The dominant aesthetic paradigm of contemporary art participates in a form of extraction to impose value as a separation from form, and critical distance as discourse. Case_L proposes an emerging encounter with this form as it is internalised: inscribed in bodies as they are condemned to perform, subjected to the contemporary conditions of extraction, work and the redoubling of life as management. The exhibition follows the same protocol as IASI: the terms of the Case are deployed – manifestation, expression, treatment and recovery. The ground floor, standing for the manifestation and expression of panic attack, presents the living body – its marks, notations, afflictions – as temporal, mortal. As expressed in the birthmark, a shock in the life of the mother can transfer to the child: from one body to another. Drawings on large –body-sized –sheets of paper signal tensions, pain, the holding of contraction, all the while indicating gestures of release. These notations are as much recordings of articulations of movements and stoppages as re-enactments to come. They exist in the potential and affective dimension of time rather than in an actual chronology of actions. The first floor of the exhibition, standing for treatment and recovery, proposes an encounter with Shelter_Refuge, two ‘cocoons’ made out of natural materials (palm leaves and water hyacinth), big enough to welcome a body: to protect this body, to conceal it, camouflage it. The cocoon is a visualisation of existing inside one’s body, of occupying the place of the acting – but, paradoxically, paralysed – subject. Next to the first cocoon, there is another, that somehow duplicates the situation as a sort of structure. Shelter_Refuge includes a week-long performance, to take place during the exhibition, transforming the status of the objects into props to be activated, rendering total perception or consumption impossible. Shelter_Refuge can also be imagined. It is as much a situation as it is a structure; or rather esents itself to the subject as a sort of structural situation, where structure as abstraction cannot be completely detached from the situation. The process of abstraction or detachment leads to an error, and this process is the Case. Shelter_Refuge is the process of the structure of panic attack. The cocoon stands for the subject as objectified. The visitor is pushed into a sort of confusion of identification: between the subject within the cocoon whose place they imagine taking, and the two objects the visitor identifies as identical. The subject – the visitor – in trying to locate him or herself falls into a paranoid trap. This situation-as-structure is subject to the infinite regression of inexhaustible analysis. That is precisely its structure, whereby the viewer has no choice but to accept being with the performance, feeling presence instead of locating, letting go instead of trying to understand. And here treatment is recovery.

Nicolas Brulhart, Recovery beyond recognition, Georgia Sagri, Case_L, 2022, Kunsthalle Friart