It took me a week to recover from Cementa_13. It felt like I’d been to 60 back-to-back gallery openings in 4 days, which, in a way I had. As I tried to describe the experience to folks back home, the best approximation I could come up with was “it was like living in a giant sharehouse with 60 other artists” - at once domesticated and relaxed, but also intense and stimulating.
When you attend an artist’s show opening, at best you get 5 or 10 minutes to say congratulations and briefly touch on the work. The unpacking and debate generally comes after the fact, if at all. In the case of Cementa, the work felt “live” - it was discussed, revisited, argued over, even meditated in.
Yes, that’s right. Meditated. One afternoon mid-festival I arrived at the horse paddock where my work Untitled (98 vacancies) was installed to find 2 people meditating and 1 person asleep IN my work. I had come to set up the Artcycle Blender bike and make free watermelon cocktails for people turning up for Liam Benson’s Ode to the Black Cockatoo performance at sunset. The funny thing was, I felt like I was disturbing them. I didn’t feel like it was my place to interrupt the particular relationship they were forming with the work. Similar feelings rose to the surface when I saw people bending over and touching the work, and in many cases picking the objects up from their very precise locations. One work was even vandalised overnight, but it all seemed a natural part of the process of showing work in this place and in this context. I was not in control - Kandos was - and that was OK for once.
