“If we take a look at the animals and at the raw earth where they step on, at the organic molecules and at the fluid in which they move, at the microscopic insects, and at the matter which produces and envelops them, it is evident that matter is generally divided in living matter and dead matter.
But how is it that matter is not all alive or all dead?
Is living matter always alive?
And is dead matter always dead?
Living matter does not die?
Dead matter does ever begin to live?
Could not living molecules resume life after losing it, to lose it again and so on, to infinity?”
Denis Diderot
Mater, mother, is the place where matter is eternally generated. There is no place on earth for the eternity except in Mater. Here the life-generating mechanisms revolve in a perpetual centrifugal movement.
In this exhibition, Ana + Bethany present us with a set of sculptures that celebrate life and death, interpreting myths and rituals of the Judeo-Christian imagery related to both.
Their works are developed in surreal, surreal, mutant, but leafy and delicate structures. We thus see the rupture with a long course in figurative sculpture through distortion of all references of the natural, crossing vegetal elements with animals, visceral elements with cutaneous coverings, in a struggle for the survival of the most capable one.
Perhaps the greatest product of the nearly two-year artistic residency in the Ceramics and Earth Workshops – during which the duo experimented with ancestrally practiced conformation and cooking techniques – is precisely this approximation to a more pristine and rawer ceramic practice, where the ritual of to do is regarded as something mystical that overlaps any brighter aesthetics.