Earlid | solace + friction, summer 2016

Two artistic practices converge and take leave at very different intersections. Both offer hymns to homes wrenched of the safety of mother tongues and awash in a wealth of quiet refuge. Their work is a distillation or a sieve for writer Italo Calvino’s meandering of imagined cities, armatures, shells, beehives.

Pip Stafford’s Iris is silent of voices, yet full of sound and the quiet movements of the inhabitants of an old house. Dragan Todorovic’s In My Language, I am Smart is an engagement with language and exile, with foreign landscapes and broken tongues, spirals many voices and song-stories.

When asked to intersect with Calvino, Todorovic created a newly minted work of sound, in itself a Calvino-esque question about the small town encounter.

If the thread that ravels its way through the rooms in our head reflects the way it entangles the chaos of the rooms in our home; or, conversely, simply settles like dust along the beam of light (falling just so in the morning across the foot of the bed); then such an invisible thread must also run through the cities where we live—and where we escape.

Two artists invite us towards these rooms, these cities.