Mor Charpentier presents Swimming in Rivers of Glue, the first solo exhibition of Julieta Aranda in Paris.
The series of works that conform this exhibition are the result of the artist's preoccupation with the topics of hostile architecture and defensive design, and how they manifest in the 21st century construction of civic space, as the architectural policing of social boundaries.
Take the Camden Bench. Imagine the kind of body that this design demands; and, how will you modify yourself to the level of bone constitution in order to be able to lie down and take a nap in the street where this bench is found?
Spend a second looking at recent proliferation of anti-homeless spikes—though they all have the same purpose; their shape changes from city to city. How does this relate to the bodies that they are meant to keep away?
In many Latin-American cities, you will find houses that are protected against...trespassers—not with barbed wire, but by way of shards of glass embedded into the architecture of the building. Thinking about the for-profit educational turn, and profiteering of knowledge; from JSTOR-style academic journals, to Ivy League universities (such as the one where Aranda herself purchased her artistic education), the artist slices this architectural detail, and uses it to build the shelves of an inaccessible library, as a way to address the fencing-off of information and what could be seen as a concerted effort to withdraw education from the pool of common goods accessible to all.
Swimming in Rivers of Glue is the second installment of the trilogy "Stealing One's Own Corpse", in which Aranda explores notions of space—from outer space exploration and extra-planetary projections, to public space and reflections on architecture, to the examination of inner worlds from biology to psyche.
Julieta Aranda was born in Mexico City and lives between Berlin and New York. She holds a BFA in filmmaking from the School of Visual Arts, and an MFA from Columbia University, both in New York. Aranda is co-director of e-flux.
Entrada actualizada el el 17 oct de 2017
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