THE VOICE OF MY OWN ECHO 2/2

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.

☞ This is part 2 of The Voice of my own Echo. You can read part 1 here.

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.

16. February 17th

Dear guests, dear artists,

When you are a critically-oriented artist with a practice that presupposes awareness of the social engagement your actions generate, some questions always come up.

They can be sharp spears pointed at the normative paradigm (un)consciously held by an institution – and ANY human gathering can be considered institutional; or they can be the smothering pillow insulating us from perceiving the pathways that lead us to our current situation (how did we get here?). Us, who change, us, who resist, us who stay the same, us, who move slightly, who give way, us who gather and are gathered.

For the O – rooom, some of these questions may be:

What kind of guests and collaborators do you want to attract?
What power does this space hold in the imaginary of the city?
What does Copenhagen need, that you can offer?
What is your role in gathering interested individuals into communities with strengthened bonds?
How can this space support the multiplication of narratives and their autonomy?
And – can I be a part? I, who am reading, I, who am writing.

Talking to my friends Martin & Bodil helped come up with some of these questions (they came over Zoom). Learn to ask them together, and I hope we can continue to practice it with each other and in our relations.

Even a spear can make a gentle caress, spark a pleasurable tingle. Spears and pillows, it is all about how we handle them.

– Yours truly, Marina D.

17.

Think of a tree. Of the fruit it bears and the animals that come feed, of the moss lined within the bark and the vermin gnawing at its roots. A tree, a body, a house, any system, any dense mesh of relations. Ecology? This room is the tree, what do you think? it jumped into the paper as a patch of land, and so – I want to share this paragraph drafted for another letter:

“Cultural spaces could be managed as patches of fertile land: the first seeds will grow and change the chemistry of the soil, determining what else can thrive in the same environment. The next species to come will create a balance with the original conditions. This community will never be able to accommodate or hold the needs of every plant and insect and bacteria and life-forms that exist in that region; but as caretakers of this process, we can and should be mindful of how our choices and methods are able to attract and nourish both wasps and elderflower, or if they will only cater to snails while being aggressive to everything else. And then, you can and should consider that your patch of land, too, does not exist in a vacuum: around it the earth extends, creasing into ocean-filled bays evaporating into the atmosphere. Our divisions are tricks of perception necessary for survival, a limit that life imposes and from which all manner of creative and destructive energies sprawl.”

18. Postcards IV-VI

“Kopenhagen”

19. February 24th

Dear O-rooom,

As time tends to, much has revolved since I last wrote you. I’ve dropped into one more nest of white walls at “Fonte”, an independent art space where I have been invited as a guest resident, this one artist-run and lacking in public funding. Here I feel concentrated, potent. Being close to other artists lives makes our peculiar trade feel attainable. I was shocked to realize most of my friends from the bachelors have since strategized their way out of contemporary art, working as teachers, designers, and workshop technicians. Between the gallery and the university, there doesn’t seem to be much room for expectations of sustenance as an artist in Brazil.

But at Fonte I am surrounded by people further ahead in their careers, who continued to bet on the art system. It’s hard to avoid the thought that most of them come from wealth. And if they don’t, they certainly chose to have amicable relations with it, perhaps free of the revolt I feel when I compare and contrast my own privileged working conditions in Cph to the harsh struggle that desensitizes and toughens most of the population in my city.

Ten to twelve artists at a time have their studios at Fonte. One of them has his actual home, bed and shower and fridge and all. They share two kitchens, a resting area with books, embroidered armchairs and a vinyl player, a sunny balcony and a backyard surrounded by climbing foliage; and an ample gallery, three or four times your size, studded with two impressive rotating walls.

On the second day of residency, me, Bruno, Tetê, Sofia and Renato decided to join our tables. The individual studios that had been offered us thus became two large common areas: work tables for laptops and tools, walls and space for experimentation. We didn’t know anything about each other and weren’t too worried about our practices’ interactions, fit and friction; we are here for it, and we are happy in this way.

I received your news with equal parts nerves and celebration. O-rooom is reborn! At last? What had we been waiting for! O – Overgaden’s survival is reassured! There was a party! Happy faces and contentment. But oh, what was made of the brightly colored geometric pie-chart furniture? The softly curved amphitheater steps and moody champagne curtains? Have they evolved yet into a vision for the future!? My fingers move toward my laptop’s touchpad to finally check the pictures Vera has sent; I palpitate.

