Julie Falk
There is no outside of language
April 13 – May 23, 2024
Reap.
Spend as much time as possible being wide awake and receptive to stunning surfaces, they can easily become an alphabet or unpredicted souvenirs.
Notice that particular thirsty brownness, that dull version of matte, both so very uniform, they’ll be no one’s to claim. But they will be decisive for a sudden flush of grief. A sudden ecstasy.
Grow up insistingly.
Expand any vocabulary in directions that will be easy to forget. The more sentences that seep out of a head, the keener the hands and the blood become.
Lie down and curse it and appreciate it.
Sit down and know that it may be a compromise, but not a degrading one.
Replace the urge to construct with an urge to look.
Replace the urge to invent with an urge to repeat.
Allow the reddest heart to force its way into the brain and consider if emotions are in fact the opposite of words (they probably aren’t but it’s nice to decide that they are, and then think about how they’re not)
Get an unrestful night’s sleep or simply no sleep at all, night after night it is the same and so day after day looks like leather: oil-black and slightly hostile in a way that either sharpens the attention to beauty or liquifies it, turns sensibility into a thin soup from which corners and edges and solid squares must be dragged out with quite a majestic need for structure.
Abandon these structures, moisturize them and lean back in an architecture that can melt completely any minute, only to become landscape again.
Acknowledge the timespan between landscape and language, millennia and millennia of storm-colored mountains before their name arrived and someone eventually started thinking about tall buildings and attractive corporate furniture.
Forget steel.
Forget habitual politeness.
Learn to cherish all hands equally, this is probably impossible but the challenge is noble and necessary and new spectacular or forgettable movements will always replace previous ones.
Stay cheap and deal with the fact that longing for glam is usually inevitable. And isn’t longing the most effective fuel for omnipresent desire and isn’t omnipresent desire the primary vital condition. Life is so necessary right now.
Elevate the dark in other people’s gazes by fabricating it. Do it, fabricate an easy darkness, a portable condition that doesn’t require architecture or contracts and let this condition be a gown to wear or a shade to rest in or a house to build.
Remember that thousands of flowers will bloom in our absence.
Sow.
Nanna Friis
Julie Falk
B. 1991, Copenhagen, DK
Lives and works in Copenhagen, DK