Marlo and Ena Kosovac
Conduits, props, leftovers and other attempts to reach across irreducible differences in the search for knowledge of an intimate other

24 September to 10 October 2020

In Space R you’ll find several of my attempts so far to draw back the curtain of another’s accountable experience through objects that act as a channel towards more intimate knowledge of his world. The ‘another’ in question is Marlo – a nine-year-old Rottweiler and the love of my life. Through the building and shifting of our relationship over time, which in turn has shifted how objects are made in this practice, I have come to think of Marlo very seriously as a collaborator and co-creator.

I tell you this because it feels strange even writing this little piece of text all on my own, without his input. Which, of course, would be impossible anyway. It has been a knotty problem. How do I avoid putting words into Marlo’s mouth? How do I avoid speaking for him? How do I avoid simply imagining his world, instead of getting to know a slice of it in a real, material way? At the same time, there is a risk of poking my nose into affairs that are not my own to access. I don’t think Marlo would care, but it’s something to ponder.

In putting a toe over the smudgy threshold of our different ways of being as members of two separate species, I hope to take deeper notice of the undefinable in others through co-created social intimacies and the ‘worlding’ of mutual grounds – all mediated through sculptural objects as gadgets of play and exploration.

And, because I’m sure I’m not the only nosy person out there, I invite you to do the same. Please feel free to touch and experience any of the objects in the space (if you want to). There will be sanitising wipes and sprays on-hand to help prevent other, more deadly, critters from joining in.

Artist Charles Buenconsejo has left his home in the Philippines to make a new one in New Zealand, one that promises purity and connection with nature. He instead finds a society that poses familiar challenges even as he is “making it” according to Filipino standards of progress, having migrated to First World comfort. Homelessness and poverty seem an intensifying albeit new reality for New Zealand, and the country’s aggressive push for construction in the face of this reality intrudes into his suburban dream.

Twice the migrant—first from his provincial home in Cebu to the Philippines’ capital of Manila, then to Aotearoa—the artist discovers the concept of food sovereignty and finally finds his solace in returning to the soil, the land, and transforming his front yard into a thriving vegetable garden. Using discarded materials from construction, he fashions an urban farm that builds both community and self-love. He learns what the soil, plants, and seasons teach him as he grows food to nourish himself, and in doing so remembers the wisdom of his rural childhood, forgotten in the colonial whitewashing of third-world aspirations. He marries his past and present, the devastation wreaked by market forces and the regenerative influence of nature, the cultures of the Philippines and New Zealand, to engineer paradise—his utopia built within the cracks.

Clare Fleming, The momentary triumph of aggression over tenderness
and 
Bronte Perry, Awaiting Paradise
August 28th- September 14th

The momentary triumph of aggression over tenderness
Clare Fleming

In The momentary triumph of aggression over tenderness, Clare Fleming brings together sound and image to recall the interior world of motherhood as it is felt. In this deeply subjective practice of psychodrama and catharsis, her documentation of the domestic tableau works to frame a soundscape that is a raw re-enactment of a mother’s mind produced by the deep listening and self-excavation of parenting by connection. 

This work of disclosure investigates the ambiguity between memory and experience, reality and re-enactment. It questions the mythologies of women’s magazines and influencer feeds, and the art-historical representation of the mother, in an emotional self-portrait of the agony and the ecstasy. Here, the mother is both contemporary archetype and lived contradiction.

Awaiting Paradise
Bronte Perry

Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel. Psalm 2:9

In the memory of my grandmother’s house I can hear Armageddon. It bubbles and seeps underneath the floorboards, whispering cold horrors from the ashtray and old Cody’s on her kitchen table. It’s in this house that family values and religious dogma formed a site of corruption of kinship, a place where religious practice and abuse were amalgamated into one another. Where whanaungatanga was lost as the fragility of colonial kinship cracked under its own weight.

My hands buried deep among the pamphlets of his leather bag, a brother of the faith once told me:

“The dead will rise again Bronte, and you will be greeted by them in lush fields laden with fruit.”

I still dream of her kicking and flailing as she screamed for god to not let her die. The stress of not knowing how to respond to her passing was more traumatic than watching her beg wildly for god to save her; for we are taught to not speak ill of the dead – or the dying. Between the spatters of fluid that were filling her lungs, Tim said “we will meet you again in paradise”. But I wonder still if she found her way to Hine-nui-te-Po or whether the assimilated lay aimlessly in purgatory.

