The Origin of Everything Strange, Chapter 1: The Arrival by Marlon de Azambuja and Ángela Jiménez Durán, curated by Margaux Knight, at POUSH, Aubervilliers, 15/10/2024 – 24/11/2024.
Exhibition text:
“Listen carefully. The story you are about to hear is paved with ellipses and mysterious phenomena. It is an encounter that took place thousands of light-years away from our solar system, on a telluric exoplanet. We are silent witnesses to this occurrence, made visible to us by the new Earendel telescope. It is the tale of an origin: the birth of a language, of a landscape. A history of worlds in the making.”
The Origin of Everything Strange is a decade-long cycle of exhibitions. Its ten chapters unfold in a non-linear time, at the pace of one exhibition per year. Like a narrative filled with ellipses, it tells the story of a meeting and a renewed face-to-face encounter. Born from the dialogue between two artistic practices, that of Marlon de Azambuja and Ángela Jiménez Durán, they are accompanied by the curator-narrator Margaux Knight.
Chapter 1: The Arrival takes place in their studio at POUSH. A source place, it is the origin and center of gestation for their singular yet porous imaginaries, which often intersect and influence each other. The exhibition is a zone of contact where a phenomenon emerges as an enigma: two foreign bodies, both material and symbolic, meet. The exhibition is an invitation to take root in uncertainty, to question our assumptions. It is about embracing the inexplicable in order to conceive possible dialogues between radically different forms, things that should not be understood together.
The feeling of strangeness is a sensation of floating, like a wavering, paradoxically rare yet commonly shared. It shakes the certainties of our daily reality, its familiarity. Nourished by science-fiction, a form of dreamlike quality, the phantasmatic sphere, or archaic thought, The Origin of Everything Strange questions phenomena of tipping points, threshold crossings, and paradigm shifts. The exhibition becomes an ephemeral laboratory, a necessary space for the speculation of possibilities, embodied in space and matter.
