Transition Exhibition Letter, 2021
I arrived in this room on December 10th at 2 p.m.,
with the ambition to get as close as possible to you.
To inhabit the desire to kiss you, touch you.
You: the artworks, practices, and physical entities – architecture inclusive – who meet here for the coming transition. You, plural, from disparate geographies and ages, seeking to rejoin in kin.
As this body approaches you, the distance between us becomes more dense, palpable, sculpted by agreements, promises, contracts; by trust. By the broth and breadth of exchanged words that allow my breath and warmth to reach you, and interact a bit with a surface of atoms, first grains of your structure, as we develop some intimacy.
The cubic centimeters of air between us is thick with the beliefs of those who contributed to the opportunity to be here, today, in relation.
The desire to kiss. To retreat from value and sacred towards carinho, endearment, simple and gratuitious. We are flesh, wood powder, printed paper, weaved thread, cement and glass; we pululate and transgress erratically together, our hyper sensible particles refuse to occupy a fixed position. They crowd us, through and for and with, we organize and differentiate in exorbitant pace – and even now are only shaped by virtue of the statistical average of this agitation.
I don't know what is the share of your desire expressed in the mean average that stops this arm and belly just before my thin hairs can graze you (but not before they stand on end and catch secrets of your extension, your temperature and texture, of the pressure a curvature or a carved relief produces in the time-space that loosens from a body, dissolves into another, and condenses, within the next).
I do know it is filled with the discordant songs of those who carve a future, attuning between stasis and movement, exactly as happens in all space-time of feverish particles that collide, encounter and disturb to build together the life we share; all these people, artworks, bodies and expressions, alive in life or in death, with whom we insist to relate to – even when our touch is a flag of danger, when care can spread disease as much as its lack; when our inheritance is at once a painful scar and the muscle with which to practice tomorrow.
When a simple approachment can open space within the distance, so that other pathways may invade our understanding of being-with, as matter itself, insufferably pulsating.
For I know you touch me back. And this is cherished.
M. Dubia
Kunsthaus Dahlem, Berlin