Category: … essays
Then the Letting Go
Forever’s Gonna Start Tonight Aaron Aryadharma Matheson 23 May – 15 June 2024 Liverpool St. Gallery, Sydney [First published in 2024 as catalogue essay for Forever’s Gonna Start Tonight, Liverpool St. Gallery] Monday mid-morning and we’re at church. It’s a compact old one, on top of a hill in a leafier pocket…
Gardening Essentials / in Uncertain Arrangements with Ghosts, Among Others
[Published in Judith Wielander & Gilly Karjevsky (eds.) Parckdesign 2016: Jardin Essentiel, Parckdesign, Brussels, 2020. The book documents Jardin Essentiel, a public art project with medicinal herb garden and distillation lab in Parc Duden, Brussels, on which I worked over the summer of 2016]. In the beginning there was a…
Creole Gardens: Growing Otherwise
[Originally published in Hans Ulrich Obrist and Asad Raza (eds.) Mondialité Or the Archipelagos of Édouard Glissant, Brussels, Skira/Boghossian Foundation Villa Empain, 2017. Also translated into French for the French edition]. The question of how to live amongst plants must emerge peculiarly in those times and places experiencing what could…
Collective objects of anxiety: Things encountered and enacted in Paris, Autumn 2015
[Originally published 2016 in un Magazine 10.1: ‘Co-Workers’] It’s early October and I’ve come to Bétonsalon Centre for Art and Research for the opening of Co-Workers: Beyond Disaster. Three months since arriving in Paris, disaster is already decidedly in the air. The United Nations COP21 climate change talks (expected by most to be…
Plan Bienen: Sharing (in) the more-than-human city
[Text by Tessa Zettel & Sumugan Sivanesan; originally published 2016 in A Peer Reviewed Journal About_Excessive Research, Vol. 5, Issue 1. DARC (Digital Aesthetics Research Centre), Aarhus University, Denmark, 2016.] o This text circulates in and around a series of honey trades, conducted by the authors as a form of artistic…
Autonomy/Autarky or ‘Are you sure that’s normal?
[Conversation & photo essay originally published 2013 in Runway Issue 23: ‘Prototype’] In August 2013 Tessa Zettel (TZ) and Sumugan Sivanesan (SS) spent a week in residence at the Summer School for Applied Autonomy, a project by Berlin-based Greek artist Valentina Karga. The Summer School is ‘a research initiative interested in…
Being an Account of Rain and the Various Ways to Capture it
Extract from the first printed title by ‘Tilting at Windmills Press‘, an underground publishing house that compiles and distributes anonymously authored pamphlets, each exploring a different encounter with weather in which things are not as they seem There is a little well at the back of the cottages, bound by…
Eating with Intent
Tessa Zettel [Published in Das 500, December 2011] In recent years, much of the work I’ve made in collaboration with Karl Khoe has been eaten. Not by us (the host rarely gets a chance), but by people who’ve been invited into an unusual space of exchange facilitated by the presence…
Remembering Ahead (Or How I Never Learnt to Play Bridge)
[First published as catalogue text in Kathryn Gray (ed.) Rules of Play, Tin Sheds Gallery, Sydney 2011] o o North: so spades is always the highest, isn’t it? South: no that’s only in the bidding West: you’ll learn by playing, you will. North: let’s just have a crack East: that’s…
Land-escapes: à propos of time, the city and its other
Tessa Zettel & Karl Khoe [First published in Zanny Begg & Lee Stickells (eds.), The Right to the City, 2011, Tin Sheds Gallery, Sydney University] At one end of a darkened room or corridor is a curious construction attached to the wall and spot lit. The object is the reverse…