„Express Method” – artist notes that have taken the form of a printed author publication. As an ‘excursus to realms beyond the exhibition terrain’, these notes lead through multiple conceptual and material nodes formed through – sometimes slow and extensive – time, even if those nodes at first glance don’t have that much in common. Instead of proposing an all-binding red string, the text allows the already fragmented world to keep coming apart, and come together in the most peculiar shapes. Everyday charms, enchantments of immediate-effect, magic tablecloths, furniture without memory, ethnographers who have become disenchanted with their life’s work and have gotten all the things wrong, and electric fences of new neighborhoods for the supposed protection from the monsters. These are the rituals that embody personal and communal practices; fictions making up alternative codes to soothe our anxieties. Accompanied by the author’s etchings, these notes engage with the other texts and their authors, reminding that notes are one of the ways to make a connection and stay in it.

“Gathering the little pieces of the puzzles people and communities construct themselves through, I am interested in secular rituals of identification – rituals and gestures that reflect a profound desire to discover passage or protection; a rational and, at the same time, magical action that would pave the way for a new life and new self-perception. To learn a hack. A secret code. A method. A spell. Before and after, once and for all.”

This publication follows the exhibition Diluvial Valleys by Anastasia Sosunova that was on view at Swallow in 2021 at project space Swallow in Vilnius (curated by Vaida Stepanovaite).