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.

 
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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.

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Medusa Offspace VZW Michel Zwabstraat 20 (7) 1080 Sint-Jans-Molenbeek registration number 0787.962.276 RPR Brussel

Website ©Saskia Smith


Are We Nearly There Yet?
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, marked such arrivals. On birthdays, we understood what it meant to arrive at those celebrated numbers through which adults measure life. Age instantiates growing up as a calculable system. But like all structures and systems, the numbered clarity offered by age also stands as a gatekeeper, barring entry from toys, PG-13 movies, or bedtimes deemed “not yet for you.” To turn six, ten, or thirteen is to encounter the bureaucracies of becoming; the systems, rules, hierarchies and orders that script who we are, or allowed to be.

And yet, even as we grow into adulthood, the arrival of coming-of-age remains strangely elusive. If we ever sense ourselves crossing some definitive threshold of being ‘fully grown,’ it often reveals itself not in triumph or certainty, but in a sense of loss—for an era we cannot quite articulate, yet continue to idealise. Childhood, in this light, persists as an effect of nostalgia: activated when our adult selves are confronted by the leftovers of its manufactured imagery—past-era commercials, sun-bleached Justin Bieber posters, Disneyland souvenirs, mass-issued IKEA children’s furniture (those bedsheets or lamps we all seemed to have) or the familiar props that frame our childhood scenes.

But these cultural leftovers confirm the rule that childhood essentially brings up a spatial imaginary, a zone of symbols and shared fictions that, as Giorgio Agamben analyses in Infancy and History (1993), is at odds with any notion of time. The term child-hood carries a suffix that suggests the notion of a neighbourhood, as much that Disneyland or Dreamland—the epitome of childhood—refer to a terrain of collective media, symbols and myths. It seems indeed that childhood is as much space as a time which materialise the meaning of childhood for us.

Time, after all, holds little signficance for a child not yet having learned to read the clock. So why insist on defining childhood through a “time in one’s life” rather than reffering to this space or the experience that framed our playing? Agamben writes that, whilst calendar time structures and sequences time, play is an experience that disrupts and subverts it. For what 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?

Bringing such potnetion of disruption of playtime into the exhibitions’ display, Are We Nearly There Yet? engages with artists who—intentionally or not—tap into dreamscapes we retrospectively imagine to have once inhabited as children. Speaking animals, primary colours, graphic minimalism, the cartoonesque and where the make-believe becomes operative. For to encounter ‘the childlike’ is also to glimpse the possibility that ‘adult order’ can be disrupted, not in spite of play, but through it.

Yet what also surfaces are the very projections through which ‘the child’ has been imagined in late-capitalism: as stereotype, as symbolic vessel, as the adult’s curated fantasy of innocence. Pop-cultural archetypes, soft-edged and mass-distributed, furnish the infrastructure of this fabrication. The child, in this sense, becomes a figure not simply lived, but marketed—its imagination shaped and sold through the circuits of adult economies, the pervasive influence of media and entertainment industries, the grand dramaturgy of mass media and consumer culture on both personal and collective levels. The consumable enchantment of the toy shop sits uneasily beside its plastic excess. Wonder is not without its price tag.

But it is precisely within this contrast—between manufactured fantasy and its unraveling—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.

What we conventionally call adulthood—stability, closure, destination—is refigured as a structure always already in play. So the question Are We Nearly There Yet? is not simply one of distance to goal. To ask it again, seriously, is to refuse closure—and to entertain the possibility that what we call childish might yet carry a logic worth staying with.

Saskia Smith