Galatine
Romana Drdová, Julie Grosche, Lucia Leuci, Jaana-Kristiina Alakoski, Katy McCarthy
Curated by Like A Little Disaster
September 03 — 30, 2021
Berlinskej Model, Prague
The etymology of the word “milk” –
“lac-lactis or glactis” in Latin and “gala-galactos” in Greek
– is linked to the oldest “GLU, GLA, GAL, GAR” root that
indicates the onomatopoeic sound of swallowing of an infant during
breastfeeding. Galatina (Italian feminine singular) Galatine (Italian
feminine plural), is the name of a famous Italian milk candy.
Galatine are made with powdered milk and honey. They look like
solid-dehydrated-chalky-whitish circles. They are porous like all
bodies of water. They return to their “hydro-state” through the
connection with any other body of water, in this case, the saliva of
our mouth. (1)
“Galatine” is conceived as a
dialogue between five artists – Jaana Kristiina Alakoski, Romana
Drdova, Julie Grosche, Lucia Leuci, Katy McCarthy – whose practices
and poetics trigger an hydrophonic choir questioning and reflecting
the concept of milk, experienced as material metonyms of a planetary
watery mesh that interpermeates and connects bodies and bathes new
kinds of plural life into being. Milk is commonly connected to human
and, more generally, mammalian species’ experience, to care and
nursing and primary nutriment. But milk is also something that goes
beyond human projects. “Galatine” triggers a non-human
perspective just by emphasizing human extracorporeal implications in
the bodily waters of others – human and other animal, but also
oceanic, mineral, riparian, gaseous, epiphytic, estuarine, arboreal,
tropical, saline, lychenic, meteorological, galactic bodies. We are
all just swimming through milky streams. If adult humans manage to
keep their mouths away from milk, they often substitute it through
its simulacra – mostly provoking well-know disastrous ecosystem
damage; coconut milk, rice milk, soy milk, hemp milk, oat milk, pea
milk, peanut milk, grains milk, barley milk, fonio milk, maize milk,
millet milk, oat milk, rice milk, rye milk, sorghum milk, teff milk,
triticale milk, spelt milk, wheat milk. In fact, not only do mammals
produce milk; some birds, such as pigeons, doves, flamingoes, and
penguins produce a substance derived from epithelial cells called
“crop milk,” with which they nurture their chicks. Spiders do
that and also cockroaches, pseudoscorpions, discus fish and some
frogs and salamanders too. Plants emit milk-s too. Latexes and milky
resins are secreted both for defence, for care and healing; what’s
a new branch but a little baby to take care of? Through guttation
some plants secrete small milky and viscous drops guaranteeing
nutrition and hydration to the smaller plants below. Stones are made
of calcium, many varieties of fossils produce milky fluids. Yes,
stones produce milk but, in turn, milk produces stones. And more,
casein is found in a variety of objects that we use every day
(including tech-stuff); but it happens to be mixed with toxic
plastics and derivatives. We are surrounded by milk, it is in us,
with us, above us, below us, around us. Too close, too far, from
invisible molecules to “our” shining galaxy that is milky twice,
because it is the Milky Way and because it is the Galaxy. When
infants ask their mothers for milk, they are actually asking for “the
whole” Galaxy. Besides all, isn’t it true that the Milky Way was
created from Hera’s milk breast?
Stones are porous, like all bodies of
water; like all wet bodies, fossils are porous, the bodies of women,
and fish, and infants, and flamingo, and Tajikistan, and alocasia,
and spiders, and figs, and artesian wells, and galatine, are porous
too. These bodies are all caught up in one another’s currents –
as they are with the whale’s body, the body of the rain cloud, and
the body of the increasingly toxic sea. As bodies of water, we are
all and always, at some point of the levels, implicated. If
“Galatine” began with the objective of ‘describing the
geography closest in’, it has soon paddled a great distance while
never really leaving this body that is ‘ours’. It has also
paddled in time; milk connects us directly to childhood, but also to
other bodies across time and space, where the entwining of bodies
might stir ‘the remembered smell of our own mother’s milk ’. As
a watery vector between bodies, milk gathers the heritages of the
myriad porous bodies that are the condition of our perpetual
hydromorphic condition. We all give ourselves up to another wet body.
We all become with, or simply just become, other milky seas. While
the subject-forming lineaments materialize the body very concretely,
they also index its multiple belongings and anchor their subjectivity
in multiple places.
The body is always multiple.
Well, yes, this body is also situated
as a maternal body. “Galatine” portrays the act of nursing as a
vector of powerful and sometimes uncanny affect: “the act of
suckling a child, like a sexual act, may be tense, physically
painful, charged with cultural feelings of inadequacy and guilt; or,
like a sexual act, it can be a physically delicious, elementally
soothing experience”. (2)
“Galatine” describes the transit of
waters between bodies as a matter of fact, but also as a matter of
feeling, of memory, of gendered and sexual embodiment. We might try
to parse out the ‘real’ biological flows of milky
intercorporeality (DDT, antibodies, flame retardant, calcium) from
affective ones (bonding, love, revulsion, fear), but such divisions
here falter. In “Galatine” psyche and soma, biology and affect,
dwell in and as our bodies in what can be seen as an immersive space
for a fusion of meshed gametes, where seemingly disparate bodily
factions are nonetheless communicating with each other in empathic
narration.
Remember: Saliva
and milk are always fundamental resources in order to “Spit
on Hegel again and again“
Adrienne
Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood As Experience and Institution, 1976
“lac-lactis or glactis” in Latin and “gala-galactos” in Greek
– is linked to the oldest “GLU, GLA, GAL, GAR” root that
indicates the onomatopoeic sound of swallowing of an infant during
breastfeeding. Galatina (Italian feminine singular) Galatine (Italian
feminine plural), is the name of a famous Italian milk candy.
