Ord, Udstillinger, RejserMARINA DUBIASeptember 01, 2023Marina Dubia, Overgaden, EnglishComment

THE VOICE OF MY OWN ECHO 1/2

Ord, Udstillinger, RejserMARINA DUBIASeptember 01, 2023Marina Dubia, Overgaden, EnglishComment

I have recently completed a letter-based installation in O – Overgaden, The Voice of My Own Echo. Considering it is essentially a series of texts, it would make sense to give it an "after life" and publish it online. There are approximately 24 handwritten letters, plus three contributions from guest artists. They contain musings on my trajectory between territories (Lisbon, Copenhagen, São Paulo) and the quirks of working as an artist across different value-systems. They are mostly directed at the space of the O – Rooom, as I explored a way to remain connected to O – Overgaden from a distance.

From O–Overgaden’s Vera Østrup: In her performative work Marina Dubia is concerned with strengthening our relationships of trust with other people and places, through risk-taking and physical engagement. From November 2022 through June 2023, through the performance project Flooding In, Marina Dubia will work her way into O – Overgaden’s DNA and out onto the streets of Christianshavn. With live performances, workshops, and interventions in O – Rooom, Dubia questions the art institution’s location, importance, and visibility in the local area. Dubia starts this long-term project with the new work The Voice of My Own Echo. At a distance – from both Portugal and Brazil – this stage of Dubia’s project entails her sending letters, essays, and found objects to O – Rooom while the space undergoes a major renovation. Dubia considers writing as a physical embrace of the exhibition space and a manifestation of several movements: her own journey between countries, the transformation of O – Overgaden’s space toward a new identity, and the movements between writing and art making.

Marina Dubia, The Voice of My Own Echo. Photo: Christian Brems.

1. October 26th

Dear ones in the O-rooom,
I write from a city white and luminous like an art gallery, Lisbon.

Here energies from the north and south have a go at each other – Scandinavians are among the immigrants who inflate the real-stat balloon, shop, dine and wine, while another type of immigrants build, serve and agitate the streets. I write from a distance, an imperative ever since I moved from São Paulo to Copenhagen four years ago.

Distance became the logic of my body, a ground to be made fertile. I wanted to become a bridge where these same energies meet. It is the place where I care for everything I loved, and left, and everything I love, and hold.

Without distance there is no listening, no vision, no touch, no possible relation: a pulsating ball of indistinct sensation.

I needed to come here, this city and this room, where you stand now with me, to feel my contours. To breathe. In these spaces, I expand.

How do you feel here?

2. November 1st

I tend to enjoy art galleries and museums, places that look like they are empty. There are less things that call my attention, and I can take large strides, turn suddenly, sigh loudly and wave my arms around. I am probably the only guest in the room, anyway.

I relate to myself first. That’s the trick. This kind of room wants to be the playground of my sensations. Then comes art. And relating to art, a relation under a microscope. You can only touch and be touched through the pressure of looking. The jester in me is released, but the joyous spirits of others may stop at the door.

3. November 18th

In dance classes, instructors will often ask that you arrive, do what you need to arrive, as we arrive in the space… We warm up the bodies, and we warm up the room. We walk, look, take hold of where we are. Give it a good massage. Touch the walls.

We wander into a gallery knotted in our own entanglements. My attention kicks in, loosening the mesh. There is the pressure of looking, and there is the choreography of interests.

There is an attitude of consumption, demand, a game of judgements and sentences. Theories and fantasies.

And another one, of making company, attending, supporting and being together. Sit down next to me. It is that much more difficult.

Why do you wander into a gallery?
What can you find here that you can’t find elsewhere?

Give it a good massage. You have a jaw, and heels. A great muscle called psoas wedged from inside your hips to your lower spine. Relax your forehead. Your tongue. Settle into your bones and each bean-sized gland. Remember you have liquids squirming through you, and a pancreas. Kidneys. A heart. Lungs. We stand through the delicate assembly of these structures. The floor, and the earthen scum below. Decisions, managers, staff; their negotiations and desires. The hands that operate the machines that sewed your shoes. Shipping companies, air travel, information exchange. You pull air that has been cooled by the walls and warm it up in your nostrils. Have you ever seen images zooming into a molecule? Each particle surrounded by infinite space.

That’s
how we can move.

These are warming up letters.

Warmest
Kindest
Best
Attentiously,
Attentively,
Atenciosamente,

4. November 21st

Every time I have dozed off in a video projection room, gotten excited with a clever aesthetic solution, or left a gallery buzzing with questions and an urge to share, those spaces have been homes to me.

They have been places where my worries rest.

Then curiosity comes, not hunt or creation. Open pores.

