Artists: Goda Palekaitė & Adrijana Gvozdenović, Rachel Pimm & Graham Cunnington, We Work in the Dark (Luiza Prado de O. Martins & Obaro Ejimiwe)

Curated by Anna Santomauro & Laura Clarke (Arts Catalyst)

What matters matter? How does matter circulate within, around and through bodies? What kinds of interactions, metabolisms and exchanges does matter participate in?

I as it, or stones that vibrate brings together three collaborative artist projects, each developed in dialogue with a particular landscape and the more-than-human forces that continue to bring it into being.

Currents, minerals, molecules, rhizomes are active agents, exerting forces that shape cultural forms, histories and politics — as political theorist Jane Bennett puts it in Vibrant Matter, they are “themselves powerful, material assemblages with resistant force.”

In the works presented in the show, this resistant force — the agency of matter — emerges as a political actant in different ways: through unsettling encounters with organic and inorganic matters ingrained in rocks, sounds of leaking iron particles intoxicating rivers that turn orange, and eroded pebbles on a beach revealing traces of concealed military histories.

The exhibition attempts to evoke a somatic conversation between multiple actants, including water, rocks, magnetic fields, and iron – around their own agency and the kinships, animacies and conflicts that they instigate.

The exhibition presents following three works:

Acknowledging the Earth as a historical character, learning from cosmologies and ecologies, and acting as amateur storytellers, Goda Palekaitė and Adrijana Gvozdenović’s Anthropomorphic Trouble (2021) traces their journey from their trouble, from incomprehensibility, through a landscape of associative thinking. The research started in their heads situated in Brussels, later travelled to places like the Jurassic coastline and Abbotsbury Swannery in Dorset, Arts Catalyst’s office in Sheffield, Nikola Tesla’s museum in Belgrade, etc. In the exhibition space of tranzit.sk, the project is presented in its new iteration, sharing research, stories, artefacts and artworks within a spatial installation. On the opening night, Palekaitė and Gvozdenović will guide the audience through Anthropomorphic Trouble in an artists’ talk.

What kind of river has no middle? (2022) is a new sound work and installation by We Work in the Dark (Luiza Prado de O. Martins & Obaro Ejimiwe), developed in collaboration with the Slana river in Slovakia. In 2019, the Brumadinho Dam disaster caused catastrophic loss of life and environmental damage in Minas Gerais State, Brazil. The dam contained the tailings — byproducts of mining operations — of a nearby iron ore mine; the toxic mud spilling from the dam changed the course of bodies of water, and affected water supply in the region.

an earshare / to cassay the earthcrust (2021) is a collaboration between artist Rachel Pimm and Graham Cunnington, founding member of the industrial music collective Test Dept. A video and audio work, an earshare / to cassay the earthcrust considers the matter and antimatter of the pebbles that make up the shingle landscape of Orford Ness, a former military testing site on England’s south coast that has been repurposed as a nature reserve.

For more information visit please: tranzit.sk / exhibition / i-as-it-or-stones-that-vibrate

Cover picture: Rock research image (2022). Courtesy of We Work in the Dark (Luiza Prado de O. Martins & Obaro Ejimiwe).