A Sting from Two Houses    (2022)

A Sting from Two Houses    (2022)

Nettle seeds, projector lens, beads and binding cord
C-type photograph
Dimensions various

♦

The stinging nettle is mostly perceived as a nasty weed, the sign of trouble, an ‘outcast’, associated with wasteland, the roadside, borders, and neglect.  It is also a fantastically nutritious plant, its sting a protection from being eaten before its ability to reproduce through germinating its seeds.
Here the nettle seeds share with us an image that they think we need to see.  They watch it with us.  Through the presence of light their own potential germination is delayed.
The stinging nettle; Urtica Dioica. Urtica is derived from a Latin word meaning ‘sting’. Dioica is derived from Greek, meaning ‘of two houses’ (having separate staminate and pistillate plants; dioecious).
The sting from two houses. Contradictory identifications that both feel like ‘home’ but pull us in different directions.

Contradictory identifications in one body are also apparent in the simultaneous states of consciousness and unconsciousness explored in Chodzko’s exhibition title “Renata, remember you are unconscious; you have no expression, no pain, you don’t yell, you are unconscious!” at the British School at Rome, (2022) where A Sting from Two Houses was first shown.  That exhibition, ‘guided by the spirit of Pier Paolo Pasolini’, who is also frequently characterised as having contradictory identifications, conflicting ideologies and inconsistent styles. (Pasolini liked to refer to himself as the poeta della sineciosi (a “poet of the oxymoron”).
Nettles grow within Pasolini’s work, from the poem Gramsci’s Ashes (1957) (…The earth, fertile with nettles and vegetables, brings forth…) to the film, Theorem (1968), where Emilia, the maid, transforms into an agrarian saint capable, after imbibing a broth made with nettles, of healing disease and of levitation.

The artwork as a vessel or template for plant propagation also appears in  I See Through Every Image.(A souvenir for Laarni; A planting template for Belladonna seeds), 2013  , The woods shall rise up in those places where you pause, (1995) , Sowmat  (2007)  , …reached. So, deltoid-bodhi-leaf-shield… (2020)).

Chodzko distributed nettle seeds amongst the audience (‘for future germination’) as part of a performative lecture at the British School at Rome made on the opening night of the “Renata...” exhibition.  During that performance he also stated: ” They are partly in the exhibition because I’ve always had a strange fascination with nettles and their ability to sting us so easily from the slightest brush of our skin against them. They seem to get very angry at the slightest thing! In the small scrappy suburban woods near my home, where I played as a child I used to get stung by them so frequently that I’m pretty sure I reached a limit where I became immune. At least I didn’t feel it anymore…”

♦

“Renata, remember you are unconscious; you have no expression, no pain, you don’t yell, you are unconscious!” (2022)   [ exhibition at the British School at Rome ]
includes the works:
A Sting from Two Houses   (2022)
ah; open; offering; severing; ah  (2022)
outside, to clear my head (2020 – 2022)
Reunion; Salò     (1998)
Knots (2013)