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The box is only temporary

At the age of seven Agnes, the protagonist of Sylvia Plath's short story "The Wishing Box", dreamt of a land "above the clouds where wishing boxes grew on trees, looking very much like coffee-grinders." One has to turn around the box nine times, while speaking softly into the small hole on its side. Agnes believes that those immaterial words confined in the enclosed space of the box, will make the wish come true, and generate an event in the real space.

In Edwin A. Abbott's "Flatland", a 2-dimensional land where no material depth is allowed, that box would be a square, like the novel's narrator. Flatland, he writes, is like "a vast sheet of paper" on which individuals, shaped as "straight Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures" move around on the surface, "but without the power of rising above or sinking below it, very much like shadows." In this sense, as Giorgio Manganelli would later argue in a preface to the novel, Flatland is a language, a place where we can be only by "accepting the linguistic rules that limit it."

For her project at Claudia Groeflin Galerie, Jelena Martinovic revolves around similar narrative dimensions. Text unrolls on the corner of a straight-line-shaped carpet, it disseminates over a pyramid of archive boxes and is arranged over fabric and paper. Words are here presented as sculptural, dimensional narratives, activated by visitors' gazes - vertically, from the stairs, diagonally, across the gallery, and horizontally, following the invisible strings that design the exhibition space - as well as by their random walkabouts around the pieces. Through these crossing paths and looks, words inscribed in the space, over heterogeneous surfaces and areas, combine into temporary grids, lines, meanings, and meta/physical poe/try.

Federica Martini

Jelena Martinovic (1981) lives and works in Lausanne. She graduated from the University of Art and Design Geneva (HEAD) and has a Master Degree in Social and Political Science from the University of Lausanne. With the support of a fellowship "Pro*Doc Art Science" from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) she is currently writing her dissertation.