SEE YOU IN MY ROOM /
GLOGAUER STRAßE 16, BERLIN, FIRST MOVEMENT.
Duo exhibition by Emily Kelly and Gonzalo Morales Leiva
Produced and curated by Emily Kelly and Gonzalo Morales Leiva
held in the project space of GlogauAIR.
Berlin, Germany 2024
Design by Emily Kelly
Photo documentation by Gonzalo Morales Leiva
Texts by Gonzalo Morales Leiva
SEE YOU IN MY ROOM / curatorial project:
SEE YOU IN MY ROOM is a curatorial project developed by Emily Kelly and Gonzalo Morales
Leiva, conceived as an ongoing exploration of the boundaries and possibilities of artistic creation in times of crisis. Its first iteration took place at the GlogauAIR project space in Berlin, focusing on the creation of meeting spaces through both collaborative and individual practices. Using humble, handmade materials, the project reflects the precarious conditions of the artists as well as the contemporary global instability.
The central premise of SEE YOU IN MY ROOM is the idea of a room as a transitory, intimate space where artistic creation and refuge converge. Drawing inspiration from thinkers such as Reinaldo Laddaga and José Esteban Muñoz, the project explores how artists construct themselves and resist in a world where certainties are blurred, and where dissent is vital for communal life. The Curatorial Project title, “see you in my room,” suggests an ambiguous invitation to an intimate space where the tensions between desire, refuge, and precariousness become evident.
The project’s first iteration at “Glogauer 16, First Movevement” was structured as a series of encounters that materialize vulnerability and the need for connection in a context of migration and economic uncertainty. By working with materials like cardboard, clay, wood and paper, Kelly and Morales Leiva challenge traditional notions of artistic value, elevating the ephemeral and marginal as essential elements of their proposal.
SEE YOU IN MY ROOM is envisioned as a constantly evolving process, where each stage explores different geographies and contexts, expanding its dialogue on precariousness, eroticism, and community. The first stage at GlogauAIR is just the beginning of a journey that aims to activate spaces and raise questions through a shared curatorial and artistic practice.
GLOGAUER 16, BERLIN, FIRST MOVEMENT / Curatorial Text
Duo exhibition by Emily Kelly and Gonzalo Morales Leiva
Text by
Gonzalo Morales Leiva.
“The loose ends of the experimental are energies that emerge,
opening up a range of possibilities”.
TO EXPERIMENT THE EXPERIMENTAL
Helio Oiticica
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1973.
SEE YOU IN MY ROOM – GLOGAUER 16, BERLIN, FIRST MOVEMENT is the first duo exhibition by Emily Kelly (Belgium, 1997) and Gonzalo Morales Leiva (Chile, 1985), which explores artistic creation as an urgency, born from a world in tremor, where individuals and ideas are in constant movement, reacting to forces beyond their control. In this context, the artistic process becomes both a reaction and a refuge, a response to the uncertainties and tensions of contemporary existence, a zone of encounter where they improvise the mechanisms by which they build fragile and transient common worlds¹.
As Reinaldo Laddaga states in his book Estéticas de Laboratorio: “I constitute myself (‘I’ is
constituted), as I can, with the materials I find and the resistances I possess, in the changing panorama where I am and where sudden people appear, whose expectations and intentions I would like to (but cannot) guess² .” This idea of self-construction aligns with both artists, who approach their work from a place of honesty—acknowledging the limits of their economic resources and material possibilities. Without a permanent studio and living temporarily in Berlin, they turn to lightweight, transportable materials such as cardboard, fabric, wood, and clay. These materials not only reflect their reality as emerging artists constantly in transit, but also speak to a broader global condition defined by migration, war, and economic instability. In this sense, their use of materials becomes a strategic response—one that embraces both personal constraints and the urgent
realities of the world around them.
