Julia Selin & Matti Sumari at Krognoshuset / Lund

Julia Selin & Matti Sumari

The artist’s dream of the insect’s innermost desire

14 January – 19 February 2023

 
Krognoshuset
Mårtenstorget 3
223 51 Lund

Our exhibition is a chapter as short as a moth’s wingbeat


The ghost of a fly that lived in this house 700 years ago knows that I will soon be a corpse

its descendants will lay their eggs in me

The eggs will hatch and thousands of larvae will crawl inside me

eat my rotting flesh and grow and become flies


It’s the ghost fly’s inherent instincts

Insights in insects are often formulated that way

My corpse becomes involved in the insect’s

innermost desire


How to make an exhibition in a house where things have already happened for 700 years


Then think that

700 more years pass

We are already corpses already decayed, gone, forgotten

But the artist’s ghost still sits in the basement and tries to figure things out

how to be able to make this exhibition

how a work can come to see the light of day in the very time in which it lives


How to make it the opposite

to the ghost it is

before it happens


Art is also a ghost

but it is a ghost inside the artist’s mind

like my studio, it has only a drapery like a fluttering membrane


An idea for a plastic or metal sculpture or a painting

can be killed like a fly

was beaten to death with a wooden shoe against a stone wall in 1349


What kind of unfinished business can a 14th century insect really have

that makes it haunt us?


Bugs will eat my corpse when I die

My body becomes a home for many different individuals

With unique fluttering, crawling, smacking sounds

Their community can be compared to the community that existed in a studio collective in Malmö for a very, very short period


text: Julia Selin