Pia Rönicke: The Drifters’ Archive

Dear E, 

They keep telling us that the past has passed and that we have little to do with what is yet to come. How to deal with such violence?

And here we are, once again, despite the fences and the extraction. Despite this rhythm imposed with statistical cruelty. Here we are, believing in images and words, shapes and sounds, despite it all. Once again, knowing that it’s never the same again.

But let’s rehearse a possible beginning. Perhaps 2006: you and Pia working together on her exhibition at L k. It’s not difficult to imagine you two, gathered around Pia’s practice. One can almost feel the sense of urgency of those conversations. A plot, a search for cracks along the walls that now, twenty years later, resonates like a murmur, or a prophecy. 

Pia’s is the kind of work that impels us to write letters to those we care about. Letters written in a nomadic language, addressed to our loved ones, and to the ones we’ve learnt to love across history (through photographs, pages, traces). Pia’s work is a gathering (of stories, between beings), and so we gather in this archive, that sounds like the water dripping on a tree fern, while the coxolitli sings. A drifting archive, that collects the echoes of revolutionary dreams. Of Rosa, of Walter, of Ursula. Here we are, in motion, walking in the cloud forest, meandering through an unknown city. Once again, retelling stories about the dignity of the dispossessed. About a girl who followed the rhythm of the woods, and escaped society. About a seed that travelled back home, crossing the ocean. 

Life: that which remains unruly, despite it all. 
How to deal with such hope?

Dear F, 

Your letter is of the rare kind I wish to receive, a shared sensibility that resonates perfectly with my mood. I’ve been spending the summer reading Sara Ahmed. Annoyed by the state of things in the world and thrown between a dispirited sadness and the empowerment of the NO (more), I tended to my balcony plants for some momentary solace.

Reading your beautiful notes on Pia’s work, I couldn’t help to think of Rosa Luxemburg and her incessant, fierce critique of war mongering. Imprisoned and under surveillance, she formulates a brutal dissection of capitalism, exposes the disease of imperialism and argues against the conventional, wooden language of her peers while seeking words that go from the writer’s heart to the reader’s heart. Even from within her enclosed prison cell she notices the early signs of the ecological collapse we suffer today. 

Her battle feels so timely, and yet so overwhelmingly unreachable. Will we ever succeed in breaking this vicious circle? 

In a way, Pia humbly picks up this thread between Rosa’s revolutionary stance, one imbued with so much love expressed and shared in her letter writing, and Hannah Arendt’s storytelling as a way to borne all sorrows. Such a stark contrast to certain institutions who celebrate Arendt while continuing their abuse of power.

Things run in circles, yes, but circles do break eventually.
Is this perhaps the sort of hope you’re asking for?
I believe it can be.

Pia Rönicke is a visual artist living in Copenhagen. For over two decades, she has collected narratives that contest the colonial and capitalist attempts to enclose life. Rönicke’s projects imbricate diverse media and expand across timelines, honoring the inexhaustible force of feminist and communal resistance. The Drifters’ Archive is an exhibition in two parts presented at Fuxia 2 and SIGNAL.