Galatine are made with powdered milk and honey. They look like
solid-dehydrated-chalky-whitish circles. They are porous like all
bodies of water. They return to their “hydro-state” through the
connection with any other body of water, in this case, the saliva of
our mouth. (1)
“Galatine” is conceived as a
dialogue between five artists – Jaana Kristiina Alakoski, Romana
Drdova, Julie Grosche, Lucia Leuci, Katy McCarthy – whose practices
and poetics trigger an hydrophonic choir questioning and reflecting
the concept of milk, experienced as material metonyms of a planetary
watery mesh that interpermeates and connects bodies and bathes new
kinds of plural life into being. Milk is commonly connected to human
and, more generally, mammalian species’ experience, to care and
nursing and primary nutriment. But milk is also something that goes
beyond human projects. “Galatine” triggers a non-human
perspective just by emphasizing human extracorporeal implications in
the bodily waters of others – human and other animal, but also
oceanic, mineral, riparian, gaseous, epiphytic, estuarine, arboreal,
tropical, saline, lychenic, meteorological, galactic bodies. We are
all just swimming through milky streams. If adult humans manage to
keep their mouths away from milk, they often substitute it through
its simulacra – mostly provoking well-know disastrous ecosystem
damage; coconut milk, rice milk, soy milk, hemp milk, oat milk, pea
milk, peanut milk, grains milk, barley milk, fonio milk, maize milk,
millet milk, oat milk, rice milk, rye milk, sorghum milk, teff milk,
triticale milk, spelt milk, wheat milk. In fact, not only do mammals
produce milk; some birds, such as pigeons, doves, flamingoes, and
penguins produce a substance derived from epithelial cells called
“crop milk,” with which they nurture their chicks. Spiders do
that and also cockroaches, pseudoscorpions, discus fish and some
frogs and salamanders too. Plants emit milk-s too. Latexes and milky
resins are secreted both for defence, for care and healing; what’s
a new branch but a little baby to take care of? Through guttation
some plants secrete small milky and viscous drops guaranteeing
nutrition and hydration to the smaller plants below. Stones are made
of calcium, many varieties of fossils produce milky fluids. Yes,
stones produce milk but, in turn, milk produces stones. And more,
casein is found in a variety of objects that we use every day
(including tech-stuff); but it happens to be mixed with toxic
plastics and derivatives. We are surrounded by milk, it is in us,
with us, above us, below us, around us. Too close, too far, from
invisible molecules to “our” shining galaxy that is milky twice,
because it is the Milky Way and because it is the Galaxy. When
infants ask their mothers for milk, they are actually asking for “the
whole” Galaxy. Besides all, isn’t it true that the Milky Way was
created from Hera’s milk breast?
Stones are porous, like all bodies of
water; like all wet bodies, fossils are porous, the bodies of women,
and fish, and infants, and flamingo, and Tajikistan, and alocasia,
and spiders, and figs, and artesian wells, and galatine, are porous
too. These bodies are all caught up in one another’s currents –
as they are with the whale’s body, the body of the rain cloud, and
the body of the increasingly toxic sea. As bodies of water, we are
all and always, at some point of the levels, implicated. If
“Galatine” began with the objective of ‘describing the
geography closest in’, it has soon paddled a great distance while
never really leaving this body that is ‘ours’. It has also
paddled in time; milk connects us directly to childhood, but also to
other bodies across time and space, where the entwining of bodies
might stir ‘the remembered smell of our own mother’s milk ’. As
a watery vector between bodies, milk gathers the heritages of the
myriad porous bodies that are the condition of our perpetual
hydromorphic condition. We all give ourselves up to another wet body.
We all become with, or simply just become, other milky seas. While
the subject-forming lineaments materialize the body very concretely,
they also index its multiple belongings and anchor their subjectivity
in multiple places.
The body is always multiple.
Well, yes, this body is also situated
as a maternal body. “Galatine” portrays the act of nursing as a
vector of powerful and sometimes uncanny affect: “the act of
suckling a child, like a sexual act, may be tense, physically
painful, charged with cultural feelings of inadequacy and guilt; or,
like a sexual act, it can be a physically delicious, elementally
soothing experience”. (2)
“Galatine” describes the transit of
waters between bodies as a matter of fact, but also as a matter of
feeling, of memory, of gendered and sexual embodiment. We might try
to parse out the ‘real’ biological flows of milky
intercorporeality (DDT, antibodies, flame retardant, calcium) from
affective ones (bonding, love, revulsion, fear), but such divisions
here falter. In “Galatine” psyche and soma, biology and affect,
dwell in and as our bodies in what can be seen as an immersive space
for a fusion of meshed gametes, where seemingly disparate bodily
factions are nonetheless communicating with each other in empathic
narration.
Remember: Saliva
and milk are always fundamental resources in order to “Spit
on Hegel again and again“
Adrienne
Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood As Experience and Institution, 1976
SUMO Prague 2021 is an international
gwallery exchange project, the second edition of which, entitled The
Odd Year II, will be taking place in Prague, Czech Republic from
September 3 to October 15, 2021. Eight local galleries will be
hosting exhibitions with an accompanying program curated in
collaboration with partner institutions from abroad. The project aims
to present the local audience with international art and artists new
to the Czech context. SUMO will also help foster international
cooperation in the field of contemporary art, establishing new
networks and promoting exchange between artists, curators, art
critics, and other art world professionals. SUMO’s opening weekend
will take place September 3–5, 2021.