I no longer think of paradise but I still dream Armageddon, the crumbling salt pillar of Lots wife and Linda singing Poi E as she drowned.

Solidaritet/Solidarity
3rd – 20th July
Ardit Hoxha

Solidaritet/Solidarity takes its name from a former social housing complex in Kosovo, where Ardit Hoxha and his family resided in the late 1990s. Displaced by the ethnic cleansing that characterised the collapse of Yugoslavia and its subsequent wars, Hoxha now revists this site, its contradictions and its utopian visions, constructing a narrative of red nostalgia. 
The show is accompanied by a publication including the written work of Vanessa Cole and Ardit Hoxha. Designed by Bardhi Haliti. 
Made possible by the generous support of Creative New Zealand and RM Gallery

From November 5, 2018, Jill will be the RM Archive resident.

Rm Conversation Pit

Over the next twelve weeks Rm Archive will host Rm Conversation Pit, a series of habitable installations and amicable talking events. Adopting the impromptu format of a happening and the architectural intent of a conversation pit, each Rm Conversation Pit will bring together a small group of people and a provocation on re-thinking nature-culture through which to engender speculative freeform discussion. Conversation Pit invites participants to share in a dynamic of thinking-together, a process articulated by object-oriented ontology philosopher Timothy Morton as “a physical process that happens in-between people and in interactions with people”[*] For each conversation a conversation pit (or nook, cranny, hut or den)  will be constructed in the Archive room, an evocative dwelling-space in which to incubate small moments of re-thinking-together and hopefully seeding ongoing thinking and sharing.

A common thread that may be traced through discourse surrounding the changed state of our planet, often referred to as the ‘Anthropocene’,[†] is the urgent role of active imagination in making the transition from an anthropocentric stance to the yet un-named identify-value arrangement we are, literally, dreaming up for ourselves. This project directly engages contemporary art practice as a modality for this imaginative passage from disempowered, passive consumption in the Holocene to the active caring required in the Anthropocene. These conversations set out to catalyse moments of active engagement in which we might ponder together the implications of this re-imagined being. To speculate on how we might act and interact now that we find that we are human, and not our anthropocentric alter-ego Human. These concerns may be addressed in many ways and via various terminology; Rm Conversation Pit sets out to hold space for all voices as we talk our way into small steps of reimaging the here and now of dwelling together.

You are invited to enlist in a conversation or conversations of your choosing, please respond to info@rm.org.nz with your name and availability within the allocated time-frame. Conversations will be convened in groups of 3-5 participants and will be two hours in duration. Unless otherwise arranged they will be 6-8pm weekdays and 4-6 pm weekends.

Rm Conversation Pit Part 2

22 – 27 February 2019

For the duration of this event Rm Archive has been transformed into a conversation pit, a relaxed summer space for talking and sipping a cool beverage. Conversations will happen daily and can be arranged to suit. Suggested times are Lunch time (lunch provided), after work or weekend afternoon (for a cool cocktail) at 5.30pm, or evening (for a wine and snacks) 7.30pm. If you would like to be part of this talk-fest please contact us on info@rm.org with you name, contact details and preferred time(s) and date(s).

The environmental crisis has toppled our self-appointed Western position as masters of the Natural World. A so-called Natural Order in which, subservient only to God and Angels, it was proper for Humans to (in descending order and variable over time), admire (whales, dolphins) nurture as companions (dogs, horses, cats) raise to eat (sheep, cows, pigs, chickens) kill as vermin (rats, stoats, possums) plunder to eat (fish, sea food, ‘game’ animals and birds) grow to eat (fruits, vegetables, nuts) cultivate to host the above (soil, land) build on, mine, drain (land) throw unwanted material items into as ‘waste’ (land, sea, atmosphere) As this hierarchy collapses around us we are beset with questions of how we should now live. Rm Conversation Pit Part 2 invites you to think-together on two of these questions

what, or who, should we eat?

The above ‘Western position’ expects urban and suburban dwellers to be passive consumers, how might we reclaim roles of active participation?

I am hungry, I have teeth, what can I eat?

In a post-Holocene Earth eating becomes strategic, what can I eat if I care? What can we eat and survive as a biosphere? How can I eat and not participate in resource hungry Capitalist consumption?

