SI OFFSITE | LUNAR INTERVAL IV: FULL MOON | Aria Dean: Get-Together: A Tragedy of Language

Two couples get together for dinner and make conversation. Everything loses its shape.

Get-Together: A Tragedy of Language unravels over the course of five movements. Vacuous from the start, the couples’ chatter veers toward the nonsensical and absurd. Drawing inspiration from Eugene Ionesco’s first (anti)play, The Bald Soprano (1950), Get-Together: A Tragedy of Language is an exercise in the failures of speech, capturing and exhausting the meaningless meaningfulness of the day. Routinized, stock turns of phrases, and empty and overflowing signification reveal their own organizing mechanics as otherwise independent actors find themselves puppeteered by a massive (non)logic not their own. Get-Together follows Ionesco’s interest in the “collapse of reality” brought on by a loss of meaning, but doubles back on itself, exploring western culture as defined and nourished in part by such cyclical crises of meaning. Anxiety around order breaking down signals an order being re-established.

Out of this cycle, Get-Together: A Tragedy of Language forges a text about being emptied out.

Part of Swiss Institute’s OFFSITE program, each Lunar Interval event takes place in a different location in Lower Manhattan, in the lead-up to Swiss Institute’s move to 38 St Marks Pl in the East Village. Drawing a connection with cycles and orbits, each takes place during a different phase of the lunar cycle, from the waxing crescent to the new moon. Each will be also followed by the publication of a 7-inch record.

RSVP is essential as space is limited, please email rsvp@swissinstitute.net.

For questions about accessibility, please email lou@swissinstitute.net.

Aria Dean (b. 1993) is an artist, writer, and curator based in Los Angeles, CA. She currently holds the position of Assistant Curator of Net Art and Digital Culture at Rhizome. Her writing has appeared in publications including Artforum, Art in America, e-flux, The New Inquiry, and X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly. Dean has exhibited internationally at venues such as Ghebaly Gallery (2018) and Chateau Shatto (2017) in Los Angeles, American Medium and Foxy Production in New York (2017), Air de Paris in Paris (2017), and Arcadia Missa in London (2017). Dean also co-directs As It Stands LA.