From the W1555 Buurtkrant November 2024. Review by Yoana Buzova
Seems like it is the last truly hot and sunny day of the summer. It is also GRAW 24. I am about to pay a visit to the artists from W1555, opening their studios for visitors.
My first stop is the home studio of Petar Tuskan. Believe me, climbing those many stairs to the flat he shares with his partner Sanja is totally worth it. Petar makes paintings. Abstract work if you like. What is so enchanting about his work is that it is like looking into a world, magical world, through a foggy, maybe even oily window. I felt like my eyes are suddenly in need of dioptric aid, but as I looked away from the canvases, it seemed like my eyes were just fine and everything was perfectly in focus. It's like the paintings are a portal to a blurry other-world. Sometimes exploding with vibrancy and colour, other times muddy and melancholic. This summer I thought a lot about death, about myself dying. Instead of that I survived but lost a loved one. Petar had displayed a painting that I carried the whole day with me, long after I had left his studio. A dark, blue work, that transported me into the depths of my own grief and at the same time it hugged me tightly and created space for me to feel anything. He painted this after he lost his brother, who was a diver. Thank you Petar.
After that I walk back downstairs, only to go upstairs in the other building and enter the home studio of Dario D´Aronco. First it's the studio itself that stands out. Dario has the whole first floor of his home as a dedicated studio. It is big, light. Not a trace of domesticity. I myself share a home studio in a room in our apartment with my partner, believe me I shortly felt jealous of Dario. Large paintings hang on the walls in the first part of the studio. Geometric, full of dichotomies. Clean, yet dirty. Colourful, yet monochrome. Looking around I notice the views Dario has. Neighbouring windows, rooftop windows. They too carry such dichotomies and they too carry the geometries of his painting. But paintings are by far not the only thing to look at. Dario makes sculptures, contemporary remixes he makes from archeological artefacts and other objects he finds 3d scanned or modelled and then uploaded onto one of the various 3d model sharing platforms. He then chops them up and reassembles them into these new, wild objects that he then 3D prints and I am not finished. He then works their surface in such ways that it looks like the objects are ancient. A mindfuck for your pleasure. Both the symbolism of each element, then the new symbolism in the assemblages and then the uncanny melting of time. One of those works is set of five 3d collages, displayed together, each representing a moment of the story of an Italian saint who got raped and murdered by a man, who then felt so guilty as to become a monk. A contemporary visual tale of a mediaeval femicide.
I need a moment to stop looking at art. So I make a pause, sure you would understand the feeling. And then I head to the W1555 communal space, where Joshua Thies has set up his broadcast station. He has set up laptops, mics, effects and speakers. Josh runs (RAAR) Rotterdam Art And Radio, which is a sonic platform for experiments in audible artwork. It has become a monthly podcast with over 100 guests and collaborators. Essentially, RAAR aims to promote live performance of audible artworks via live audio streaming from various sites throughout the city of Rotterdam and beyond. RAAR specializes in curated podcasts, live streaming of art related lectures, performances and events plus audio documentation of art related happenings. And today he is playing some sounds, sounds he claims are not very RAAR, sounds that are more mainstream. He also has two microphones, and that is how the audience gets involved in this stream. He points microphones at them, they take them, they talk, they talk with sound effects, it's RAAR, it’s an open mic. It's both welcoming, known, safe, yet strange and confronting. It’s radio. Radio is raar. It’s voice and it’s noise. Voice is soothing, it’s pure magic, a voice without a body. At a certain moment it seems like this is a hub, where visitors enter to get directions. Sometimes they do, sometimes not. In the background, in the same space, the neighbours are preparing to have a pizza night, so there is a lot of extra noise, klanking of pots, people talking. It’s raar and it’s life. And it’s art and it's in the aether.
Last thing before I stop writing and the rain begins. Katrina Niebergal’s video Dancer’s Slab. Watch this on a bigger screen and with headphones. Looking at your phone won’t do it. You need to feel the rhythms, the cracks layering on top of each other. The video itself is filmed on 8mm film and carries everything that the medium brings. It immediately erases time. There is no past, present and no future. There is only this. The footage is filmed at the ancient site of the Järrestad petroglyphs in southern Sweden. Sudden, almost amateur-ish shots carry a fleeting presence of a body. A body in a rush, a body observing the stone carvings, devouring them, each and every one, like there is yet another presence, a larger one, perhaps the slab itself, and it demands the viewer. Katrina’s experimental documentary film is (as she in her own words on instagram puts it) “an an attempt to both upset and re-define a somatic relationship to the site and encourage a speculative re-reading of (pre)history through its ancient symbol languages (based on the research of the Lithuania-American archaeologist and anthropologist, Marija Gimbutas).” So go and do your reading, especially her writings on the old European gynocentric culture.
To you dear reader, support local artists, they need it. Be kind to yourself, so that you can emanate that kindness and soundness to both human and nonhuman in these weird times.
Comments