What I like about this exhibition is that when you enter the gallery and see the entrance to the domes with the rainbow snake/ the Serpent of Paradise that weaves into the distance, then you feel you are at the start of a journey.
The immediate aesthetic impact is pleasing and gentle. There is no mdf and plaster board covered in white emulsion, no extra walls, plinths, or pedestals. You are not entering into a commercial environment. You are not being asked to numb your self and give in to what you are being told. You are not belittled by the enormity of an art environment. You don’t have to worry if this is where you belong or you have the right to be here or if you are wearing the right clothes to blend into the environment. This is not a whiter than white sterile environment or even a deliberate reaction to the cube. What you see has grown naturally, without anger or desperate need to be accepted into a cliché. There is space to breath. You can take this on. You can stay. But what the hell is it all about? You don’t have to know. The question is stupid but its a question that you expect to ask of art. Art makes you stupid unless you know. Art strips you naked although you think you are dressed to kill.
Sabina’s exhibition is an Apparatus for Resurgence in Trophallaxis; a tool to cultural reciprocity and mutual benefit; a method to begin to share what we need to survive. But its easy to survive, isn’t it? Isn’t capitalism great? It’s so easy, just don’t look to the side, don’t smell the soles of your shoes, wipe your arse with perfume and ignore your reeking gut.
So then, what do we need to survive? For starters we need bees and ants and flies and they need plants and flowers and they need soil and water and they need worms and microbes and bacteria and mycelium and I don’t know what the hell they need but I’m sure we all need each other.
It all sounds so corny if you think of how any sense of belonging to the land has been laughed at and ridiculed by the money-making pirates. Tree hugging hippies with their expensive clothes and middle-class privileged educations spouting about love through mass-produced chemicals, forming exclusive tribes and worshipping the sun through designer sunglasses. When really, even in the sinking wreck of our environment there is so much we can have for free. It’s actually even nonsensical to say that it is free. Plants, bees, flowers are free? What does that even mean? But no matter, that’s the language we use and I suppose it means that we are free in our own imaginations.
Each one of the objects in this exhibition is a starting point to a journey of international, shared culture and knowledge. Take a fermentation crock for example and think of the evolution of thousands of years of reciprocity with the plant and microbial world; the interconnectedness of gut, brain, plant and bacteria; a culture of working with the processes of nature, of preservation and transformation. Your life starts here.