One of the materials used by both artists in this zone of encounter is an excerpt from The Villagers, Bernard Dulsey’s English translation of Huasipungo, an Ecuadorian novel by Jorge Icaza published in 1934. Through the description of human and non-human sounds, this passage presents a refuge in the middle of the rainforest, on the side of a mountain, where a group of Quechua Indians rest after a day’s work under the control of a foreman (Mayordomo). The artists, attracted by the way the novel depicts the deterioration in the bodies of the resting people as well as the place of refuge, saw a reflection of their own research into the precarious nature of existence, work, rest and intimate space. The conscious use of the English translation is due to the international context of the exhibition in the city of Berlin and also emphasises the marginality of the language of the novel
lost in translation. Huasipungo, as a word, contains a meaning that The Villagers completely erases. Huasipungo refers to a piece of infertile land that the group of indigenous people receive in exchange for work on a landowner’s land. In the extract, the artists also highlight a language trick played by Dulsey when he says that the ticks glut themselves with Indian blood, when Icaza in Spanish only speaks about blood. In these transformations and losses, inherent in a translation, the logics with which the major narratives operate on the minor narratives are also manifested. Something that the artists will talk about from their personal experiences.
The excerpt is carefully handwritten on a piece of paper, which is then waxed, an intentionally simple process that seeks to preserve and protect the text. This waxed paper is framed and displayed in the exhibition, symbolising both the delicacy and resilience of marginalised narratives. The connection between the novel’s ‘poor language’-a mixture of Spanish and Quechua, criticised at the time of its publication-and the artists’ use of “poor materials” such as paper and wax, reflects a shared strategy. Just as Icaza’s novel was criticised for its linguistic hybridity, the artists embrace the use of humble materials as a way of acknowledging their own realities and limitations. In this sense, both the language of the text and the materials of the work challenge traditional ideas of value, elevating the precarious to something necessary.
This hand-transcribed excerpt appears in the last room of the exhibition, subtly signalling its importance. After going through the entire exhibition, viewers arrive at this intimate piece, discovering its importance as the conceptual nucleus from which the rest of the works flow.
As it could have been understood at some point in history, “see you in my room” was an invitation to a private and safe interior space where desires could be fulfilled, opinions expressed or simply inhabited surrounded by a collection of objects that reveal the identity of a person in their time. For Kelly and Morales Leiva, “see you in my room”, is an ambiguous statement in a world where certainties are blurred, a room is a provisional space for temporary encounters and an artistic work is a question that emerges from an affective and political behaviour.
GlogauAIR Project Space is divided into three rooms with high white walls and a cream-colored wooden floor, evoking a warm, domestic atmosphere. In the first two rooms, individual works by both Emily Kelly and Gonzalo Morales Leiva are displayed together, showcasing their distinct artistic practices. In the third room, however, they collaborate on a joint installation, merging their creative approaches in a shared space.
Emily Kelly’s artistic practice navigates the interplay between materiality and space, often exploring the boundaries of perception through her sculptures and site-specific installations. Her work invites viewers into a dialogue that challenges conventional understandings of form and structure, encouraging a deeper engagement with the objects she creates. Among her intricate creations, Imprecise Container and Tubular Integument exemplify her innovative approach to sculptural design.
Imprecise Container is a sculpture made from cardboard, cotton, latex, and hardware. This
intriguing and ambiguous construction captures the viewer’s curiosity about its contents. However, its true strength lies in how it sustains itself, relying on the rigidity of metal bars. This unexpected support invites an exploration of the relationship between the materials and their assembly, challenging preconceived notions about stability and form.
Tubular Integument consists of ten sheets of wax-impregnated paper, each transformed into an individual tubular shape. These tubes are paired, with five pairs of tubes connected at their centers using screws and bolts. This design allows each pair to stand upright and creates a delicate balance between the lightweight paper and the metal fasteners. Through this exploration, Kelly encourages viewers to focus on the assembly and the way these materials interact, prompting a rethinking of weight and support in sculpture.
Gonzalo Morales Leiva immerses himself in a creative process that combines the body, movement and materiality, seeking to archive performative experiences through his drawings, videos and sculptures. His work is characterised by a sensorial approach, where each element acts as a record of action and memory. The series of performative drawings There Was a Cracking Sound, which consists of three drawings on paper ready to be folded and unfolded, accompanied by a video performance that reveals how the artist ties a bunch of graphite pencils of various densities to his heel. Using the sound of the pencils kicking and scratching the paper, he creates a rhythmic line that reflects the influences of Latin American culture, evoking the subtle spirit of the Icaros of the Amazon and the strength of the Cueca, Chile’s national dance. The grid created by the marks of the
folds contrasts the flow of the movement of his strokes, the grid of the folds organises the
spontaneity of his action, generating a tension between limit and overflow. The sound coming from the video permeates the entire room, allowing the viewer looking at the sheets of paper to reconstitute the movements made to create each line of graphite, a phantasmatic sensation characteristic of the artist’s work.