Looking out my kitchen window in Lisbon, there is an intricate patchwork of colorful balconies, patios and rooftops. I pour myself on each detail, growing softer. I try to keep up with diversity. Life proposes, re-arranges. I participate in the effervescence, arriving somewhere unsettled.

A pavement lined in white stones is sure to make the Portuguese feel at ease. It makes me homesick, too. They are a feature of Brazilian sidewalks. A leftover trace from a time the people here will insist on commemorating, tiny caravels perched atop light poles. Before we realize, we have nested in barricades and ruins.

Yet the scattered texture of the pavement offers me the same kind of space than the one in-between my tendons and fascia, fatty tissue and veins. Through these gaps, it’s as if the whole city could shed its weight.

The streets greet me with a principle of multiplicity.

5. November 25th

One night last November, I cooked dinner for a danish friend. He scrambled around the flat looking for candles, though this was not a blackout situation. “Coziness” was imperative.

The preference puzzles me.
Wouldn’t fluorescence better help us resist the gloom?

I feed on white light.

The same harsh light that keeps offices ticking and pierces the future. I wish to feed on this light. To stifle it in my stomach’s dreams while I cry out to friends in the night. I want an alert body that keeps on dancing.

May art galleries give way to what won’t be seen and won’t be known.

It is cold all of a sudden. Tomorrow I come to Copenhagen, and from there continue toward São Paulo, summer, and carnival.

6. Postcard I

“Please protect me from what I take for granted.”

7. Postcard II

“Keep me company in my distances.”

8. December 12th

Heat disorganizes, agitates. The gallery organizes, do you see it? agitation puts me at ease: sacred is to be fast on your feet, not this guilt you have been carrying.

Look at these objects, these walls. They are so lonely.

Now we need to speak about distributing responsibilities.

Ps. Have you already spotted my accent, behind the words?

9. December 14th
— Rivera, the frontier between Uruguay and Brazil

I walk the fenced perimeter of Campo Abierto. I clap toward the woods, and listen to the echo reverb on the white flesh of eucalyptus. They reproduce themselves. The echo gets trapped in their regular grid. Nature nature nature nurture nature a little less rich. A little less. Rich, a little less.

The woods clap back, but they’re unable to break through into the field and the sky this side of the property. That’s the direction.

10. January 2nd

Dear Vera,

When I am done with this letter I will pull up my e-mail and recap our last meeting. After being carried over the Atlantic, the height of the trees and the scrambled textures of São Paulo hit me with such strength that it feels as if Copenhagen, O – Overgaden and my European friends are all a private hallucination. It will be a shock to pierce the distance with high-definition-video-call-technology next Friday.

Since being tasked with reflecting with and along the O – room, I have been obsessed with the image of a clay water filter. I have one of them next to me right now, in my grandmother’s kitchen, and there is one in my mother’s house, and pretty much in every Brazilian home, and I wish there would be one in O – Overgaden.

I know that in Copenhagen you can get potable water in every faucet, but something has always felt off-putting about drinking water from the toilet sink. In Beboerhus they have been serving tea for free since 1975 (and they are really proud of it). The clay filters speak of my homesickness, but also of the gesture of welcoming and being welcomed.

During my bachelors I discovered commercial art galleries were free to visit, and naively started to think of them as cultural centers like any other, interested in offering cultural services for the population at large. Sure, it felt awkward and stiff to be there by yourself, you and the art, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it yet. I developed a trick to feel at home: I would always ask for the toilet, and for a glass of water. The basics, really. And so I told whoever was there to hear that they, too, can go to art galleries.

Recently someone suggested – in a vaguely concrete way – that I present my portfolio to a gallery I admire. I cried on the spot. I have been looking at institutions and wondering who they welcome, and who they leave out. Now I realize I spent most of my life as one of the people left out.

There is an element in this of my class, race and gender. But also a challenge to how artists and institutions see their roles in nurturing meaning in the lives of people, and their conscious desires and efforts to shape this capacity. They say we should listen to our heart, right? That’s how I got here. I only ever stepped into a gallery because I started studying art. I think this is the case for many of us. But now that we are here, we need to learn to listen to the many hearts and many beats.

This is not poetry – go outside on the street. Go out and imagine each heart in each body that is walking by. But commit to the exercise and imagine their peculiarities, where they are coming from, the turmoils they are engaged in, their entanglements.

When you do that, it shifts around what feels important, doesn’t it?

What’s beating in this room?

11. January – sometime after the 2nd, before the 3rd

Finished with the letter, I open my e-mail. A white expanse framed by sleek drop-shadow greets me. In my 93 year old grandma’s home or set against December blackness in the O – room, no matter where I am the sharp white arrives to my eyes in the exact same way.

I open my e-mail and type a message to Vera.
In-between, nothing really happened.