Oof, it’s a relief to see you’ve kept to yourself! Looking through the .jpges, I imagine the fairies of elegance, coziness and functional minimalism paying a visit to clean up, tone down and tighten, seeking a warm hosting landscape.

The pie-chart tables and benches were originally modules for a specific exhibition display. They were re-painted in a dark, subdued tone, and received cute pillows in the hopes of inviting guests into stretching their limbs and times. The pillows on the benches are held together by thick safety straps, a simple and objective solution that can also be used to tie benches together in a shelf formation, enhancing flexibility and preserving a splash of color. This kind of resource is already a part of the vocabulary of installs and de-installs. You gained a simple bar and tables by the windows. Though still heavy and a bit awkward to move around, this furniture can disappear and re-appear on demand.

I was afraid of something more drastic, that luxuriating forces would be stronger than the earnest desires I have attempted to locate together with you. There’s something important that I resonate with here, though! A certain spirit of improvisation.

To observe (and work from) what already is present, to opt for interventions that enhance possibilities and offer support for plural manifestations, preferably with low material investment for the sake of relational sustainability, resulting in immediate but transitory solutions – these are values that I believe to be present in the trajectory of the past few months, welcome my friend!

From my own turmoil, crossing bodies and frictions that pile on me at each moment, I’m actually weirded out to recognize myself right there with you.

Or, you know. I dig your vibe.

(The estrangement of right now; of finding myself within,
myself in this room, me there with you now).

At Fonte, isn’t this also exactly what we strive for?

Sofia, another guest resident, works exclusively with found materials from the streets, usually wood and cardboard. If we speak of improvisation, here it is, raw. She turns the rubble into toys, sculptures and installations that invite the body. They want to be touched and played with. But what happens when she brings them into the gallery? My eyes roam, spilling aesthetic, formal readings. My hands behave, losing their willpower until the white-cube spell can be unmade in conversation with the artist, who grants permission, and at last the exchange and entanglement can instigate me to the point of manipulation and play.

I’m noting down my readings while “adjacent” to these processes, Sofia’s and your own. I feel as an erratic witness making light of evaluation criteria, trying to perceive the pathways that open or close as we shift positions, either by choice or spontaneous relation to our surroundings. Trying to understand, too, if the changes we are available – and willing – to catalyze reach into our very core.

There are two dangers apparent to me in improvisation. You risk sustaining an impoverished relation further than what its means allow, with constant patches and readjustments that bury the no-longer adequate structures and keep them from being worked through. And you risk imposing an over-excited will that exercises its creative power with little regard to holding space for the fermentation that liberates energy from one form of organization into another, at the expense of a networked environment.

I imagine another person, another witness erratic, a different attitude. Someone who would prefer to step into an O – rooom filled with grass and the scent of herbs and spices, with graffiti scrawls every inch of the walls to the pulse of trance-like electronic music in the darkness of closed curtains.

Perhaps even this person can share in the same values we do, O – rooom. Aesthetics has its limits. I’m here, in this exercise with you, so we can also sharpen our sensibility between the lines, footnotes and blank spaces.

Can the reality of these white walls sustain such idealism?

20. February 29th

Sometimes I fantasize with a network of tunnels connecting all galleries and art spaces in the world, an infestation of monotonous white spaces, a secret language of electric lightning, bold fashion choices, status anxiety and art speak; I never fantasize with this, it is, simply, my life.

My stark anti-commercial education protests:

why should any culturally exuberant country have contemporary artists?

To professionalize art and expression to a restrict few is a disgraceful marriage of aristocratic values with speculative capital, we should be empowering people to be artistic agents in the co-creation of life every step of the way!

My stark anti-commercial education also gently proposes that a lifelong commitment to academic study is the most suitable tonic for such ideologies.

You spin me ‘round, right ‘round, right ‘round…

21. February 29th

Fonte has rotating walls. This is striking to say the least. As soon as my colleague Tetê learned of it, she yearned to make work where they spin by themselves. I’m sure the idea struck all of us, but she was the one to wrestle it into reality, hiring an “arduino guy” within the first week.

I love the rotating walls because they allow me to come through, gently indicating directions rather than blocking my passage. I love the rotating walls because they are also pathetic beings, illuded into futile movement that is able to perform but not actualize agency and freedom. I also love the rotating walls because this continuous performativity is nonetheless able to shift their surroundings into a softer, more pliable and exponential space of possibilities, stimulating air to circulate and ideas to unsettle. They teach me something about how hopeless absolutes in isolation can still have tremendous power for positive change when active in relation.

