ECHOING MOVEMENTS TO COME
ROMY RÜEGGER

Echoing Movements To Come, the first solo show in Italy by artist Romy Rüegger, departs from her recent book Language is Skin: Scripts for Performances (Archive Books, 2018), translating her time-based, performative practice into the temporality of the exhibition space. The newly conceived installation at ar/ge kunst articulates the two rooms of the gallery, making visible parallel ways of assembling the anticipations, fragments and research materials of the performances while thinking around their associative potential, status and temporary presence.

The first room is built around three autonomous elements from three different performances. These are brought together so that they overlay, intersect and echo each other’s narratives, their co-habitation forming a potential stage that will play out differently in each performance.

Vertical (Hanging) — a backdrop in long sheets of cotton printed with a draft fabric design questions and undoes the narratives of the early textile industry. Drawn and produced in a factory in the Swiss Valley of Glarus, exported to Indonesia from the port of Ancona, floral patterns, apes riding on dromedaries, palm trees in bright colours bear witness to a specific form of silent colonialism. In 1837 the same factory was the site of the first workers’ strike in Switzerland “led by women and children”. This strike followed the installation of a bell to mark the beginning of the working day (A Fabric in Turkey Red, 2013/2019).

Horizontal (Floor) — silver markings superimposed on the floor of the gallery delineate the ground plan of a single-room apartment built in 1926 by the newly founded Housing Cooperative for Working Women. Their desire to live independently among other women was justified by the economic incorporation of the female workforce into the region’s growing metal industry. Planned with architect Lux Guyer, the apartments were built to conform to modern living standards – mini bourgeois flats with single beds (If You Lived Here, You Would Already Be at Yours, 2015/2019).

Sound: (Dusty Voices) — voices speak from the galleries of a federal museum, south of the Alps, with a view towards the Italian border. Two climbers, alone at night in the museum. White plaster models for statues and monuments and the relief Victims of Labour form the scenario. The Gotthard base tunnel has just reopened, again. Who does the cleaning here at night, invisibly? Who keeps the statues as white as can be, maintaining those role models of the modern nation state? (Climbing Monuments, 2016/2019).

In the second room, documents, scripts and research materials that inform the performances are made available to the audience in a newly conceived display system, an expansion of Romy Rüegger’s montage practice. This display seizes Isamu Noguchi’s set for Martha Graham’s Appalachian Spring (1944). The installation operates as a performative setting for documents and texts; the stage design resonates with questions about the historic, private and public spaces through which our present moves – histories of work migration, constructed national myths and white privileges.

PERFORMANCES AND PUBLIC PROGRAMME

Opening
with Performance A Fabric in Turkey Red
6 September, 7 pm

Performance
If You Lived Here, You Would Already Be at Yours
12 October, 5 pm

Performance and Matinée
To be announced
9 November, 11 am

Savoir-vivre #4
Workshop series curated by Simone Mair
Date to be announced

With the kind support of:
Pro Helvetia – Swiss Cultural Foundation
The Autonomous Province of South Tyrol, Department of Culture
Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio
City of Bolzano, Department of Culture
Pasticceria Hofer, Bolzano