Hora Lupi. Edith Karlson.
Originally published in Issue 10 of Art Review Oxford
Edith Karlson, Hora Lupi, Chiesa di Santa Maria delle Penitenti, Canarreggio, Venice, Estonian Pavilion, Biennale Arte 2024, Photo:Patrycja Wojciechowska
Lake was full of stars…
“The lake was full of reflected stars. The strange water gave them a faint green tinge, flickering slightly as I watched, probably from ripples. Not that the ghastly lake ever seemed to ripple when I watched. I looked up, away from the water, hoping to find an anchor in the familiar constellations.
There were no stars.
I believe I stared for at least half a minute, while this knowledge worked slowly through my brain. It was an overcast night. The sky was dark grey with a sliver of moon just edging through.
I looked back down, at a lake full of stars.”
T. Kingfisher, “What moves the dead” 1
The sense of falling. All around. The feeling I experience whenever I reflect on the collapse of the world I live in. The XVIII-century church is falling into pieces, half abandoned restoration works reminding us that not every place in Venice gets the same attention. There has been said a lot about it being a perfect setting for the work with the evocative beauty of ongoing disintegration, but it is easy to forget that this is not a gallery, that Venice is a real city with its inhabitants, that this is a working church with parishioners, that there are residents in the complex.
Edith Karlson, Hora Lupi, Chiesa di Santa Maria delle Penitenti, Canarreggio, Venice, Estonian Pavilion, Biennale Arte 2024, Photo:Patrycja Wojciechowska
The church is filled with constellations of clay and cement-made anthropomorphic creatures. Some are more or less human, some more animalistic, all monstrous.
“The monstrum is etymologically “that which reveals”, “that which warns”, a glyph that seeks a hierophant. Like a letter on the page. The monster signifies something other than itself: it is always a displacement, always inhabiting the gap between the time of upheaval that created it and the moment into which it is real.” 2 Delle Penitenti is a place of displaced revelation.
Perilously seductive fish-headed were-maids bask around a gaping hole in the floor, exposing canal water below. Giant troll-like men are clubbing snake-like creature to death in front of the main altar decorated with phantasmagoric candelabras. A two-headed cat is guarding a small bedroom, waiting for its companion no longer there, traces of its paws scattered across the floor. A chapel full of faces arranged on the walls like a memorial. Weeping mourners lost in their ghostly grief wandering around the empty room. Generations of birds living and dying in the building. Skulls left in the cabinet like some forgotten collection. Liturgical music fills the space. The church is in-between ritual and abandonment, sacred and catastrophic, miraculous and monstrous, dream and myth. The space does not tell a story; instead, it is a realm, time-spatial reality marked by a sense of falling. Like in a dream.
Edith Karlson, Hora Lupi, Chiesa di Santa Maria delle Penitenti, Canarreggio, Venice, Estonian Pavilion, Biennale Arte 2024, Photo:Patrycja Wojciechowska
The title, Hora Lupi, refers to “a mythical time between night and dawn when things arise and disappear- an hour of deep darkness but also transformation. It is believed to be the time of night, when the most people are born and die and inexplicable things happen.” 3. Past, present, and future collapsed onto one another, replaced by moments that are never to reach completion.
Who are the giants engaged in the act of killing in the centre of the main nave? Are they trolls? Are they human? More-than-human? Are they us? What do they reveal?
As I walk across Chiesa delle Penitenti, I think of another end. I think of Lars von Trier’s "Melancholia" where, to Wagner’s score, the world, about to be obliterated by a crash with a celestial body, is experiencing an event of gravitational collapse. Somehow this is how I feel now, as if I were melting into the ground below, as if my feet were reaching down to the lapping waters of the lagoon. As if the church, the world, and I, were the House of Usher sliding into the lagoon. The time modes merge and compress to an impossible white density within space-time of wolfish hour.
Hour of the Wolf. Hour of the unfolding. Forking paths of falling.
Kafka wrote about the Silence of Sirens, the far worse fate than their call. Tidal lagoon water floods the floor rhythmically, dispersed forever. All is silent. There is no end.
We remain incomplete.
Edith Karlson, Hora Lupi, Chiesa di Santa Maria delle Penitenti, Canarreggio, Venice, Estonian Pavilion, Biennale Arte 2024, Photo:Patrycja Wojciechowska
Hora Lupi is a place of intertwined and conflicting fictions; fictions of the site, reconstructed when in fact it isn’t, offering redemption and penance for women who should not have asked for it, of charity that is really control; fiction of Venice as a city—splendour and collapse, finery and brutality, the fictional monstrosity of all bodies contained—or intended to be contained—in the church. All re-enacting fiction that, in a way, is true. Fiction of the future now.
This is what Hora Lupi is about. It is about ends. Not the end of the world, but about the end of time mode, where past, present, and future become multiple, coexisting simultaneously enacted happenings, a temporality condensed by the gravitational pull of life no longer arranged as a sequence. It is about ends that have no end. In this extreme density, we lose our boundaries, melting into a white dwarf that we encounter at the Chiesa. One feels pressure to assign the experience of distracted narrative to that of a dream, but I tend to think of it as the process of unmaking of worlds, of endless folding and unfolding. Stuck in-between before and after. A place where ghosts and hauntings take on monstrous flesh.
Edith Karlson, Hora Lupi, Chiesa di Santa Maria delle Penitenti, Canarreggio, Venice, Estonian Pavilion, Biennale Arte 2024, Photo:Patrycja Wojciechowska
“In the time of catastrophe, reality and fiction don’t contradict but shimmer through one another”. 4 “Kata -down and streiphen-turning over = downturn which undoes the narrative structure. A system-wide shift in temporal gravity “like an emergence of black-hole that reshapes the time-space around it’” 5
The (un)making. Stories falling like an avalanche around me.
Catastrophe. Fiction that no catastrophe takes place.
The church is removed from being the place it always has been and becomes a place of elsewhere. Another place, the place of a wolf, a place outside of narrative time, outside of stasis, and populated by those who are outside of the norm, monsters. The interior is a place of upturning, a liminal space of the Big Crunch, where linearity is no longer a possible convenience. Delle Penitenti is in flux, destined to continuously transform, never retaining its complete state.
Always in-between before and after.
Hora Lupi, a moment of Melancholia.
“Not much happened today, but reality continues to slide." 6
Edith Karlson, Hora Lupi, Chiesa di Santa Maria delle Penitenti, Canarreggio, Venice, Estonian Pavilion, Biennale Arte 2024
Footnotes:
1. Kingfisher, T. and Edgar Allan Poe. 2022. What Moves the Dead. New York, Nightfire, a Tom Doherty Associates Book, 70
2. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” In Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. J. J. Cohen, NED-New edition., 3–25. University of Minnesota Press, 1996, 4
3. ”Edith Karlson: Hora Lupi - Announcements." E-flux. February 7, 2024. https://doi.org/Edith Karlson: Hora Lupi - announcements - e-flux (no date) e. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/581462/edith-karlsonhora-lupi/.
4. Zhang, Gary Zhexi. “Catastrophe Time!” In: Catastrophe Time ! , ed. Gary Zhexi Zhang (Strange Attractor Press, 2023),41
5. Zhang, “Catastrophe Time!”, 37
6. Zhang, “Catastrophe Time!”, 38