They are also ridiculously simple to implement and I am convinced rotating walls would make most people’s lives better.

They do catch you, but also offer the escape.

22.

Dear echoes of a life hosted by these walls,

humming buzz of what we did and tried,

dear handprints and traces

still warm under the paint

dear ghosts who talk to us

values reverberating:

You are in this room.
and the people who help you be here:
friends, family, government officials
who organize your paperwork, for example.
In this room there are probably even more artists
than you imagine, even if you do imagine a lot of artists already –
they all come haunt
the places that leave food out
for them.

How do you end up here?

Do you walk through the door? Do you need an invitation? Do you come often and do you come for the drinks? Do you come to get lost, or just to ask for directions? Do you come to sit, or to see, do you listen? Do you walk around or hold still; do you come because someone told you to, is that person close to you? Are they your boss, or your teacher? Does your presence here necessitate economic terms, or can you just be? Do you need to be attended? Would you like to buy a beer? Do you need information, would you like to have a chat? Did you remember to say hello to the receptionist? Can we be here together?

There are other people here, and they know you know you – plural you plural, you, plural, you are in this room, together now, yet if you lose them from sight – them and not you them and not you them and not you, I bet you sigh with relief. I wish the people in this room would kiss, caress and fuck.
Kiss, caress, and fuck this room.

This room is made of many opinions.

Do you trust me, the room?
In this room there are trust techniques.
Come pray at me (tricksters, you see?)

And the people who continue to give time to art in their lives,
most of them, all of them

gathered here today
networks of complicity.

The important thing is not to see, to touch or to feel
but to share what is seen, touched and felt
to open up rooms and rent space in each-other
this room in me greets this room in you.

The people in this room do not come from so far away. But they are also not the closest neighbors. There are different types of gardens for them, too.
I am sure that all of the art poltergeists are in this room, but I am not sure if all of the art poltergeists are in this room. There are worker poltergeists, aristocrat ones too. Mostly those ones.

I am in this room.
The cleaning ladies are in this room.
They came in while I was still working and my presence surprised them.
We took in each-others breaths and they carried on.
I guess they don’t believe in ghosts.
I can hear a singing woman,
and her voice is in this room.

23. March 4th

Agitation. The past couple of months have been so agitated. I could barely keep-up. The city throws you around, people invade you. You learn to crowd together, your body loses its limits, and it is all for the better. There’s a roaring sense of life expanding.

I can’t and won’t explain, or put it in a bottle.

But I have been trying to make a kind of confetti blend charged with this joyful violence. Here is a sample.

I wish you, too, can experience this someday. And that O – Overgaden can be a set for unsettlement.

See you soon –

Marina Dubia

24. March 31st

Dear guest,

Thank you for browsing through these letters.

Dear O-rooom,

Thank you for offering us a meeting space to be and do, erratic or continuous, for offering me a space to flood in and experiment.

Dear guest,

I hope at times these letters hooked you into a world of what could be, and that other times they made you tune into your own predisposition. Before we continue tracing the paths of our own entanglements, let’s take a moment to cultivate an alert body. And let’s take a moment to accompany.

Thank you for accompanying me.

a hug,

and my warmest wishes,

Marina Dubia

GUEST ARTISTS:

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.

Julia Coelho (BR/ES)

around your neck
I can warm up your vocal chords
My soft, silky touch
languid like the letter “N” carved by a ~
teaches you to speak in another language
they call me “pañuelo”

I flew from Spain and floated on the Baltic Sea
I was a seagull, a jellyfish, a fish of satin skin
I am now a deposit of salty tears from the feeling of longing
Wet, thirsty for so so fresh water from that clay filter
I learned the language of birds with Fahlstrom
I sought in his maps, in his gardens
an argument

and now you can speak

the letter “O” makes a swirling sound
of spinning and turning into a circle
“O” has the sound of a joyful invitation
the O-room has four corners like me
melting easily like a square silk scarf
wrapping around a waist
a head
a throat

holding tight, letting go

Shima (BR)

“YOU ARE HERE”

I would like to thank Vinícius Maffei, for his helping hand and enthusiasm, Amilcar Packer for his guidance, O – Overgaden for the openness & opportunity, and my colleagues over at the School of Conceptual and Contextual Practices, a “community of learning”.

Oct. 2022 – Lisbon, São Paulo, Copenhagen – Mar. 2023.