My Garden's Boundaries Are the Horizon: Performative reading by Constanza Mendoza and Giles Bailey

For this event, we invited Constanza Mendoza and Giles Bailey, who have been following the process around the exhibition My Garden’s Boundaries Are the Horizon closely, for a performative reading and conversation. They are going to read the publication My Garden’s Boundaries Are the Horizon: A Porous Reader to Unguard the Garden and transform their interpretation into a collective event where the book serves as a score to be performed.

Constanza Mendoza was born in Chuquicamata, a mining town in the Atacama Desert, shaped by the colonial history of copper extraction and the violence of the Chilean dictatorship. Her artistic practice, research and writing explore exile, alienation, and rootedness, analysing how institutional violence impacts bodies, knowledge, and affections.

Giles Bailey works across performance and publishing, using texts, video fragments, and choreographies to explore how knowledge and meaning are generated through relationships with others. Since 2016 he has published TALKER, an interview zine about performance.

About My Garden's Boundaries Are the Horizon
To See the Inability to See — a collective that formed at de Appel’s Archive in 2019 consisting of Arefeh Riahi, Martín La Roche Contreras and Maartje Fliervoet — developed a foldable multidirectional book/object called My Garden’s Boundaries Are the Horizon: A Porous Reader to Unguard the Garden. The publication has sculptural and performative qualities, stressing the relationship between bodies and books; provoking collectivity in writing, reading and thinking. The book/object has now unfolded into this exhibition — a repertoire of objects, gestures and events that expands its content into the space and in relation to other bodies, such as those of readers, visitors and artworks. This unfolding takes place on a flexible sculpture display that also holds a selection of works, weaving the publication, the artworks and the artefacts into an inter-related constellation of physical and spatial experiences.