The Nature of this Room
(2019)
During the course of 6 months I kept exchanging ideas with the artist Rosanna H. Bach and curator Sofia Steinvorth for what was to become a site-specific installation related with space, sound, touch and the liminal aspects of light, darkness and feeling. The exhibition was on display during the months of November and December of 2019 in Lapso Galeria, Setúbal - Portugal.
“As the anthropologist Edward T. Hall refers, practically everything that man is and does is related to the experience of space.
The often-unconscious idea of a personal bubble of space, an invisible territory that we call our own, is one of the key pillars of modern society. This privatization of space exposes deep-lying notions of estrangement, which translate not only into our being in space, but into several other dualities such as: 'us' and 'them', subjective and objective, normal and strange, science and humanities, rationality and spirituality.
In the exhibition The Nature of this Room, the artists Rosanna Helena Bach (1990, Switzerland) and Nuno Moreira (1982, Portugal) challenge these assumptions of clear separation and pure rationality, tackling form and formlessness, order and chaos and the prima materia, as the primitive formless base of all matter.
Parting from two site-specific installations and a series of photographic experiments, the gallery turns into an immersive experience, in which the space itself - its rooms, shapes, walls, columns and windows - becomes a part of the artists' pursuits. Their pieces seem to merge with the surrounding architecture and to expand into the space contained within it. The apparent borders between works and space, graspable object and aether, blur. The gallery reveals itself as a liminal realm, a transitory, in-between state characterized by indeterminacy, the potential for destabilization and the possibility for transformation.
The publication with the same name - The Nature of this Room - to be launched on the day of the exhibition opening, is made of an assemblage of images (mostly photographs and drawings) and text fragments showcasing a part of the process that the artists have been diving into for the present project. This combination gives insights into theoretical discussions, poetic excerpts, physical and alchemical concepts as well as fictional and individual reflections on some key ideas in relation to their works. While the publication stands on its own, it can well be read as a complement to the exhibition, which visitors are welcome to do during the visit to the gallery.”
The materials present in this publication originate within the context of the exhibition The Nature of this Room, at Lapso Galeria (Setúbal, Portugal) in the timeframe of November 1st and December 21st, 2019, featuring the work of the artists Rosanna Helena Bach and Nuno Moreira.
Besides showing an important part of the artists’ aesthetic experimentations and research inquiries that developed in Lisbon throughout the months previous to the exhibition, this publication includes fragments on central topics that guided our conversations. It assembles theoretical discussions, poetic excerpts, physical and alchemical concepts as well as fictional and individual reflections on some key ideas in relation to the artists’ works. In this sense, the present publication does not only show a process, but provides entry points into an immersive environment similar to the one that materialized through the works at display at Lapso. Above all, it functions as an invitation to dive into the microcosmos of questions that led our interest.
Curated by Sofia Steinvorth