Making Kin, Making Place

Making Kin is a process of rethinking relationality beyond blood – family, community, species – that involves weaving links between humans and non-humans alike. It invites us to cultivate a sense of mutual care, responsibility and interdependence in a world facing complex challenges. Through its curatorial program as slow as possible aims to serve as roots of a wider whole that fosters a real exchange of ideas and perspectives between artists, curators and audiences, creating a community around 3353.

Turning a space into a place involves commitment and time; valuing its disparate elements by accepting the challenges and discomfort that arise from a pluralist worldview in order to create a community anchored and invested in sharing a given physical, social and conceptual space. Making Place thus invites us to engage by making conscious effort to allocate space to individuals, objects and discourses typically marginalised by Western and Modernist perspectives. 

Making Kin, Making Place thus acts as a guiding principle – not as a thing to do, but a way of doing, of being, of exhibition making. It is a thing to be done slowly. Slowness in face of urgency calls for the unproductive, the minor, the reframing of “priorities” as an aggregate of conditions that demand a response. as slow as possible looks to slowness not in the sense of taking longer than necessary, but in the sense of taking the right amount of time: eigenzeit – the time inherent to a process.

For the inaugural and eponymous exhibition of their curatorial residency, as slow as possible has invited four artists with different approaches and practices to take Making Kin Making Place as starting points for spatial and social interventions in Espace 3353 and its surrounding area. Some reflect on what is: the artist-run space in relation to institutional space, while others approach the space through what is not – inciting exchange through meals and interaction.  

Mathias C. Pfund, in mixing personal, institutional and Hollywood mythology as an (art) object – to be taken or left, used or kept – presents us with small paradoxes to be riddled out and activated.

Zahrasadat Hakim  introduces elements – living, static and dormant* – into the exhibition space that suggest belonging to a certain place, history or era, evoking the passage of both dream time and real time through gestures of care and attention.

Maud Abbé-Decarroux looks to Carouge as a place that holds intimate memories, yet is a cliché of gentrification and urbanisation. She reconciles these frictions by transposing its characteristic architectural elements onto everyday domestic objects.

Victor Delétraz explores the immediate surroundings of 3353 using a small motorised appendage. In the exhibition space, filmic exploration is confronted with a shaky architecture. The installation later acts as a performance space for the artist.

* As part of the exhibition, Zahrasadat Hakim  is offering two (vegetarian) dinners on 13.12.23 and 13.01.24. Sign up by emailing asap.collectif@gmail.com with the number of diners.