OFLUXO

An art exhibition is a crime scene in the sense that in a gallery, we spy with our little eye and try to discern texture from an object, divine the artist’s criminal motive, understand the setting and its dimensions in its complexity, to necessarily realise that there are clues that our crude senses simply don’t register. In this instance, we are invited to a routine inspection alongside the Clueless Agency and meet a private eye, who by his very nature exists only as a grey smudge with a coat for a contour. More than a human being, it seems, he is a tool to be used. PGS Collective – his literary author – understands this archetypal detective persona as a vessel – as fluid but also filled with fluid. As the story progresses, different amalgamations and venues will spawn different enemies and traces, as they repeatedly fill in the vessel with prompts and cultural concepts, so that we eventually collect their sediment and retroactively divine its history.

The advent of the detective genre in the late 19th century coincided with the questioning of social reality in which paranoia emerged as a psychiatric term. I think it provided a way to come to terms with the multiplicity and schizophrenia of urban life, its frenetic quest for elusive gratification, its smell of decay and grandeur, but mostly of armpit. The collective is renowned for hatching out off-site art events in such sites of decay, corners charged with mysterious energy, whether those may be inside burnt cabins, parks, or miniature mines. When enclosed for the first time in a white cube, of course, what follows is that they invade it, too, and build their environment from scratch (and successfully manage to spill over). And so we have a slab of architecture in front of us, with its boarded-up windows, a door leading up to another door, lamps that slowly melt and become one with vomit on the street – a campy Edwardian-era alley dropping acid. If the objects had a taste, it would be bitterly acidic, the kind that stays on your palate and, truth be told, is more of a lol than a haha.