I “traveled” and “moved” and “brought” and “crossed” and even “turned” a couple times over, but the white pulls me back; it is where I live now.

And then: the pungent smell of creamy rich dark chocolate that was just served to the table in front of me, in a coffee shop tucked on the second floor of a bookstore in Avenida Paulista, at 20:51.

12.

She didn’t know it yet. Head in the clouds, there was no here and now anymore. The more she struggled to find ground, territory, magnetic forces pulled her into the air and spun her out into a cloud, pulverized into particles that migrate around a sun and mingle with dust. Only bursts of affection in varying intensities could momentarily gather her up into a form of being; in those moments she appeared terrified at her own delight.

13. January that same day —

They say we should listen to our heart, right? That’s how I got here, was it?

I wrote that. Did I lie? Did I get here by “listening to my heart”?

I also wrote this: I only ever stepped into a gallery because I started to study art. Galleries were very far from my heart. Hearts have rooms in them, four little spaces where blood rushes with full prejudice. A blinding red cascade with the taste of iron. They’re like galleries, in that way, interlocked rooms gushing with full force: art, life – what does it matter? Precisely my point: what does matter?

What does matter do? Back to rooms. Bricks and paint, that’s it right? Some structural metal beams, pipes, wires. The floor to step on. What is there to listen to here? Walls don’t speak. (The beat of our own hearts? – be quiet). Well, of course they don’t – you don’t try talking to them much, do you, they won’t have much to reply then if you don’t go ahead and. Hey, hello, my room my heart, what can I offer you? Can I be here for a second before you hit me with your pulse? In case you don’t remember your biology classes: there’s atriums and chambers, that’s how they’re called, we are here in this heart and now what? Blood needs space to flow, and love too, I think.

In museums they try to hold onto things forever, that’s not very good, right? Not very right, not good now, for us, not very heart-like-health-like. Good thing here we are just an arrangement of bricks, cement, metal, paint and veins, no transcendence required.

14.

If you can listen to god then you can listen to walls too. I’m sure some sound artist has stuck some microphones to them at some point too, at many points even.

15. Postcard III

“miss your gaze looking back at what we can still do”

GUEST ARTIST:

Three guest artists have contributed with “The Voice of My Own Echo”:

Julia Coelho (BR/ES) with her “scarf letter”;
Nazario Díaz (ES) with his “score letter”;
and Shima (BR) with his work “Você Está Aqui” (“You are here”), a postcard made with blood from the artist in 2014, edition of 1000.

Julia & Nazario were invited to relate to the O – rooom from a distance, making original contributions; while Shima’s work was acquired to mark the end of “The Voice of My Own Echo”s trajectory.

Nazario Díaz (ES)

Dear Marina,

How are you?

Once I wrote a text by mistake. It was a commission. But due to an oversight, I did not attend to what they asked me, and I ended up writing what I felt like. That ended up being a fortune. Reflections on something that interested me in the relationship with the "sacred objects" that we can find in a museum, and with which we interact. "Fucking with a rock or towards a spiritual proximity", is what that text was called.

I think of a kind of spiritual distance that connects us with things. An ascending, invisible and pulsating trajectory. A place where you don't speak in meters. A threshold from which the visible and the audible escapes us. A territory that connects us with what is in us, and is also in those objects. I like to get dangerously close to them when I perform. Transcend the permitted distance.

The following fragment is for you, dear visitor of the O – rooom:

Following the idea of Marina's warm-up letters, choose one of the most prized pieces on display, one that you like, and put yourself next to it. Observe it. Find something that opens your appetite, somewhere in the sculpture, the painting or the installation. Connect with it. Perhaps it is at the height of your head, or of your knee. Approach it, little by little, until you are close by three or four centimeters. Breath on it. Give it warmth. Feel whether the staff in the room gets restless or if they come toward you. Keep calm, it is fine, you are not "touching" the piece.

Happy day 😊
Nazario

☞ Read part 2 of The Voice of my own Echo here.

MARINA DUBIA

Marina Dubia (BR/DK) (b. 1992) is a wandering artist and writer at the frontiers between visual arts, dance and discourse. She works with flesh, bones, dust and institutions; with words and their effects on us. Marina holds and MFA from the School of Conceptual and Contextual Practices of the Art Academy in Copenhagen and was part of the performative arts program PACAP 4, at Fórum Dança, Lisbon. Over the course of 2023 she will work with confetti as an emotionally charged performative tool. ARIEL, O-Overgaden, Fonte and Pivô are her partner structures in this research. Recent exhibitions include The Voice of My Own Echo (O-Overgaden), Fear and Fauna (ARIEL Feminisms) and Transition Exhibition (Kunsthal Dahlem).