Black Dog Studios
08.10 - 11.10.2021

I have had the ambivalent pleasure of playing witness to my sister’s practice these past few years. I will call her Nico, as she prefers, though as to whether or not Nico is synonymous with my sister, I cannot be sure – her being a body, as she writes, of “colliding personas and intimate intricacies.” My mother (our mother) once asked if Nico had a mother. The question was met with silence, left unanswered. Indeterminacy, you see, is what Nico embodies; being unlocated, insensible to boundaries, alert to the oneness of disparate things.

‘We Need New Archetypes’ has cast a sense of conceptual inevitability on all Nico’s previous projects: her time spent working as a stripper, the tantric dinners held in our shared apartment, the artist residency run from her bed, the many cakes made and ‘splooshed’ in. Each has been necessary to the next in arriving here, at this place, at this momentary pause. Lent the formal structure of the exhibition format, the complexities of Nico’s practice suddenly coalesce – in “a moment of density,” as she writes, “in a shifting topography.” The previously opaque is rendered legible, if only temporarily, lent a transient clarity that offers a way through the filaments of her mycelium thinking. Even Nico’s writing, which more often sets itself apart from lucidity by the density of its prose, finds a novel directness in the works’ accompanying text.

Nico Athene, Surfacing (Emerge), 2019. Courtesy of the artist.

Hers is a promiscuous practice that finds no single form, spanning the vagaries of performance and its documentation, conversation and collaboration. For this exhibition, Nico has worked closely with photographer Johno Mellish, in whose studio the show is staged, and where she has lived while installing it. “We sleep in the same bed but never at the same time,” she says of her arrangement with Mellish, “and ownership of the gaze is, by all usual accounts, confused.” While more often behind the camera, his likeness appears twice-over: in one image, Untitled I (Speculative Fiction, author uncertain), his prone body extends into frame, his hand holding the shutter release; in another, Heterosexual Man Made, he stands naked among rows of battery chickens. Together Nico and Mellish have pictured the body of my father, my grandmother, and the undressed body of my sister, replicated across prints and screens. Conspicuously missing: the body of the mother (my/our). Instead – rubber teats, a breast pump. In this archetypal absence, hostile dependencies and generous entanglements announce themselves. Uncertain Origins, immaculate beginnings.

Nico Athene, Untitled I (Speculative Fiction, author uncertain), 2021. Courtesy of the artist.

Human, animal, ingredient, object – to Nico, all are invested with affect, are alive with an animism that exceeds their physical parts. A certain slipperiness of matter and its categories is central to both my sister’s practice and personhood. Any distinctions are rendered moot, the boundary line between the living and inanimate subject to much spilling over. But then, perhaps our inherited taxonomy is too rigid, indifferent to necessary slippage. “Empirically speaking,” poet Maggie Nelson writes in The Argonauts (2015), “we are made from star stuff. Why aren’t we talking more about that? Materials never leave this world. They just keep recycling, recombining.” Or rather, as a voice intones in artist Rachel Rose’s Sitting Feeding Sleeping (2013), “all you are is means to mutate material, a mechanism to redeposit your bone into the mineral-sucking ground.”

That Nico finds in butoh a methodology for making is telling of her disinclination towards definition. Her hourlong performance recalls the Japanese philosophy of movement which evades easy description, being resistant to form and fixity. Founded by Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno in the decade following the atomic bomb, butoh offered an antidote to the ritualised choreography of Noh and Kabuki theatre. More often painted white, as if having stepped from that malevolent cloud, the performers follow no steps, move to no sequence of gestures. Instead, they respond to prompts felt or seen; look to inhabit unconditioned movement. To return, as Hijikata says, to “the body that has not been robbed.” A theft by finding, the human animal wrest from the landscape and into machination.

Nico Athene, Three Eves‭, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.

“The body,” scholar Silvia Federici writes in Caliban and the Witch (2004), “was the first machine invented by capitalism.” She cites Marx’s theory of ‘primitive accumulation’ as central to this invention, when the commons were first privatised under the Enclosure Act in 16h century England, the peasants moved off the land and put to work in newly imagined industries. The displacement of people under the Act was accompanied by widespread witch-hunts, the new order suspicious of those femme bodies that were neither productive nor reproductive, that offered alternative way of being at odds with profit-driven labour (of work, of birth). Such accumulative strategies were later extended to the colonies, repeated time and again under the banner of Empire.

To resist inhabiting a tradeable body, Nico proposes, one must experience “self as landscape, mind as an event within a general ecology.” She continues:

Such ecologies outside of linear notions of success and progress necessarily exceed categories of purity and pollutant, wild and urban, domestic and political… One begins to understand self as a site of relational ambiguity, a place where life and death are necessarily partnered and the lines between the parasitic and collaborative, sentient and material, are blurred. To live is to eat, to feed, to cleave, to breathe. It is to respire and exchange heat and substance. To cleave is a contranym; to come together, to be separated. In a way, this is also a maternal paradigm.

These landscapes, these ecologies, need not be those of nature unspoilt, but domestic or pastoral, places to reside in. Among the more apparent works exhibited is the stuff of life: a bed, a vacuum cleaner, books, a pot plant. “Plants,” a text on the multi-screen video work Feel SOME THING announces, “Real Plants.” But then, everything is real, Nico suggests, “everything is alive.” One need only attend closely to materials to recognise their latent potential to life. Soil, air, the womb of a mother. Mixture: not the collapsing of difference but the opportunity to encounter. The encounter, too, of self and everything else. My sister, no longer dancing to be seen, waits to be moved. 

Nico Athene, We Need New Archetypes, performance, 2021. Photo by Bettina Malcomess.