Chapter 14 Mountain Morse
(2015)

YO NO HOmeWOrk - LOUISE GUERRA

The nomadic curatorial project deuxpiece makes a guest appearance at sic! Lucerne and presents an exhibition by Louise Guerra. The artist collective Louise Guerra, founded in 2013, tests the practice of artistic collaboration under this pseudonym in a variety of ways, creating context-specific installations in a dialog between all participants of the individual projects. The media range from painting and sculpture to text, posters, publications, ceramics and clothing. Louise Guerra also organizes performances and seminars. The core of this multifaceted activity is the continuous exploration of the question: What is collaboration in a collective and how does it work? And what is the relationship between the collective and the individual?

Painting as a field of negotiation for collective work
The two founders of the Louise Guerra collective began exploring artistic collaboration in painting - traditionally the medium of genuine individual expression - in 2013. On the one hand, the painterly traces created jointly by two authors emerged on the canvases and, on the other hand, these formed the testing ground for a new form of artistic collaboration. Louise Guerra was created through the initiated dissolution of the artistic individual in favor of a common identity. The ever-changing, new situation of a joint work is intended to counteract the identifiable, subjective artist figure. Louise Guerra is by no means interested in a "creative duo" (think of star architects or the most successful artist duo in Switzerland) as an extension and potentiation of her production - but rather in the development of an artistic collaboration that is removed from the cult of the individual that is so pronounced today, in which this collective action itself becomes the theme. For this reason, other actors and participants are temporarily integrated into the collective at different moments, making the practice versatile and heterogeneous. In addition to spatial installations with various materials, wall drawings, paintings and publications, self-designed items of clothing, performances and choreographies are also created - whereby the construct of this art figure is constantly questioned anew. In one of her early texts, Louise describes this process as "losing a sense of 'me, the author'" and as a liberation for her artistic work.

Forms of fiction and community
The dissolution of authorship and individuality brings great uncertainty, both in the actual artistic work, where the ego is always in negotiation with the Other, and in the reception, where the lack of an identifiable subject - who can be held accountable - leads to irritation and questions. Following on from the fundamental transformation of the artistic act as a genuine, individual activity into a conceptual decision detached from the individual person, Louise Guerra carries this problematic into a present that is more fixated than ever before on individual figures in politics, business and culture and regards them as guarantors of stability and security. It is no coincidence that such consistent models of communality have repeatedly been perceived as a threat, especially as political-economic systems. Louise Guerra's approach is concerned with nothing less than this questioning of "hegemony and power relations". One example of this is ANTIBIOGRAFI, a performance spanning two centuries as a self-portrait without a self (which will be shown at sic! on October 3), which links different historical Louises. In it, the question between the fiction of such an art figure and the reality of her existing works and persona is questioned. In an interview, Louise Guerra sees this as "a strategy of appropriation of history, which becomes the fiction of history and at the same time questions the origin of an authority that declares individuals to be reality and narratives to be truth."

This appropriation and rewriting of history is particularly evident in the publications and texts that form an important part of their collective practice. By including biographies of Louises living and working in the past (such as Louise Bourgeois or Louise Nevelson, Louise (Lux) Guyer, Louise Lawler, Louise Farrenc, Louise Michel, Louise Aston, Louise Glück, Louise N. Johnson, Louise Mack) and materials with typically "female" connotations (ceramics, textiles) are consciously integrated into the work, Louise Guerra places herself in relation to a history of other female protagonists whose work and creations were also subjected to a fictionalized historiography.

The world as a T-shirt
In the exhibition at Elephanthouse, Louise Guerra presents a spatial installation of self-sewn T-shirts consisting of complex patterns, which will be activated as choreography in Lesson One and Lesson Two (15h and 17h at the opening on October 29). An artist book Mountain Morse - Chapter 14 will also be published to accompany the exhibition. The exhibition YO NO HOmeWOrk explores the theme of coding a functioning system. People move through life using social codes that structure their thoughts and actions like a language. This social "clothing" learned through upbringing and education in the sense of a certain habitus becomes a practical all-rounder T-shirt that is available in variations and deviations, but is difficult to take off. Many synonyms can be found for these codes that structure a society (grand narratives, hegemony, habitus, traditions). We encounter the fiction of the individual, self-determined subject on a daily basis, as it is a sales argument that turns entire branches of industry, especially music and fashion, into immensely lucrative businesses. Looking at Louise Guerra's works and engaging with the idea of such an artistic activity means moving out of the art-immanent field and perceiving the world and its seemingly immovable cornerstones and limitations, observing a design or a search of an alter- native. deuxpiece - a nomadic art project deuxpiece is a nomadic, independent curatorial project for young and contemporary art. As a non-commercial platform, deuxpiece has been realizing exhibitions, events and publications with young artists, graphic artists and designers since 2009. deuxpiece works in collaboration with other art spaces in Basel, Berlin, New York and other cities.

Text: Claire Hofmann, deuxpiece, October 2015