Re: Re: Re: Re:
An exhibition of new work by Clementine Edwards and Ada M. Patterson commissioned and curated by Mourning School.

Re: Re: Re: Re:
From: Clementine Edwards
To: Ada M. Patterson


The path you tread between the grey gums and the platanus is sometimes dry and sometimes soggy, always jumbled. Of course you’re in this universe, but you must stay awake to how it rocks you backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. You must tip-toe along its gravel and gumnut path, being careful to go slower with it than your grabbing instinct demands.

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Re: Re: Re: Re: is a series of gentle missives, videos as call and response, between Ada M. Patterson from Barbados and Clementine Edwards from Naarm and then Rotterdam. In the correspondence, they speak to their shared experiences of life back home as potentially untenable, and the ways it provokes a complicated grief rooted in trans-ness, administration, climate, and the (dis)possession of land and body.

Re: Re: Re: Re: makes space for a textured and emotional confrontation between their bodies and the world, riddled with desire for, and attempts at anchoring themselves in their surroundings, histories and land, yet failing to, or resisting these impulses at the same time.

With Re: Re: Re: Re: Patterson and Edwards attempt to make visible, legible and palpable the lived effects of grief. They ask, How might we trace the passage of grief from something that takes up space within our bodies towards something that makes space for our bodies and other bodies to inhabit?

Re: Re: Re: Re:
From: Ada M. Patterson
To: Clementine Edwards


Sargassum: a brown that collects or traps. I’m afraid of how slow it moves or how much it could slow me. Trying to salvage brown sargassum from a trap, to a complicated accumulating of life and death; a grief that gathers, a body that gathers, a brownness that gathers.

Re: Re: Re: Re: is a work in a constant state of unfolding. New thoughts and images are making their way into the artists’ correspondence that respond to events and feelings happening in real time. This generates a conversational rhythm as a methodology and a continuation of a friendship. Creating synergy between their respective practices, Edwards and Patterson step into each other’s pace and working process on a material level; borrowing editing techniques, frames and phrases. To a visitor, it feels as if you have entered into the middle of an ongoing conversation, the details of which may not be clear. This indeterminacy opens up a space of profound, queered possibility that disrupts existing dynamics between public and private, universal and personal, familiar and unknown. It is a space where we can recognise and honour, remember and grieve the lives, deaths and suffering of those otherwise deemed ungrievable within the context of the worlds we live in.

Clementine Edwards (Naarm, Rotterdam) & Ada M. Patterson (Bridgetown, Rotterdam) have been sharing conversations and collaborations on subjects such as climate crisis, plastic-as-toxic-muse, queer grief, and Blackness and whiteness since they met in 2019.

Mourning School is an artistic study program on the notion of being in grief as the stuff of our everyday, initiated by Lucie Gottlieb and Rosa Paardenkooper.

Re: Re: Re: Re: is made possible with support from The Swedish Art Council, and The Nordic Cultural Foundation through the Globus Opstart Grant, and generously hosted by Galleri Nef. This work is a starting point for an ongoing project to be developed by the artists at Live Works Vol. 9 in 2022.

Visual identity and templates: Agga Stage