Ladder Letter, 2023
July 15th 2023, Copenhagen
Dears Anne Sofie, Anders, Ladder Space, readers,
Last year I had the pleasure of inhabiting Ladder to prepare my first show, “Glitched Belongings”. Since then, I’ve missed addressing that experience; and have wanted to do it with a small letter, an offering. This letter is that.
More a poetic flare-up than a posthumous reflection. A love letter, as always.
.
I enter this room on May 27th 2022, the opening makes me nervous. The walls push warehouses and studios and history, cattle blood and horse’s manes; the time-travelling ladder retracts, the room a swelling, an interval. Pause, period, to be long.
In those days I would throw it all up into the air and pour myself into the work of making up, in those days I would put office paper wings in my arms and spin, I would put masking tape (masking tape is the matter of universes) and music on, and the room would become fat with my speculations. I laughed and I cried.
And since we are artists, we call it all work. In those days I tired myself, the tiredness mine, the self not, with great relief. The cold floor of this room was my home, and even today its dust is my land. The swelling, the interruption. Anne Sofie’s invitation cut the melancholy of early March and gave me an horizon (a cut that scores but does not separate). I can belong to here and now.
These words intrude on a day that cries for help: there are e-mails, posts, starved images, schedules of hubris, rabble to meet and rub, wealth, beauty, blight, excess, abundance, disabundance, many bums and bum dances, there is the stink of putrefaction when the sufficient unhinges into too much --- amidst this we must find love.
To write here to make an interval, for us.
It is a sunny morning, and this body breathes. Deeply. Let’s go. Invitations, compliments, acts of will, criticisms. Friendships that become social structures that become society, let’s go, working plotting weaving. Work is the measure of the energy that moves relations, and all of our preposterous devices to give emotions expression in the world. The slightest touch is replete with direction.
Do you dance to what you receive?
Ladder, together with all the tiny independent galleries in Copenhagen, a lymphatic system, the city dotted with white intervals. The work of the artist isn’t aesthetic. Fuck objects, and fuck subjects too. I know these are vague words, but I hope the reader, Anne Sofie and Anders may share in my efforts to elaborate intervals. To keep life alive.
Open horizon – Pulsating connections – Irreducible complexity
With the electric blue skies,
A great thank you ---
Marina Dubia