ah; open; offering; severing; ah     (2022)

ah; open; offering; severing; ah     (2022)

(a)  [In the Gallery]
Shirt and trouser fragments, 5m long belt
The removed pruned stems, that grew in the direction of 149.98° (South South East), from shrubs in the courtyard garden.
60cm x 100cm x 130cm

(b). [In the courtyard garden of the British School at Rome]
A work in progress (the work is completed in the future, in 5 years time, when the pruning of the particular branches used in this work has developed the growth of new buds).
Pruned stems of shrubs, hi-vis scarf, ink (text reads: Makwaru Beach Park, Chamwino District, Dodoma Region, Tanzania, 3623.25 miles [from the BSR], 149.98°), lighting croc clips (hanging from the light fixture on the courtyard wall).
Dimensions various.

♦

ah; open; offering; severing; ah (2022 – ) is a method of shifting and opening our consciousness towards a distant place. To feel pulled by it, fascinated; becoming it. Or perhaps it is a form of guilt or denial,  attempting to remove everything that points in the direction of the place that haunts us.
In the earlier work Here ( made in Beppu, Japan, 2015) Chodzko used a similar process of making a partial ‘ghost body’ from pruned branches severed from a gallery’s garden that had pointed in the direction of his own home, again as a question of ‘being in place’.
At the centre of this Roman garden is a carved stone fountain.  A compass point taken from its spout of water, heading 149.98° (South South East), is the direction of  Makwaru Beach Park, Chamwino District, Dodoma Region, Tanzania. 3623.25 miles away!

In the exhibition “Renata, remember you are unconscious...” , at the British School at Rome (2022),  ah; open; offering; severing; ah  imagines and attempts to embody Pier Paolo Pasolini’s consciousness in relation to his feelings about a culturally and geographically remote place from his ‘home’.  Pasolini’s documentary ‘Appunti per un’Orestiade Africana’  (1970) makes evident his desire to project Aeschylus’ Oresteia onto the diverse African people and places he was exploring. And this projecting, with all its overlooking of cultural specificity, its lack of listening and engaging, but instead imposing meaning, was itself Pasolini’s method of mediating his own aesthetic, poetic and political interests.
Sam Rohdie’s conclusion about Pasolini’s position in relation to a colonial otherness was that “he needed what he loved to be far away and not known in order to be ideal and, therefore, to fuel his system of perpetual desire which was the paradox and motor of his writing”.*
At one point Pasolini laments a dance performed by the ‘Wagogo tribe’ as being; ‘emptied of their ancient sacred meaning and …being redone almost out of sheer joy’.  This seems to be an echo of Pasolini’s frequent criticism of Italian youth for their westernisation and corruption by consumerism!
Chodzko’s ‘ah; open; offering; severing; ah’ is an attempt to face up to and play with the guilt, to receive it, or inhabit it internally, in the gut.  It is also an attempt to compensate for the neglect implied in the tourist gaze, returning attention to the place of the dance (in this work, Makwaru Beach Park, in an area inhabitated by Wagogo people a Bantu ethnic and linguistic group based in the Dodoma Region of central Tanzania), inviting our participation in this collective space with ‘sheer joy’ communicating ‘ancient sacred meaning.’

*Sam Rohdie “The Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini” (BFI/Bloomsbury), (1995), p.99

♦
ah; open; offering; severing; ah (2022) incorporates many elements of Chodzko’s practice that explores a psychological relationship to landscape and place; assembling, signalling, announcing and transmitting forms of ‘loops’ into public space, ranging from  Meetings of people with stammers to describe a fire (1999-), Better Scenery (2000 – ), We love you here, even though you are there (2012),  Runners (2013) etc.  As with Better Scenery (2000 – ),  Ants Choose Position for Sequins – 2 Seconds Interval  (2003),  White Magic (2005), Pattern for a Procession with Two Masks (2007) and Because… (2013). A more direct precursor is  Looper   (2003)  [Image: Stockholm.    Text: Haiti.    Flyposted onto a single billboard hoarding in Turin] and Next Meeting: Opposite the main entrance to the Ordzhonikidze Health Centre, the Sochi-Matzesta resort…   2007. [Image: Pakistan, 1978.  Text: Russia, 1958. Flyposted around Toronto, 2007], Next Meeting: The foyer of the Hagens Hotel, Måløy, Sogn og Fjordane, on the island of Vågsøy… 2007. [Image: Mexico City, 1973. Text: Norway, 1975.  Flyposted onto a hoarding, Balbutcher Lane, Ballymun, Dublin 11, Ireland],  Next Meeting: The car park of the plywood factory, just north of the town of Tolhóin … 2008   [Image: Tashkent, 1967.  Text: Tierra Del Fuego, 1991.   Flyposted onto a single billboard on the coastal path between St Ives and Zennor, Cornwall],  Next meeting: Beside the TV transmitter on the highest part of Szechenyi Hill…2010  [Image: Haiti, 1971. Text: Budapest, 1967. Flyposted around Esperidon Square, Glyfada, Athens, 2010], Next meeting: In the entrance to the Golf-Club restaurant, past the Konak, in the Košutnjak Park… 2011   [Image: Ecuador,1968. Text: Yugoslavia, 1966. Flyposted on the ground floor windows of Hafenstrasse 23, 60327 Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 2011].
All these works operate in the vibrating space between two apparently disconnected sites apparently communicating with each other.

♦

“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)