Matilde Cerruti Quara – INTERGALACTIC INTIMACY - PART II
Matilde Cerruti Quara’s INTERGALACTIC INTIMACY takes advantage of the intimate small space where we are usually alone to imagine the expansive potential of the mind and the power to change inspired by what is unexpected.
Matilde Cerruti Quara, INTERGALACTIC INTIMACY - PART II, 2023. Images credit: Beth Davis, courtesy the artist and SAC
The commission for our restrooms encompass audio and written poetry in an immersive installation designed as a space to reflect upon contemporary visions of space travel, weightlessness, self love and the hope for movement beyond borders to “transcend transuniversal inter-humankind.”
The following interview is between Matilde Cerruti Quara and Ché Zara Blomfield, the curator at Shoreditch Arts Club who commissioned and produced the work:
For INTERGALACTIC INTIMACY you brought together many elements to transform our bathrooms into a transportative and unexpected space of reflection. You were really excited about bringing this to life as it relates to themes you’ve explored in previous works. Can you tell us about your interest in making a permanent installation in a space not typically thought of a space for art?
I love unconventional spaces for art to live in. They have the potential of being more accessible and less intimidating. I firmly believe art is an inherent component of everyone’s spirit since the time of caves when our ancestors painted on the walls, made pottery or we gathered around a stake to tell each other stories of the day’s crop or hunt. Art has to be felt with your whole heart and spirit, that is the most important thing.
So far I worked with the bed as an archetype, the living room and now the bathrooms are just the best. I’m cheekily delighted thinking my poems–one different for each cubicle–will keep company to people in the most universally shared private space. People can’t escape them as I placed my poetry exactly in front of the sinks’ mirrors. I’ll be there via my works like a little cheeky fairy spirit.
In 2023 London the pace can often be so fast that we forget to stop and reflect on what’s important. The audio poetry in the bathrooms narrates how unexpected circumstances can be vital for progressive change, how does this relate to the installation as a whole?
London these days is vacuuming out the best of me and I suspect I’m not alone feeling this way. But this is why it is so great to have sanctuaries, sacred safe spaces of peace and real connection with ourselves and our communities.
The very title INTERGALACTIC INTIMACY calls at the coexistence of two opposite concepts, one of limitless openness, infinity and distances; the other of extreme closeness.
The unexpected is a matter of shifting perspective because something happens outside of your control. Life is always surprising. It is always unpredictable. This installation is an invitation to challenge our perceived limits through love, compassion, connection, laughter, intimacy and adventure. A call to journeying within and outside ourselves.
The audio poetry was there for PART I and it is staying for a bit as I develop my finishing touch for PART II. I’m working on a new track which will mix brown, pink and white noise alongside some electronic tunes I will record. So the original sounds of the Universe, which still float in the background of our silences since after the Big Bang, intergalactic frequencies and vibrations, as well as very intimate, personally produced notes… Beware, I just got an electric guitar!
Can you tell us about INTERGALACTIC INTIMACY - PART I and how it connects to PART II?
It’s funny how the unexpected can be a great source of inspiration. PART I was never meant to happen but then a week away from your informal soft launch in January, you asked me if I could think of something last minute for the restrooms! I love a challenge so of course I said yes.
In January, I was working on my first film project, on night shoots, which means you go to bed in the early hours of the morning and are back on set in the early afternoon of the same day, again and again. You live in this completely parallel world. So perhaps because I was living nocturnally like a bat, completely disconnected from my usual reality and I was mostly surrounded by all these incredible film lights and panels, I immediately had this vision of an alternative realm, and I went on working with the pre-existing fluorescent neons to create a vivid blue environment. Then I thought: how to give life to light? And I decided to hang the disco ball. Light is a great medium. Indeed, I want to sign up for an electrician course this year. And so it happened, so the connection between the two works is that the former is a seedling of the latter.
In a Narnia-like fashion, by going to the loo at Shoreditch Arts Club you might unexpectedly be transported into another dimension, and reminded, if only for a moment, of our inter-humankindness, intergalactic belonging, beautifully chaotic interactions and meaningful connections…
We all need the loo… we all dream… we all feel.. we all wonder… instead of queuing and texting or scrolling you can experience the present of time present… maybe talk and discuss about the work, react to it.
Specifically, PART I is an ephemeral iteration, meant to last for one night only, as in a short-lived dream. For it, over the course of 8 intense hours, I created a visual landscape of blue neon light, which is quite enveloping, as well as positioning a white and a blue spotlight against a rotating disco ball to obtain a dance of luminous prisms. I used a projector to manifest this gigantic blue-green rotating galaxy against a wall. It featured short poems, evocative words, a soundscape of electronic tunes and my voice performing my poetry. Blue, black and white lipstick writings on the bathroom mirrors, as well as on the walls, with markers and glowing-in-the-dark pens. I inscribed it all in a graffiti-like way, inspired by the uncanny poetry of all those messages people leave in public toilets.
For the installation we painted the walls silver and covered the doors in mirror vinyl. What significance does silver have for you?
