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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, but soon I learned that destinations like home would always come eventually. Birthdays, too, marked moments of arrival. On the earliest of birthdays, I learned what it meant to arrive at those celebrated numbers through which adults measure life. This number, aflame in candle wax perched on the cake, cuts the elusive contiuum of change, the experience of “growing up,” in a rigid system of numerical order from 0 to 99+. Time is cut into slices. But like all systems, the clairty it offers also creates exclusions. Age is a gatekeeper, denying entry to toys, age-rated movies or bedtimes deemed “not yet for you.” Turning six, to ten, to thirteen is to encounter more and more bureaucracies of becoming: the rules, hierarchies and orders that script who we are, or permitted to be.

The “arrival” of adulthood rarely announces itself with clarity. My sense of “being an adult” tends to surface only through nostalgic encounters with the objects and images that once framed my play as a child. An artefact such as the IKEA children’s bedsheets, we all seemed to own, rediscovered years later in a second-hand shop, anchor my feeling of “childhood” more firmly than the memory of a lived expiernce, a passed date, a passed time, a passed age, or numer. If anything, “childhood” designates more space I used to inhabit, a terrain of artefacts, props, and the myths imaginaries and shared symbols, that embedding the a landscape of collective media, myths, that once framed my play. The suffix “-hood”, in childhood suggests as much a terrain, a association to childhood reinforced by places like Disneyland and Dreamland.

I cannot reflect on some “earlier moment in time”; a chronological measure in a slice of calendar time. For all we know children hardly know how to read the clock. So why insist on defining childhood through “time”, and not space? 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. 

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