Ceramic, infrared light, sound (22 min., loop), steel, copper, cable,
2025
All photographs by © Louisa Boeszoermeny
unless otherwise credited
‘Does touch begin with the claiming of all space in which one has been drifting?’
Recalling Caenis unfolds as a somatic inquiry and a reversal of an absence within the ancient myth of the figure Caenis/ Caeneus. After experiencing an act of violence at the hands of the sea god Neptune, Caenis demands ‘da, femina ne sim’ (Ovid, Metamorphoses 12.202) – the erasure of her ascribed femininity. Her story continues as Caeneus, a male warrior of the Centauromachy rendered invulnerable by iron. Caenis’ agency collapses into a patriarchal logic, an economy of power in which violence lays claim to the very structures of domination that it creates.
Recalling Caenis resists this paradox. The installation demands and opens a space for a new narrative – one that refuses binary definitions of gender, vulnerability and power, and explores how presence, contact and relationship may manifest beyond stable forms.
A ceramic cavern immersed in infrared light becomes a resonance chamber in which embodied memory, fluidity and porosity are negotiated. On a stage, a site suspended between remembrance and longing, traces of becoming emerge. Here, Caenis appears not as an (anti-)heroic figure, but as a hydrophilic, queer voice moving through a tidal zone of transformation, tracing boundaries while testing their dissolution. In acoustic and material encounters, Recalling Caenis listens to the fragile tensions between softness and resistance, withdrawal and presence, touch and violence – and lingers in the in-between.