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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 Sacha Verleyen & Noa Verkeyn.

    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, yet we soon learned that destinations like home would always come eventually. Birthdays, too, mark arrivals. On our earliest birthdays in life, we learned what it means to arrive at those celebrated numbers through which adults measure life. Age, in its convention, translates our elusive experience of growing up, a continuum of change, into a rigid system of numerical order, from 0 to 99+. But like all systems, its clarity conceals its own exclusions. Until the age of adulthood, every number is a gatekeeper, denying entry to toys, age-rated movies or bedtimes deemed “not yet for you.” To turn six, ten, or thirteen is to encounter the bureaucracies of becoming. The rules, hierarchies and orders that script who we are, or permitted to be.

And yet, even as we come-of-age, the “arrival of adulthood” remains strangely elusive. The feeling of it emerges in an nostalgic encounter with when a sun-bleached Justin Bieber posters refuraces, Disneyland souvenirs, or the mass-issued IKEA children’s bedsheets we all seemed to own.

These props and myths, the leftovers of our childhood’s manufactured imagery, appear to anchor the very conceptualisation of “childhood” more than a chronological measure in a slice of calendar time could. If anything, this suggests that “childhood” exists less as a past-era time, and more as a terrain of artefacts, embedding imaginaries and shared symbols. The word “childhood” itself suggest as much, carrying “-hood” as if its designates a landscape of collective media, myths, and material culture rather than a time. Disneyland and Dreamland confirm a territory. 

Why insist on defining childhood through “time”, when children actually inhabiting this social space hardly know how to read the clock. For all we fanthom, children have their own logics of time, twists time more than, for instance, children playing adults with their baby dolls, playing caretaker to an age category they themselves have yet to outgrow. Giorgio Agamben analyses in Infancy and History (1993), that indeed expiernce of time holds little significance for a child, is all about the expiernce of play. Aren’t children then the ones who define what it means to be a child? 


 ,gesturing a space r toward this,


Bringing this thought into the exhibitions’ display, Are We Nearly There Yet? engages with artists who, intentionally or not, tap into imageries, narrative, methods of being and play, whiwh we retrospectively imagine to have once inhabited as children. Speaking animals, primary colours, graphic minimalism, the cartoonesque... What surfaces in this attempt to frame the frames that once framed our play, are pervasive influences of media and entertainment industries, consumable enchantment, mass-distributed and mediated fantasies, marketed commercial, imaginaries shaped and sold through the circuits of adult economies, the toy shop’s plastic excess. Wonder with its price tag. 

Amids the grand dramaturgy of mass media and consumer culture on both personal and collective levels, the many mediated fantasies through which through which ‘the child’  has been imagined and projected in late-capitalism as a vessel through which once again consumption exists. The curated fantasy of an operative make-believe.  To encounter “childhood” is to glimpse the possibility a late-capitalism?
 

if anything, it is the expiernce of playt that defines our yoinger yeats. Agamben writes that, whilst calendar time structures and sequences time, play is an experience that disrupts and subverts it. For all we know from Agemben is that the childlike reveals a subversive capacity. For what we call ‘play’ may also be a practice that loosens the structures that format us, bends fixed assumptions to the will of imagination, and disturbs the common sense by which adulthood secures itself. In the playground roles and identity are unstable. and to entertain the possibility that what we call childish might yet carry a logic worth staying with. Structures can be disrupted, not in spite of play, but through it. So as the child becomes a figure marketed, it also remains an expiernce lived, precisely within this contrast, Are We Nearly There Yet?  sits between manufactured fantasy and its unraveling