in Berlin, we walk through a field and freshly rained city dust, smashed wine glasses, techno clubs with psychedelic art on the walls, Karl Holmqvist and a pool high on chlorine, germs and naked, drunk bodies.
      I fall on wet concrete,
      a cloud of cigarette smoke touches my skin.
      a girl in the middle of an empty dance floor, her movements sporadic, she must be nuts. She gets insecure, maybe violent, shuts down and falls close to me. I'm kissing her lips.
      I can't fuck anymore, sex is a prison. You dance like a maniac, and we have connection, in trance I fly you to London to do it again, in private, for me.
      in the morning we walk along the highway, eat breakfast, bees are all over our food. You seem so distress, you fear, but I pay no attention to all what men do. later that night i see you and your passive aggressive girl with a beautiful voice is there too, I drink my drink, I'll be okay. maybe I won't.
      x
 

Almanac is thrilled to present the first solo exhibition by Maria Gorodeckaya, coinciding with the opening of the new space and studio complex in Bermondsey.

Investigating the power structures which establish the normative imaginary of female identity, desire and pleasure, Maria’s work explores the dynamics of representation within processes of political subjectivation. The installation brings to light the frictions of a sentimental narrative, revealing the vulnerability of a surface and the stratification of affects in the configuration of identity. The residues and marks trace the movements of signification which define the physical manifestations of a body. The performativity of a gender and the artificiality of the language that establishes it delineate a porous territory defined by relations between subjects. Their borders, as a membrane, connect and demarcate the movements between the individual and the collective. In this terrain, positions and roles set by social structures, slide across the surface of things as a fluctuation of waves which efface one another.

The space is used as a stage to eradicate, overlay and set traces of actions, relations between bodies, and movements of desire. Dance poles are cast in beeswax to take on minimal and ephemeral connotations transcending their sexual meaning. Feelings as facts appear like open wounds mechanically made on the floor. The concrete piece heals over the movements of a performer dancing on its unset surface. The materiality of the works embodies and makes visible the performativity and the labour of a process of disclosing affects. A sedimentation of feelings arise.