NO NATURAL DISASTER at HORSEANDPONY Fine Arts / Berlin

Diana Artus, Caitlin Berrigan, Tamen Perez, Armita Raafat, Viktor Timofeev, Clémence de La Tour du Pin

Nov 27 - Dec 19 2016

HORSEANDPONY  Fine Arts
Altenbrakerstrasse 18
12053 Berlin




Tamen Perez




Diana Artus



Tamen Perez


Tamen Perez



Diana Artus



Armita Raafat



Clémence de La Tour du Pin





Diana Artus


Viktor Timofeev





Below sea level in the desert,
we are buffered from the ocean
by a wall of dry mountains.
The only soft body here is the desert floor,
absorbed by the accidental flood
of a river, rerouted.
Postcards of a resort oasis show blue water,
bronzed bodies, white boats and yellow blossomed date
palms.
Now full of metal and oxygen-eating microbes,
the sea’s fish thrown in for sport are suffocating
the smell of them fills the air
even after their carcasses have dried.
No horizon or colors distinguish
the wet from the dry, sea from desert,
but as you approach, your foot sinks a bit deeper
and a trail of debris starts with toilet tanks in shards,
whorls of barbed wire, collapsed trailer shacks
and merges with a thick fringe of fish bones
where the desert is drying itself out, returning to salt.
The valley is an unfirm fault.
Mud volcanoes on its rim belch soaked sand in the air.
To this din of mountain dust the only contrast
is black obsidian boulders from the last eruption 
2000 years ago, which we steal and break
a bottle of wine for Pele
staining the butte red so she won’t be angry
so the dates stuck in our teeth will still taste sweet.

After annihilation
I am becoming mineral.

This is no natural disaster it is just the natural
consequence of two people, fucking, 
having fucked. Fuck

the tourists and their picnics 
fuck this measured green 
leisure fuck all the children
discovering the softness of grass


Excerpted from Caitlin Berrigan, Treatise on Imaginary Explosions, vol. 1
(Broken Dimanche Press, forthcoming 2017)