Pauline Hatzigeorgiou
Exhibitions, Texts, Publications, CV, About


Through The Valley of The Nest of Spiders,
Simon Asencio, Valerie Solanas, Bernard-Marie Koltès, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Rocé, Páola Revenióti, David Melnick, Samuel R. Delany
18.04—20.05.2024, SB34—The Pool, Brussels, BE

To be invisible in a text, or to be invisible through a text, is to be illegible, opaque, nebulous, unfathomable, unintelligible, indescribable. This invisibility is often defined in terms of estrangement: it's a strategy to protect oneself, or a measure imposed to ostracize and exclude the “inappropriate”, the “unwanted”, the “other.”

In the book Through The Valley Of The Nest Of Spiders by Samuel R. Delany, one of the characters named Dynamite, explains to his lover Eric what "A culturally invested language" is: a slang or jargon that deviates (from) the official language to make forms of life appear and disappear according to the context in which it is spoken: reversals of stigma, vernaculars, community parlances become tools for recognition and protection. Dynamite adds: "Culturally invested language is for includin' people not for excludin' em." This term is used only once in this 800-page story. It does not appear in any other book or theoretical text. It seems that Samuel R. Delany coined the term to describe the language tools used by this fictional homosexual community, and left it there as a clue.

This exhibition is an attempt to apprehend this term through a set of propositions and textual experiments–other possible culturally invested languages–distant in time, space and motives, and yet which could contribute to an understanding of its ethical and poetic stakes. 
Who makes up language? This question lies at the heart of this project, suggesting that the substance of a language is made up of all the people who use it, and that the transgression of its norms contributes to its development. How to then share these acts of language, these subversions, without disclosing them? 
Conceived as temporary scenographic spaces that link writing with architecture, each setting pays tribute to characters, places and language tools that set the scene for the exhibition. Each chapter of the exhibition then becomes a support for a video projection, and two sound pieces by three artists: French Algerian rapper Rocé, Greek film director Páola Revenióti, US writer LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs.
— Simon Asencio
— Curators : Pauline Hatzigeorgiou & Simon Asencio
— With the support of : Loterie Nationale, Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles and Brussels Capital Region
—  (c) Silvia Cappellari