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Francisca Markus



Chatty Matter

group show at Hundred Years Gallery, London, september 2022

with Elena Greta Falcini and Jo De Hulsters,
guest: Emily Shapiro



collaboratorial text about the exhibition:


What is artistic material? And how do we encounter it?
Matter means 3 different things to us: Substance, soil, issue.


Our practices combine different disciplines such as live sound, installation, performance and sculpture.
The exhibition “Chatty Matter” is a reunion of three artists (Elena Greta Falcini, Francisca Markus and Jozef De Hulsters) at the hundred years gallery in London.

We plan to exhibit material in process as material to be processed, investigated, shared and argued for through a chat with the exhibition visitors. We are curious to start conversations with the audience via our artistic materials triggering and guiding them.

The installation of the exhibition is an improvisation of its own happening while we are gathering our matter with the audience. Therefore we want to involve and be involved in the actual space, and make thoughts visible.

Following the principles of improvisation and experimentation, we want to work with the incomplete. The incomplete as an invitation to the audience to follow the process and maybe even to create new paths for the work.

The incomplete and raw material, deliberately chosen for this occasion out of our pool of artistic materials we usually work with, proposes an eye to eye relationship with the audience, inviting for taking place and part of it. The playful and experimental approach of improvisation challenges to act on a never visited cosmos.

“Chatty Matter” celebrates the moment and the unplanned encounter rather than handicraft or technique. It explores what potential artistic material has when discovered and brought about in direct conversation with the artist.

We need no knowledge, only intuition for the material and the sharing. 



This concept was collectively written by Elena Greta Falcini, Francisca Markus, Franziska Windolf and Jozef de Hulsters




further information

http://hundredyearsgallery.co.uk/exhibition-chatty-matter/





The exhibition Chatty Matter was split up into two days.

one day was solely a day of buliding up the exhibtion through leaving traces of working on and with our artstic material. We each approached working in a performative improvised way, using brought matter.

All the participting artists differ in the interest into matter and brought these differences into this gallery in a sympoetic approach.

The second day we curated the space with these traces and used this variable setting again as a performative working platform.




I was showing my videowork in process which I used as base or ground to exmine the materiality but also the matter of elasticity. The video work is showing a collection of photos, that I took in the public space of rubber bands, laying on the floor in different figurations.

The collection includes about 100 photos, that each describe a individual (un)knot figure. The photos are a starting point of a bigger research around string theory, knot theory, space.
Along the narratiovn of these rubber bands I collected sound, movement forms and words that now will find their way back into the video.



We are currently still working on a trailer about the performative riffs that developed over the days. This will be linked to this website soon.