Tiziana
La Melia
Books + Selected Writing
While visiting Quezon City in May of 2017 I met my friend’s Auntie Lulu. When I asked her about the narrow coffin shaped pond in her garden, she said: that’s where we all came from. Surrounding the pond were plastic basins where some baby turtles lived. Inside the pond lived turtles around eighteen years old. The basins, or bowls, as others refer to them as, reminded me of the ones my grandmother used, that my Auntie Fina later inherited: for soaking clothes to remove stains. They handled these basins mindful of their dutiful potential for containing and nesting the things they took care of.
Self Defence is the collective title of a group of painted works that use the basin as a frame and that make up the main portion of the exhibition. It was initially produced for the Walter Phillips Gallery. The works are not written, but dictated and improvised and painted on plaster using an impure 13th Century mezzo fresco paint application. The title Self Defence refers to the interspecies communication taking place both underground and with the wind, via the pollen and seeds of plants, the exchanges that happen in the garden amongst flowers, bees, worms, “releasing chemical language trails through leaves and roots”*.
“The gold nuggets fell out of the cavities and landed in the dirt. The dirt was continuous like one long sheet. Sometimes it found forms of difference or separation in the long stomachs of worms. Anything contains an outside inside of it. A doughnut is a simple shape with a hole. They had entered the interior of the office building moving through the dim corridor towards the red light.”— Ada Smailbegović
*Press Release for Garden Gossip, 2017