« THE CUP OF WATER THAT GIVES ITSELF TO THIRST », Paris

« Last summer, while swimming in the sea, a jellyfish grabbed my right arm with her tentacles. She must have swum slowly towards me as the curious and intelligent creature I love to imagine she was. I didn’t notice her body rolling up my arm, brushing over my skin, and darting into my flesh. But I remember clearly that her bite abolished all sensations for a split second. The three rings of red swollen skin on my arm didn’t heal for weeks. For months, the poison would occasionally revive, reenacting the jellyfish’s killing ritual over and over. Almost a year later, the wounds are gone, but the prosthetic phantom limbs are the relics of her fierce existence. They also remind me that life involves contamination, as a form of helpful symbiosis among humans but also with other non-human entities. It’s an archive of relations.

The group exhibition THE CUP OF WATER THAT GIVES ITSELF TO THIRST proposes to look at a selection of art practices from the perspective of contamination. When challenging the assumption that contamination involves degradation while looking at it from a non-anthropocentric point of view, it provides an example of exchange and mutual transformation that may defy linear time and verbal communication. Contamination may be understood in this context as an exchange between two or more entities during which their ordinary status is challenged and destabilised. THE CUP OF WATER THAT GIVES ITSELF TO THIRST further proposes to reflect on the notion of contamination from an epistemological and relational perspective, particularly within the field of exhibition-making. It celebrates the mutual (conceptual, physical) contamination that is inevitably at play when images, objects, and participants share space and proposes to look at the group exhibition as a space of shared intimacy. »

Elise Lammer

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Elise Lammer (Lausanne, lives and works in Lausanne and Basel) is a curator, author and educator whose work engages with exhibition making, public programming, archiving and gardening. She is invested in questions related to the role of space (public, domestic) in defining the construction of identity. She is currently a PhD candidate doing research on Derek Jarman’s garden legacy within the fields of art, ecology and queer theory.

Andreia Santana’s participation is supported by Camões - Instituto da Cooperação e da Língua, Portugal.