Opening: 28 February, 7pm
first floor
 

Me

Write my name on a cigarette. Put it inside you.
Remove your socks and google me.
Lie in bed and think about that one time.
When I appear call 07xxxxxxxx6 immediately.

You

I wrote your name on a cigarette. I rolled
it and I’m smoking it
now im inside u
Leg veins contract
Bad taste in mouth
I’m sitting on a tiled bathroom floor in my knickers, socks and a white t-shirt.
I take off my socks and I google you
I don’t remember the glasses?
Up on your Instagram. Still not posting. Why?

 
 
ALMANAC INN presents Room, the first solo exhibition in Italy by London-based Russian artist Maria Gorodeckaya.
Her work sits at the crossroads of writing, performance and sculpture as an investigation into the power dynamics within which identities are determined through both affective and affected bodies.
The newly produced installation looks at the sentimental resonances and reminders which inhabit and activate a lived space. Intimate moments and experiences are re-staged defining a phantasmatic scenario, where memory and imagination coexist constantly re-shaping its reality. The work frames desire and its violence into malleable matter. The feeling of a presence reverberates in a memory landscape that charges and marks the space. Its perception is experienced as result of a contact, a clash between the subject and the object of its desire. De-sidereo, far away as a star, visible but ungraspable in its essence. To reach it means to question our own identity, facing us with the fictional structures that define our reality. Because our desire is the Other’s desire (J.Lacan) . The one produced by a social and cultural construction which regulates and directs our agency, roles and dynamics. The desire staged in fantasy is not the subject’s own, it’s defined by our relation to others - a collective imagination which informs our identity.
The installation investigates these structures of domination related to gender and identity politics, looking at the imagined hierarchies that constitute pleasure, sexuality and desire. The performative aspects that form the work, which are visible only as fossilized traces, deal with the leftovers of a narrative of love and attraction. The traumatic contact and clash between our expectations and the reality enter the subject’s fantasy frame. Once we’re getting closer to the object of our desire - their constructed image - we are exposed, vulnerable, taking the risk of loosing ourselves.