Parallel Play

Yan Lozov and Lazar Georgiev

Curated by Petra Popangelova and Julieta Colantonio

In the notion of parallel play children play next to each other but do not try to influence one another’s behavior. Yet an observer will notice that they occasionally see what the others are doing and modify their play accordingly.*

Parallel Play operates as a coordinate to link long-forgotten meanings to a multiplayer system.

Exploring the growth and evolution of a child’s imagination meeting the raw essence of everyday life, in Parallel Play memories, myths, and mysticism collide with the influence of mass consumption and the www. The result is that of alternative -and often contradictory- reality systems coexisting in world-buildings of their own.  

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Lazar Georgiev (b. 1999, Ruse) and Yan Lozov (b. 2003, Sofia)’s tight Bulgarian origins meet their daily experiences of a shared studio life in Barcelona. From there, their processes inform one another from opposite walls of the same room. At times a single consciousness, at most a b2b practice that suspends childhood innocence with dark realities and fantasies. In Parallel Play, their sense of self and its dissolution become an exercise on the substance of dreams, recollections, and the fascinating quality of the ominous.

Texts by Julieta Colantonio
Graphic Design by Sofia Mastrogiacomo
Sound Design by Bungalovv 
Live Act by Post-Organic Bauplan
Banquete Feast by lucilaedible 

I saw you in a song: an anti-memoir*

Marina Mónaco

Curated by Sofia Mastrogiacomo and Julieta Colantonio

Losing herself in a universe that doesn’t belong to her
and yet again that doesn’t belong to anyone else
a text never to be read, only written then burned
yet the photographs prevail,
substance of that which suspends but rushes to evade
the stillness of a present that just faded away

Being enough of an outsider to inhabit what’s innermost. The search for meaning through a common language that is not. The intimacy of a sleepover. The latency of an important beginning. A hotel room where much occurred. The impossible mirror that is the main subject. A gloomy, smokey, backstage. The white book to a black book. To amplify what is within. An inner reflection of the outside. Light filtering through.

And there again, the outsider’s shadow projects itself into the unknown.

Texts by Julieta Colantonio
Graphic Design by Sofia Mastrogiacomo
Sound Design by morphena

Dripping Stillness

Lena Becerra

Curated by Sofia Mastrogiacomo and Julieta Colantonio

Conceived in the depths of a basement; charged with the archetypal force of the underworld—part laboratory for synthetic matter experimentation, part home to arthropods that preceded this work.

A dark, humid, and silent ecosystem of oscillating organisms being bred— some pre-living, intra-uterus still, yet beating; waiting to be awakened from the eternal dream to consciousness.

For them, trans-living possibilities await, where their acephalous bodies will meet the cold steel clasp of surgical interventions—suspended limbs as a result of partial procedures; interrupted amputations conceived for the delight of prosthetic engineering.

In the centre, an autonomous entity of cyclical nature; shadow-working like the moon. Perpetually self-phagocytizing fluids — an ouroboros with no head or tail, only ghostly matter shifting states: the womb, the porta giving birth, to a cluster of leaky children in cautious stillness—a dripping ecosystem- meta-material.

Texts by Julieta Colantonio
Graphic Design by Sofia Mastrogiacomo
Sound Design by Candie
Light Design by Shaly López
Produced by Sofia Marchetti
Live act by Fe Sexta
Photographs by © James Verhille

I saw you in a song 
Marina Mónaco

Curated by Sofia Mastrogiacomo and Julieta Colantonio

So my last image was as the first. A sleeping youth cloaked in light, who opened his eyes with a smile of recognition for someone who had never been a stranger.

I saw you in a song unfolds as an anti-memoir.

Echoing autonomous forms: a book, a sound piece, an installation and a way of seeing -and being in- the world give form to a non-linear narrative.

Trafficking raw pulses between two realms; the sharp, woke, lucid, and the deepest dream, the circle ends where it began.

Texts by Julieta Colantonio
Graphic Design by Sofia Mastrogiacomo
Sound Design by morphena
Produced by Sofia Marchetti
Live Acts by Nils Keppel, Dignified Burial, and aemilia