Listen, they left a sigh in the curtain.

 

I would like to suggest that we consider the exhibition space as a cave.
Listen: an imagined, fictional, and already-visited cave.

 

Caves have always been sanctuaries and places for passing on stories and knowledge, and the exhibition refers to such sanctuaries. I imagine the exhibition as a mouth (cavity) from which a poem resonates—deep from the body, between the lines and times. A poem, like a sigh, left behind in the folds of the artist’s ceramic curtains, adorning the walls of the exhibition.

 

A gust of wind... being carried by it.

 

Sighs describe states of melancholy, pain, or longing, as well as expressions of relief, joy, or even lustful arousal. They can be understood as immaterial carriers of meaning in a non-verbal language—ambiguous, suggestive, and evocative. They set an emotional sequence in motion.
As an imagined sound and acoustic-narrative fantasy, the sigh accompanies the exhibition, becoming a spatial arrangement and poetic articulation. Sighing is also a physical gesture tied to breathing, weaving an airy thread that connects to Rike Droescher’s ongoing exploration of the human (and primal) longing to fly. Such a gesture is reflected in the series of embroidered works titled Then we have grown aerial roots, in which the artist recalls her own childhood memories alongside found footage showing scenes of hobby acrobats practicing flight exercises. Open arms and an outstretched body, as represented in these works, become an echo of the human longing to fly—the passing on of a moment and the feeling it evokes: being carried and simultaneously floating weightlessly. Rike Droescher associates her own memories and these found images with the depiction of the “birdman” found in the cave paintings of Lascaux, France. The “birdman” is a hybrid being with a similarly outstretched body, moving in what is presumed—and often imagined—as a trance-like flight between worlds. This transition, like the sigh, wanders in cycles: from tension to relaxation, from inhalation to exhalation, from thought to sound. Thus, the sigh says to the tongue: go and seek what I can’t express.

 

Breathed sequences, woven kinships.

 

Rike Droescher is interested in the process of weaving as an act of documenting the passage of time. From the embroidered works, an imaginary fabric emerges—the fabulation of a moment that speaks to a possible universal language, a lived and long-preserved memory.

 

The blue cushions in the exhibition formulate invitations to liminal states, and, when placed in relation to Droescher’s “memory box”, containing previously conceived works by the artist, they spin references to earlier woven narratives. They function in the exhibition as props that allow the lucid unfolding of the layers of the real world—a reverie, a dream, a poem that takes root in space and time.

 

Text by Victoria Tarak

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