In this charnel ground we are preparing for ourselves, this polluted, denuded and climate changed earth what is there for a person to eat?

Not a passive consumer

Under the banner of Modernism urban and suburban dwelling evolved as a passive transition point between a flow of resources from a generalised and abundant ‘somewhere’ and an unseen and endless ‘away’. If we now accept that nature is not that thing over yonder, existing perfectly in wilderness and imperfectly in farmland, but rather is an immersive biosphere in which all participate how then should we live?

Could we, should we and how might we transition from site of passive consumption toward a role active participation in a cyclic domestic hub?

What happens to the category of things we now term ‘waste’ garbage’ or ‘rubbish’ now we know there is no away? How might we live with nonhuman others now that we are not at the top of an anthropocentric hierarchy?

In Rm Conversation Pit Part 2 Rm Archive resident Jill Sorensen invites you to take part in a meandering, amicable conversation about urban dwelling and ecology. While Rm Conversation Pit Part 1 engaged with academic discourse, Part 2 of the project aims to draw on every-day knowledges, DIY ideas, and personal opinion.

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Conversation #1

Thursday 22 November­­, 6 – 8pm
Tuesday 27 November, 6 – 8pm
+ Drop in Saturday – informal meeting and talking space with the artist
1-3pm Saturday 24 November

Sharing in an intimate world: Rethinking human vs nature

sharing in an intimate world acknowledges the impossibility of maintaining an anthropocentric worldview[‡] in an era of eco-crisis and invites us to tease out ways to orient ourselves within a biosphere in which we are continuous with the network of entities we previously called nature.

This re-imagined world-view has been described as the third-place (Bruno Latour) or in the words of Timothy Morton, an experience of intimacy and closeness with nonhuman entities, which may include the bacteria in our bodies, the biota, animals and plants with whom we cohabit, but also trash; the plastic, chemical and biological waste we have carelessly spread around and are now intimately surrounded by.

I would like to draw attention to the semantic origins of the term intimacy, a noun deriving from the Latin root intimus, meaning innermost, most personal, profound. If we put aside the anthropocentric usage of intimacy as referring solely to close and/or sexual relations between humans, we may find the original meaning instructional for addressing this unexpected encroachment of nonhumans into physical and psychological human space. When intimacy is extended to include nonhumans, it appears less comfortable, indicating a close, family-like connection between disparate entities. Close, as in next to your skin and embedded in your thinking, and family-like as in inherited, an inescapable birth-right.

Conversation #2

Monday 3 December, 6 – 8pm
Tuesday 4 December, 6 – 8pm
+ Drop in Saturday – informal meeting and talking space with the artist
1-3pm Saturday 1 November

The Agency of Things

Water, soil, rock, a tree, a chicken, a cat, some wheat, some excrement, a plastic bottle, a river. Our relationships with these things may be articulated as resources and waste that we need to manage but also as entities with whom our lives are intertwined. Both statements extort us to act responsibly toward these things, however the dynamic at stake in each is significantly different. In the first and more familiar statement, we adopt the position of guardian and primary actor in an active/passive relationship. In contrast to this, the second statement reflects emerging thinking and language elicited by the realisation that human activity has irreversibly changed the planet. It suggests a recalibration of human identity to a less anthropocentric role in which we interact with the autonomous agency of other entities, of things.

Our language, the vehicle of our thinking, falters here; It is telling that the word ‘thing’ appears to fill a gap in English language, operating as a proxy-term that stands in for those ‘objects’ and ‘materials’ we are not quite able to imagine as entities, beings or persons. We can acknowledge effects of things (carbon becomes coal, becomes carbon dioxide and energy, a cow eats, farts and produces carbon dioxide and milk), but we baulk at ascribing things agency as such. While we can scientifically imagine a timeframe in which we can apprehend their action we fail to philosophically imagine this more-than-human scale activity as a mode of being.

Conversation #3

Tues 11 December, 6-8pm
Tues 18 December, 6-8pm

Between elsewhere and away: reimagining the suburban/urban home

The big wake-up call of the environmental crisis is the reminder that we are not separate from nature, Earth is not an infinite resource for our progress, and there is no away. Urban dwelling emerged from a culture in which we imagined our human selves as cradled between infinite earthly resource and a mythical ‘away’. Home became normalised as a house and garden, a two-part structure demarking an inside for human dwelling and an outside for all other entities. The permeability of the house is strictly monitored; there are clearly defined orifices for the entry of entities, energies, goods and resources. There are equally well-defined orifices for departure; the multifunction entry/exit for inhabitants (human, companion and machine) are supplemented by multiple exits to ‘away’ for entities no longer required, which exit discreetly as ‘waste’.