Oh, shining sexy silver! Manifesting the Moon, water, light, the mysteries of the sky, the divine, the spark of a small fish flying quickly across the waves, mineral rocks. I find silver so alluring, enigmatic and mystical.
The idea is to playfully evoke both a space shuttle, elements of science fiction, as well as a sacred, spiritual space. Silver, as well as the purple lighting gel used for the neons, are widely present in both contexts and instinctively it all felt just right. Purple is also the colour of the seventh chakra, our point of connection between our earthly and divine nature.
Moreover, with respect to the doors we wrapped in mirror vinyl, once again referencing a space rocket interior, or an imaginary oneiric space, I so liked the fact they could also be an imperfect reflective surface. The portrait they return to us is opaque, somehow distorted or wobbly, as if in a dream when you can’t quite see clearly.
Mirror, or any reflective surface, is recurrent in your work. One could draw obvious conceptual reasoning. Would you like to expand on your interest in these materials?
Sure! As you know I’m all about dancing with paradoxes. I find The Mirror, in its archetypal notion, a paradox per se; something trusted to offer an inescapably truthful perspective, and yet a medium which constantly shifts the subject of its reflections according to many as variable factors, not least what we want to see in it.
Then of course you have the whole ‘Alice through the looking glass’... The mirror is as well a passport... to another dimension! The door into our inner world, unconscious, identity.
I’m also obsessed with the liquid quality of mirroring surfaces. They remind me of WATER, which is my favourite element and a great source of inspiration. Ever fluid and flowing, metamorphic, transparent yet mysterious, strong, wise with its capacity of retaining memories. Ephemeral and yet eternal. I often fantasise what it would be like to be able to write on water.
Mirror Dibond aka composite aluminium well embeds that, and it has many other qualities which I’m very interested in, such as its malleability, lightness, eternal durability juxtaposed to its ephemeral looks, unbreakability, all of which makes me think of magic, the world of dreams, our fantasies and Moon dust.
It also has a naturally artificial appearance, as in it is already silver at extraction and within our culture we look at metals as something signifying a man made construction, because we built metal and concrete cities.
There is another layer in the larger artworks installed and the lobby, which is the reflections of water as seen in your studio. More gentle and poetic iterations that connect spaces. I think that this lends itself well to thinking about the more spiritual side of your practice: your work with stones a natural ephemera, could you tell our readers more about that?
My engravings are meditations on the impossible simplicity of life’s multiple truths, and on the infinite possibilities of words and language. They appear as slogans or affirmations, questions or playfully serious quotes, spells or mottoes. I always use my handwriting as a font.
I consider soapstone a natural archive of memory, layers of microorganisms retaining the passage of time, becoming pages to write on. Energy in constant transformation, never ending. Writing as a medium not to forget. Engraving, used in monuments and tombs alike, to preserve personal lived life or history forever, traces turning into a statement against unpredictable eroding elements.
The choice of a soapstone over another lies within both its colour and its plastic, sculptural possibilities. My sculptures have a Circe-like illusion, or disguise, about them: they might look like what they are not, transformed by our gaze, judgement or expectation: rose quartz, green marble, turquoise crystals...
Words are costumes for the theatre of life.
It's kind of off topic, but I am curious to bring your collection of NASA and space related T-shirts into the conversation, as they expose your passion for universal thinking. Do you have a dream to travel to space or is it a more conceptual exploration?
I love going off-topic! Fantastic question, thank you Ché. I think I’m rather intuitive than pragmatic or academic, I operate from my gut so I would not say it is a conceptual exploration.
I’m obsessed with the stars, galaxies and planets. I recently discovered via an American friend this website gathering photographs taken by Hubble Space Telescope and have been spending hours navigating its wonders.
BUT the origin of the word desire comes from the Latin de–sidera meaning ‘without the stars’. The pull towards something unknown, compelling and luminous, which by definition we cannot reach. Which becomes a passionate engine for self-growth. Dante ended the Divine Comedy with these words: l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle – the love which moves the Sun and the other stars. So on the other hand I feel like sometimes it’s good not to encounter our objects of desire. I don’t want to risk falling out of love with my ideas of what space represents. I’m a romantic.
I’m just so moved by this sense of reverence and contemplation towards something so magical, beautiful, mysterious and overwhelming, so I’m perhaps satiated by this naive feeling of observation rather than actually breaking the third wall.
I started this collection around 2017 and have been piling up new pieces ever since. It is a constant memento of the boundless nature of reality. There are many worlds within one, and just because we cannot see them all, it doesn’t mean there aren’t magnificent microcosms both within and outside us. It is a bit of my earth explorer uniform, as well as a reminder to be curious, to be daring, to think our limits are actually illusions we impose ourselves out of fear.
If anyone reading has some iconic NASA t-shirt to send my way, please do!
Matilde Cerruti Quara photographed in her installation INTERGALACTIC INTIMACY PART I by Alfie White
Matilde Cerruti Quara, 'WHEN THE GATES COME DOWN, SWEETIE, IT WILL ALL HAPPEN VERY FAST’, Jupiter Woods, London (UK), 2020.
Images credit: Manuela Barczewski, courtesy of the artist and Jupiter Woods.
