A letter by Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz

As an introduction to their exhibition Fog Is My Drug, artists Pauline Boudry and Renate wrote a personal letter to the visitors of Nest:

Dear Visitor,

Two years ago, we shot this film at the Palacio Cristal in Madrid, in a setting composed of smoke and dancing stages. In the film, one follows the performer Aeréa Negrot, while she performs a song, which we had written together.

In our installation, we imagined the Crystal Palace as a ghost with a skin made of glass. The building was constructed for a colonial exhibition in 1887. The palace's transparent architecture allows the gaze to take everything into possession, wandering without barriers. Its transparency visually embodies the idea to understand better the colonies. We wondered: How does the palace make us aware of its violent history?

In our art practice, we have been engaged with the question of visibility and opacity for a long time. Visibility is a political precondition for claiming rights. But queer and racialized bodies have often been rendered hyper-visible, in order to scrutinize and police them. Becoming opaque thus can be a way of resistance.

What if the Palace as ghost uses smoke to hide from surveillance, employs its steely legs to keep our gaze at a distance?

Yours,

Renate and Pauline