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Medusa is a non-profit nomadic collective based in Brussels that aims to stimulate cultural exchanges and promote new emerging artists. Serving as a platform, Medusa’s main objective is to provide the means upon which new conceptions within the current cultural landscape can flourish. Medusa strongly believes that artistic innovations emerge through dialogue, cross-over and collaboration.

 
    TEAM
Medusa is currently run by Tim Evers, Saskia Smith, Egon Moles Le Bailly & Lisa De Meyer. Anna De Wandeler is their legal advisor. Medusa was founded by Noa Verkeyn, Jeanne Mouffe, Rik Vonckx, Sacha Verleyen & Romain Beaudot.

    EXHIBITIONS & PROJECTS
    REGISTERED OFFICE 
Medusa Offspace VZW Michel Zwabstraat 20 (7) 1080 Sint-Jans-Molenbeek registration number 0787.962.276 RPR Brussel


What surpasses the bittersweet boredom of long car rides as a child? The limbo of it felt endless, but soon I learned that destinations like home would always come eventually. Birthdays, too, marked moments of arrival. On birthdays, I learned what it meant arrive at those celebrated numbers through which adults measured life. That symbol, aflame in candle wax perched aloft a cake, sliced the gradual continuous experience of “growing up” into its rigid system of checkpoint-stops at numbers advancing from 0 to 99+.

Systems create clarity but systems also produce exclusions. Age was a gatekeeper, denying entry to toys, age-rated movies or bedtimes announced “not yet for you.” And on the playground, the second question asked (“how old are you?”) could be a principle that organised playfriend-hierarchies. To turn six, ten or thirteen is to encounter the bureaucracies of becoming: the rules, the systems, the orders that script who we are, or permitted to be.

“Childhood” often seems to refer to time. But unlike age, it never arrived or left through ceremony. If ever anything does refer to childhood, it turns up mostly through the effect of nostalgia. Plastic lunchboxes printed with with SpongeBob characters,  Nintendo DS ting-a-ling, faint adhesive marks where bedroom posters once hung.

This asks whetehrs childhood rather not refer to a terrain of collective images, media, symbols, and stories, the objects, articles or stories; those narratives and material elements that once cohabited a certain phase of life alongside us, the objects that once framed out life. This makes me think that age is not related to time, but to space. For what “childhood” means for me right now and today, designates more a space I used to inhabit. 
As these elements become dispersed and scattered across the process of coming-of-age, it creates a sense of “childhood” as such.. In this sense, childhood would be less a time “behind us” than a configuration of materials whose occasional resurfacing reassembles the space it names.





Children hardly know how to read the clock. So why insist on defining childhood through “time” anyway. Time holds little significance for a child, not to mention how, in the expiernce of play, they live by their own twisted logics of chronology: playing adults with their baby dolls, playing caretaker to an age category they themselves have yet to outgrow. My childhood is not surpassed: it still exists in the IKEA children’s bedsheets we all seemed to own, the objects and images that once framed our play, the artefacts. Prehaps the suffix “-hood”, in childhood suggests as much. It is not a passed time in life, but more so a terrain or neighbourhood of scattered things existing today. Disneyland and Dreamland would be glad to confirm this rule. 

Fuck, Quite obvously, what surfaces in this attempt to frame the child, are the pervasive influences of media and entertainment industries. Amids the grand dramaturgy of mass media and consumer culture on both personal and collective levels. “The child” is the consumer; another invented vessel through which through which late-capitalism may create a consumption exists. To think of all the things that accumulate my childhoodness is also to thing of all the myths, imaginaries and symbols, the stories created shaped and sold through the circuits of adult economies: the toy shop’s plastic excess, wonder and its price tag for mommy or daddy / A curated fantasy of an operative make-believe; consumable enchantment, , marketed commercial. 



Bringing these stands of thought into the exhibitions’ display, Are We Nearly There Yet? engages with artists who, intentionally or not, tap into imageries, narrative, methods of play, with which we, retrospectively, assume to associate with the social category of “childhood”. We encounter speaking animals, primary colours, graphic minimalism, the cartoonesque, the toy shop’s plastic excess, stories that only makes sense when logic are returned. But also the domestic sphere in which mass-distributed objects Dreamland and mediated fantasies of Disneyland furnish the interiors of our home — and where we grow up.


Although these fantasieies frame our play, Agamben writes that, whilst calendar time structures and sequences time, play is an experience that disrupts and subverts it. If it is the expiernce of play that defines our younger years, there we reveals a subversive capacity. For what we call “play” loosens the structures that format us, rethinks time, bends fixed assumptions to the will of imagination, and disturbs “common sense” by which the term adulthood seeks to secures itself. In the playground, roles and identity, interoris and spaces are openly unstable. So as childhood becomes the figure of both a marketed asset, and a subversive mlethod, Are We Nearly There Yet?  entertains the possibility of a logic worth staying with.