Space Junk

There Are No Words, Eugenia Raskopoulos

The Artspace opening on Thursday was very big and noisy.. it was great seeing such a good turn out for three very different but equally great works - Eugenia Raskopoulos There Are No Words, Mari Velonaki Bird-Fish Circle B-Movement C, and Tellervo Kalleinen + Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen Better Worlds: the making of utopia.. It was impossible to hear anything so I returned to listen and absorb the works yesterday. And glad I did.

As the blurb says, “Eugenia has put us in the dark.” There’s a very primal feel of foreboding and dread as you walk around this dark, strange space which in turn encloses another un-enterable space walled in by huge transparent sheets of glass. Once your eyes adjust, it’s gloomy and opaque and full of indescribable noise, rather than blind. Although like deafness there are levels to blindness; not all blindness is total. My grandfather was considered blind and yet he had peripheral vision. Peripheral vision usually means you only see black and white, no colour. Or maybe with some sorts of blindness you experience sudden sparks and zaps emerging from your inner body rather than information from the outer world. In Eugenia’s space of no words red shapes suddenly appear slithering down the walls or beamed across the inner, thick space. As I stood peering into the inner walled off space I thought I glimpsed some words… or did I imagine it? This work makes you wonder if you’ve entered an inner world of occlusion and noise, or actually been shown the outer world finally stripped of its veils and cover-ups.

I finally had my longed for encounter with Bird-Fish on Saturday… and the chairs do have an uncanny ‘alive’ feel, something about how they sense you and your movements and then they move. They have a very delicate sensitive wild bird feel to them - where one must approach cautiously and gently, if you want to communicate. The work has an almost minimalist aesthetic- it’s beautifully simple looking, although this is deceptive… Mari gave me a quick outline of how it all works, and needless to say the machinery behind the ’simple’ chairs is very complex technology. But be warned, the navy has just begun workouts on some radar technology that is interfering with bluetooth and the communication between Bird and Fish. They loose connection with each other… and they look so lost and forlorn. It’s really too bad, but this seems to happen only on Saturdays.

Better Worlds: the making of utopia. For this multiple video installation the artists visited 3 or 4 alternative communities in Australia where they asked the communitites to collaborate on a video. Rather than do a straight documentary the communities created their own script. It’s quite a compelling piece of ficto-documentary. I was only vaguely aware of these alternative communities so it was intriguing to watch, in fact sometimes it felt as if I was watching communities from somewhere else. They actually had a sort of ‘foreign-ness’ to them. Even the landscape seemed unfamilar at times. It looked like paradise. I really need to get out more.