In the series of sculptures Yuyay, the Quechua word for memory, Morales Leiva continues to explore the relationship between memory and materiality through wooden sculptures that evoke small houses attached to the wall. Inside these boxes hang strings of paper that extend beyond the lower limits of the houses. These strings of paper are the result of a monocopy of charcoal on paper previously made, then cut and transformed through a manual process of twisting. In addition, on the roof of each house the artist deposits the charcoal powder left over from the monoprinting process. This act of twisting the paper with the fingers and the presence of the material residues of previous creative experiences not only invites a physical and sensorial experience of drawing, but also establishes a dialogue about the nature of the materials: the wood, paper and charcoal come fromtrees, and their transformation symbolises the memory that resists and resonates with the viewer’s personal experience of the house space.
In the installation Only Possible Shelter, presented in the third room, the artists explore eroticism and the limits of space through a video performance, photographs and a handwritten text. In the video, Emily Kelly and Gonzalo Morales Leiva mould clay using their own bodies to produce spheres or ‘seeds’. Rather than a subtle or choreographed process, it is an intense physical interaction, as the clay requires considerable force to be moulded. Each artist uses the other’s body as a surface to mould. The close up framing of the video suggests different parts of the body used for this purpose, without explicitly revealing them. The artists then leave the studio and travel from the city centre of Berlin to its edges – north, south, east and west – following the city’s train lines. At these urban boundaries, they improvise temporary shelters with materials they find along the way
and place three of the clay seeds inside each shelter. This act is inspired by Jorge Icaza’s text, which reflects on shelter and the precarious nature of rest. The process of creating and leaving these shelters on the edges of the city of Berlin emphasises the idea of being on the periphery, both spatially and in the artists’ own lives, as they work in a sublet studio, itself a temporary and liminal space. The photographs in the room document these ephemeral shelters, showing the specific locations where the seeds were placed: Alexander Platz, Frohnau, Lichtenrade, Mahlsdorf and Wannsee. In addition, the installation includes Icaza’s handwritten text, reminding us of the centrality of precarious space, labour, the body and rest within the narrative of the exhibition. This combination challenges traditional notions that link eroticism with pleasure and rest, proposing instead the idea of eroticism within the productive context, both in the artist’s studio and in the city of Berlin and its borders. This generates a fundamental ambiguity: what happens when the urban space of the city, the space of the artist’s studio and work, intersects with these more intimate energies? In doing so, the conception of space as a mere container is thrown into crisis. In a personal and global context of urgency, Only Possible Shelter emerges as a pressing need: a refuge for poetry and affection.
Through drawings, sculptures, video performances and photography, the exhibition unfolds as a series of encounters with uncertain and unstable worlds. The works form imprecise configurations, transforming different surfaces into permeable devices capable of archiving symbolic actions and ready for precarious migrations. SEE YOU IN MY ROOM operates from a space that embraces ambiguity, eroticism and poetic behaviour, an agreement between two artists who, in their differences, keep artistic creation open to displacement and indeterminacy.
Reflecting on the words of José Esteban Muñoz in The sense of Brown, we recall that life in
community implies a dynamic of pressure and resistance. Commons are never placid. Life in the commons is—and should be—turbulent, not only because of the various enclosures that attempt to overwhelm the commons, but also because disagreement within the commons—what Jacques Rancière would call dissensus—is vital to the augmentation of the insurrectionist promise of the commons³ . This turbulence and the vitality of dissent resonate deeply in Kelly and Morales Leiva’s work, highlighting how their artistic practice navigates the fragile terrains of existence, everyday issues, identity and community. Through their collaboration, they invite the viewer to participate in this dynamic dialogue, suggesting that the act of creation is itself a form of resistance, and that the true strength of human artistic creation lies precisely in its potential for experimental openness.
1. “Algunas maneras de hablar de sí mismo”. Estéticas de laboratorio. Laddaga, Reinaldo.
Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo Editora, 2010, p. 55.
2. Ibid, p. 42.
3. “The sense of Brown” Muñoz, José Esteban, Duke University Press, Durham and London,
2020, p.4.
