I’M IN THE BATH ON ALL FOURS… (Phase 3)
I’M IN THE BATH ON ALL FOURS… is a 3-phase visual art exhibition and interspersed series of talks, performances, workshops and screenings curated by Well Projects and artist Flora Parrott. Its premise stems from a research trip, undertaken by Flora Parrott, to learn about a recently discovered cave dwelling fish, the Cave Loach, that inhabits a labyrinthine cave network. In each phase of ‘I’m in the bath on all fours’ a pair of artists, artist-groups or researchers are invited to collaborate and expand upon notions of the sub-aqueous, engaging with the nature of water, embodied experience and the deep dark in relation to community and commonality.
For the final iteration of the project, artists Korallia Stergides & Raphael Schulenburg (in conversation with Dr Rachael Squire) have developed a site-specific installation and series of performances under the guise of their collaborative character ‘Deep Love’.
Entering into a cave system or a body of water reorients your relationship to the cartographic. The usual fixation on a determinable two-dimensional map is exchanged for a volumetric axis in which distinct entities such as temporality, relativity and materiality become entangled into a new thought space. Floating down into this space we meet Deep Love; “You are an ephemeral bubble of time just waiting to be popped”.
Interplay between spatial relativity and geological time underpins Deep Loves’ performative enquiry into environmental decision making and Planetarity; an evocation of the planet as that which exceeds human control.
Taking cues from texts and conversations with Geo-humanities Scholar, Dr Rachael Squire, the exhibition uses the proposed and imagined protective environments of sealed dome enclosures as a framework to metabolise and forecast tomorrow’s future. Using processes of storytelling, objects and monologue, Deep Love recollects, revisits and regurgitates apocryphal and on-going narratives that are unearthed in scientific predictions of our new epoch.
Through a series of reworked planetary scale arcade games, we are taken on a journey through the causalities and outcomes of gut instincts and ecological thinking, from making sense of a dream to the digestion of the Anthropocene.
“Life’s a gamble, get to know your future gut. Through the Well of today, into a Volcanic Cavity of yesterday we take an Icelandic bath into tomorrow” – Your Gastrointestinal Tract Oracle, Deep Love
