OFLUXO

“Underneath the ground, there is bedrock, magma, liquid iron, solid iron. Above the sky, there is mostly nothing, apart from a few hot, lonely stars and planets scattered around in space. One could say that between, beneath and above there is the earth’s surface, your surface, the atmosphere. But from a materialist perspective, it is more accurate to say that between the iron core and the lonely stars there is the synaptic cleft.” — Anna Zett, Artificial Gut Feeling

It’s a room, malleable in every sense. Individual sculptures in space merge into the decor of a bedroom that through two large windows opens itself up to the street. Often hand-carved and manually rubbed in flexible coating, the charge that touch gives us, is formulated in ‘Softalism’. Public interiority. Leaning strongly on hybrid resemblance, every piece—be it a bookshelf or a vase—gets unexpectedly slippery upon closer inspection.

The practice of touche—touche transports the viewer to an empire of dreamlike apparition and tactile explorations. Lacquered wooden tiles, foam rocks; simulated textures toy with bodily perception and reality slowly resides to a secondary position. Manufactured in intricate detail, the artists use contemporary materials and techniques, to create new fiction for daily scenarios. Each imagined scene is a reinterpretation of existing cultural traditions; their environments are a free fall in tangible reality. touche—touche’s sculptures and center stage bed convey a sensuality—abundantly haptic, otherworldly. Here, the mind is never fully asleep, it is resting on an extended sense of relation. The artificial—the ‘almost’—triggers an internal peaking flip. The scene induces the viewer to the arousal threshold of wakefulness and sleep.