THEY ARE PLACES WITHOUT LEAVES (cities have no name for me)

THEY ARE PLACES WITHOUT LEAVES (cities have no name for me) entangles the work of eight artists – Juliet Aaltonen, Leo Arnold, Elena Giolo, Arthur Jules, Luis Lecea, Niklaus Metteler, Kleoniki Stanich and Sophie Wright – who share a collective interest in the artistic impulse of preservation and the rhythms and layers of life cycles. As if weathered by time, the architecture of the space gestures to a city abandoned to natural forces; a ‘non-place’ where humans and their grand efforts have been decentralised, only their traces remaining.

Inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, a collection of prose-poems that conjure 55 fictitious cities through enigmatic texts, the exhibition breaks free from the confines of a white-wall gallery show to invite visitors into a sensorial relationship to the work on view. Each artist was invited to collaborate with artist and scenographer Arthur Jules to create spatial interventions that host their work. United into an ecosystem of interacting parts, these fragments come together to form a mysterious whole where whoever enters becomes less a ‘viewer’ and more a ‘traveler.’

It is the encounter between different mediums that life begins to spill back into these architectural remains. Working across sculpture, video, sound, painting, and scent, the artists brought together in THEY ARE PLACES WITHOUT LEAVES each touch on the idea of preservation whether explored by humans through ritual or the painterly gesture of still life or in the processes of nature and its materialities. In and through these diverse artistic mediums and their varying relationships to time and states, the space becomes animated with questions and reflections around loss and memory as cycles of birth and death play out across it. Proposing a counterpart to our increasingly sterile, screen-based, chaotic reality, for a short chunk of time Arti & Amiticae transforms into a space of oscillating temporalities, materialities and sensations.

Curation: Elena Giolo, Sophie Wright, Arthur Jules

Graphic design: Cleo Tsw

Documentation: Özgür Atlagan, Arthur Jules