Swallets

Swallets adorn the landscapes she once deemed familiar and firm. The exhibition presents works by Peter Černe, Ira Konyukhova, Yein Lee, Siggi Sekira and Sonja Vulpes, exploring fictional instances at the precipice of ecological devastation. Fiction lends its tools in times when knowledge and comprehension struggle amidst the incessant currents of irregularities. Swallets open to a world in transition, into environments that beget acceptance and change. “The shops back then still bore eclectic traces of what could once have been the pinnacle of 90s design; something photographed or blogged about by a Millennial. The misplaced fragments of shapes and patterns seemed all so foreign to her. Familiar enough to still be attributed to an era, be it as a signifier or a vibe, but evading all specificity, anything that could have made it tangible, usable as a conversation starter, or a piece of reflection for the stories that she would eventually tell her friends. Missed patches of nicotine yellow haunted the corners of otherwise thoroughly repainted walls. Filled and covered holes spoke of furniture and equipment deemed obsolete and removed. The plaza did not see a lot of traffic ever since retail had lost its general appeal. Kids and teenagers gathered at McDonald’s drive-throughs and highway rest stations, deserting well-kept, confined public spaces for those of unkept and liminal kind. Comfortable in settings where escape is not only possible but persistently expected, they spent their idle days waiting for that final pick-up that would eventually get them out, as far away as possible. She found their angsty faces endearing. What is angst, if not the spirit’s struggle to cling to some semblance of hope? The rest of them had long given up on even that. ‘Could you imagine’, she thought to herself, ‘still clinging to hope?’ When idle, at times, her thoughts still tended to gather in Snap or Tweet-like bits. She considered it cringe, yet more often than not still entertained it. The musings of her media-overexposed brain were but all that made her and her peers stand out from the builders, founders and entrepreneurs that came before them. ‘Might as well binge the brain away,’ she used to joke. It is but anyone’s guess, how an entire generation found itself in the position of the marginalised, powerless enough to find agency solely in escapist fantasies that sublimate like vapours rising out of didactically drawn-out, yet nevertheless unattainable ideals set before them by their nurturers and educators. Her queer friends often snarked at her defeatist stance. Even though it was this very stance that made them friends in the first place. The lineage of power, privilege and the struggle to subvert them had by then long shed its successive, linear form and brought on a more dynamic, even if, from the perspective of their contemporaries, disorienting mode of succession. Heirs of foes suddenly found themselves rocking the same boat, burdened by their gut affinities and the lectures of social struggles preceding them. How to draw the line, if at all? Arbitrariness can seem futile until it is opportune. They had to learn that abruptly – then. Specks of dirt settled on her face. She found herself fatigued. It did not take long for the air in the enclosed plaza to still. The pungent odour of anxious glands around her made it seem thicker, viscous. In times like this, breathing stops being an automatic action and becomes a conscious, arduous endeavour. The once subtle movement gains a straining quality to it, deforming the mouth and face. Like sucking air through a sheet of cellophane, it emboldens the eyes with a trace of panic and despair. She swept the dirt off her face, sighing at the sight of the muddy enclosure. A considerable amount of time must have passed since she had ended up in the swallet. The days lost their original meaning – pondering the passage of time is now but a luxury few can afford – exhaustion, however, winds its own internal clock. The leaves of a decaying branch served her for the first few cycles of rest. Flattened in the thick patch of clay, they came to bear the shape they helped to harbour.”