared?
 
This seems an exemplary interrogation, the bread of centuries of museum-collections, ethnographies, photos and an anthropological fascination with initiations, rituals and their cultural heritage. Such a relatively small scale exhibition takes for itself a serious topic, but it does it with decency, shaping an aesthetics that is unpretentious but sophisticated at the same time. In fact, is it possible to make an exhibition about spirituality together with other artists, and to maintain one’s distinct voice, given the question of faith, or the aspiration to ecstasy that are indeed singular experiences?
 
This exhibition seems to look for such a path. It is not even a third voice, the one invoked in this exhibition. It creates a space, that ideally is extendable to contain growing communal aspirations, and simultaneously it asks to be inhabited as singulars. The interrogation stems from the very action of artists, healers, musicians, in synergy with natural elements, artefacts, animals, and flora. This is an exploration of plurality.
 
-Rossella Ragazzi