Andrea Coyotzi Borja showed me her exhibition at the HAM Gallery. It’s titled “There was no thought, but a thrive for the visibility of something yet to be named.” I make notes in the exhibition. “The fallen sky” I write down because it speaks to me. Maybe because the sky falls so early in November.
Talking to Finnish colleague artists, Andrea and I find out that November is not the best month to exhibit in Finland. Everyone is buckling up for winter and they don’t go out. The months you can exhibit in Finland are very few, we are told. August-September-October are good months, and January is also okay because people want to keep their New Year resolutions and start the year in a good (cultural) way.
After the exhibition visit, Andrea brings me back to the ferry that goes to Suomenlinna where I’m spending the month. In the winter, Andrea tells me, the water between the mainland and the island freezes and you can walk over it. Andrea feels it’s a scary experience because with every crack you imagine you will die right there, disappearing into the cold water as an ice popsicle only to be unfrozen centuries later. According to Andrea, every Fin has thought about the poses they want to die in.
I suspect that only Andrea thinks about the poses she would take on while turning into an ice popsicle. In the videos in the exhibition, she freezes moments in film - the moments for instance when a body is about to fall.
Andrea is interested in gestures. When things are “about to.” Andrea’s work is about the “aboutness”. Another note I take in the exhibition: “He’s a gesture. He’s about to fall. He is a still aboutness. An in-between moment.”
In her video piece An Ever Returnung Andrea talks about “these moments when reality shows what it is made of.” There are no other options or perspectives available in these moments.
Andrea is writing a thesis on the infra-ordinary. She’s thinking about creative ways to do so. “Doesn’t that contradict the ordinary character of your topic?” I ask. Andrea tells me that at the moment she’s writing her thesis in columns. I wonder how the thinking changes when you write it down in columns.
Although Andrea works about the infra-ordinary, the moments in her videos seem to be out-of-the-ordinary: like, a man falls from the roof, or a house facade falls down.
Things fall from the shelf in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. The rain, the sky, and the night fall. People fall too. Lou Reed says “you gotta stand up straight unless you're gonna fall."
