Who is this ode addressed, but to “you”, my dear reader, to which the work speaks porously with the resilience of living things. I say with, because Anna Rún Tryggvadottir’s work is an investigation of “how we (with our limited scope of perspective and senses) define ourselves in relation to nature”. Her ode is an appellation addressed to all living organisms, to the intelligence of matter, but they main protagonist is relations, of the poriferal kinds: open, porous, precarious. It is an invocation of the porosity and permeability of life, manifested in forms of sponges, synthetic foam, minerals, stones, rubber, tree logs – these resilient materials which survived for million years and are used in our daily life– are convened in the space of this poem of things, in the space of the exhibition where things start talking to each other, and making sense together.

 

These porous entities gathered together on this occasion invoked by the artist, give us insights into the cycles of life and obsolescence not as a chaotic becoming; but more as and in its duration: the accumulation of moments, the repetitions, the slow motion. And then, it’s the artist’s work of paying attention to details, to the slightest transformation, attending to the quiet but resonant frequencies of things held in a state of arrest. Or so it would seem. The objects in the space rotate around themselves slowly, incessantly – like lunar phases – while we stop and marvel at the offering that is the sharing of this gathering of living things. We can listen, in addition to seeing, to the variations in the repetition; to the monotonous tone of the salt-water dripping, the slight changes to the positions of the tree log in the middle of the room, or a large sponge on stage. Nothing seems to happen, really. We can hardly say that these objects “perform” for their audience. The materials that the artist has gathered neither attempt to convey a meaning nor do they ask to be justified. They are the living fragments of a poetics of porosity attuned to the resilient frequencies of life; a poetics of responsibility,  that is responsible and responsive to the world’s shape-shifting and murmuring.

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Bueti, Federica, " An Ode - Poriferal Phases", BE27 Kunstlerhaus Bethanien Magazine, [Berlin:2020]