04.04.2025
The Musicologists & Maison Caca
Medusa is a nomadic, Brussels-based collective that supports artistic exchange platforming new emerging artists.
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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Are We Nearly There Yet?
What surpasses the bittersweet liminality of long car rides as a child? The limbo of it felt endless, yet we 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 measured life. Age offers a structure to situate oneself in time, but like all strctures do, it also stood as a gatekeeper, barring entry from toys deemed “not yet for you.” To grow up was to step into systems, rules, hierarchies, orders, in which one gradually understand one’s designated place.
And yet, even as we cross into adulthood, coming-of-age’s arrival remains strangely elusive. If ever we sense ourselves having crossed over some definitive threshold, it turns up mostly through the effect of nostalgia—sense of loss for an era we fail to fully define but continue to idealise. The notion of childhood stand up as a counterpart of our adult selves mostly when confronted with leftovers of its manufactured imagery: past-era commercials, sun-bleached Justin Bieber posters, Disneyland souvenirs, the scuffed plastic of well-worn toys, and the movie boxes still present in the walls of a house that once framed our play.
But these cultural leftovers confirm the rule that childhood essentially refers to a space of play and an experience that, as Giorgio Agamben analyses in Infancy and History, is at odds with any notion of calendar time. The term childhood itself suggests as much: a neighborhood; a terrain of collective images, and media, symbols and stories, a Disneyland or Dreamland, which anchor and define the meaning of childhoof for us today. Time, after all, holds little signficance in the life of a child—so why insist on defining childhood through it? Agamben writes that, whilst calendar time structures and sequences time, play changes, disrupts, subverts it. Children play to become mommy and daddy, whilst adults, in turn, become children in play. Bringing playtime to the exhibition, Are We Nearly There Yet? engages artists who—intentionally or not—tap into narratives and aethetics we associate with coming-of-age. Many of these registers, far from being innocent or purely nostalgic, reveal themselves to be inextricable from the grand dramaturgy of mass media and consumer culture. The dreamscapes we once inhabited as children are also part of adult economies, shaped and sold for comercialised intent. Some works in the exhibition hit hard on the contrast between the magic and fantasies and their unraveling. The fabrications of dreamscapes, once eagerly absorbed into intimate, domestic spaces, now appear differently under scrutiny. The consumable enchantment of the toy shop is set against its plastic obscenity. Their use of graphic minimalism, primary colors, and unfinished forms in many of these works engage in a playful openness that makes gesture to improvisation, make-believe, or instinctive resistance to fixed meanings. Exaggerated, cartoonesque, or half-formed scultures reveal themselves not as naive, but as a way to bend, reshape, and subvert the systems/conventions we take for granted. With childlike naivite and methodologies, deconstructing conventional meaning and subverting conventional things from the ways in which us adults sorts of sense come undone. Adult’s fixed assumptions bend to imagination’s will. Animals can speak like us. Everything can easily bend in playground dynamics. And so, this childhood cosmos which is part of an adults world also has within it the possibility to be distruped through play. Whatever turn is made for getting to the conclusion—Are We Nearly There Yet? is not a question to measure how far we’ve come at the desireful destination, but reconsider what constitutes this desireful destination, prehaps make it unstable. Consider what is so often dismissed as “childlike”—and find, within it, a credibility, a method or way of working worth holding onto.