Like all mammals, we are made up of a plethora of entities; bacteria, microorganisms, viruses and inherited DNA. Like all mammals we are permeable; food, water, oxygen, oils and chemicals move continually between our environments and our bodies. Unlike other mammals we dwell extravagantly, co-opting soil, water, building materials, solar energy, wind, air CO2, oxygen, biota, plants, animals (as pets, food or pests), consumer goods and fossil fuels to use and discard. However, despite sectioning ourselves off into a human enclave, I suggest that we still desire connection with nonhuman others, and this desire emerges as accultured nature; we keep pets, we value views out across the land and sea, we cultivate gardens. It emerges as vicarious care, we watch nature documentaries and YouTube videos of funny cats and heart rendering animal rescues.

How might we, speculatively or pragmatically, reimaging dwelling as continuous with a complex web of biota?

Contextual background

This research project is informed from and sets out to test, interrogate and build upon the speculations of some key thinkers:

Object-Oriented Ontologist Timothy Morton[§]; in particular his thinking on the symbiotic real, solidarity with nonhuman people and of collectivity[**] as active and uneasy cohabitation. In particular I recommend  Timothy Morton in Conversation with Verso Books sections ‘the individual and the collective’ and ‘the ontological is political’ at time point 9:40 – 15:45

Science Studies writer/philosopher Bruno Latour articulation of the third place[††]which he articulates in  Why Gaia Is Not the Globe, 2016,

Nature/culture writer Michael Pollan on nonhuman agency and taking a non-anthropocentric view of evolution and symbiosis.

Donna Haraway, feminist, science and technology scholar and storyteller, in particular, the tentacular complexity Haraway acknowledges in making-do with nonhumans[‡‡].SF: String Figures, Multispecies Muddles, Staying with the Trouble. In the four minute section from 20:00 – 24:40min Haraway talks through her process of thinking with other thinkers, highlighting the importance of how we think and what platforms we think from. It is this self-reflexive mode of thought that I hope to foster in Conversation Pit.

Levi R Bryant, philosopher, Lacanian Psychoanalyst and champion of all things ontic. A formative thinker in defining the field of Object Oriented Ontology, currently researching a line of object-oriented thought, called which he terms ‘onticology’

I welcome your suggestion of thinkers and resources to add to the mix to expand and complicate the discussion.

[*] SCI-Arc Channel, ‘B. Arch Program Chair Tom Wiscombe Interviews Timothy Morton’, accessed 26 April 2018,  (section 1:03 – 1:45)

[†] The term Anthropocene was coined by atmospheric Chemist Paul J. Crutzen and currently under review by the International Union of Geological Sciences as the geological age in which the most profound influence for the change has been human activity.

[‡] In which Humans are separate from the Nature, a construction in which the natural world exists over yonder, providing both resource and backdrop for human activities.

[§] Morton, Timothy, Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (London. New York: Verso Books, 2017).

[**] Verso Books, ‘Timothy Morton in Conversation with Verso Books’, accessed 26 April 2018, .

[††] Faculty of Arts, Aarhus Universitet, Bruno Latour: Why Gaia Is Not the Globe, 2016,

[‡‡] Donna Jeanne Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Experimental Futures Technological Lives, Scientific Arts, Anthropological Voices (Durham London: Duke University Press, 2016).

Sometime, someday, when all is said and done, a group show with David Cooper, Claudia Dunes, Rainer Weston & James Wylie.
March 6- March 23rd 2019.

That thing which you have seen and know intimately. Which helped form a part of your understanding of how things work. Despite the fact that you are aware it’s just a fabrication and not real, it’s still here – there’s just no linearity or narrative to it. The work is earnest, it just feels a little more cynical. You know how it ends. But it doesn’t. Ah! Un effomdement d’egos!

Sometime, someday, when all is said and done is a group exhibition of video, sculpture and painting. A sequel of sorts to the artist’s recent group exhibition ‘fine moon, poor tuning’ at Wellington’s Meanwhile gallery last July.

Erena Shingade
The Apocalypse Party of the Rich
Text in response to the exhibition, download here