Lúa Coderch’s first solo show at The Ryder Projects centers on the difficulties in forming a language for how we care for ourselves and how we care for others. exhausted and exuberant, a social diagnosis proposed by Jan Verwoert, illustrates the affective pressure to constantly reproduce our capacity to “show up,” for our lovers, our friends, our work, or something that links them all together in the age of network-ed being. It is a pressure to perform, and a difficulty in articulating dissent as performativity shapes consciousness and language. In Coderch’s works, we are invited to inhabit this paradox and sit with these contradictions.

It is perhaps no coincidence that these two words, exhausted and exuberant, etymologically relate to dripping/sucking. -Ex is the latin for out. In the case of -ex(hausted) it comes from “drained out,” quite literally “out” + haurire ‘draw (water) taking liquid from the earth. -Ex(uberant) is put together from ex (“out”), and uber (“udder”), which would have referred to a cow or she-goat which was making so much milk that it naturally dripped or sprayed from the udder. exhausted and exuberant both come from an idea of liquid, and of fertility(of earth and flesh). When exhausted, liquid is sucked, leaving things dry. Exuberant is a state where liquid drips from where it is held. To be exhausted is to be drained, to be exuberant is to overflow. But both states exist on a spectrum of how liquidity is managed or controlled.

Liquid is a substance, liquidity means cash. This is because the capitalistic logic is predicated on the ghoulish, vampiric appropriation of ways of being that we hoped would remain outside of it. This includes our affective lives, our relationship to ourselves, our bodies, and the bodies that touch us.

Caring relates to attention, and to control. Self-care can be the setting of boundaries and the snuggling into softness, or both at the same time. In Coderch’s practice, caring may be controlling the explosiveness of feelings between lovers, monitoring how much we share, finding the patience to listen, or creating social equations for responding correctly. This is a kind of liquidity that may not be water taken from the earth, nor milk taken from the utter of a fertile goat, but is similarly leaking and generative, messy and dry.

Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist from the late 19th century, famously argued that language “is the social side of speech, it exists only by virtue of a sort of contract signed by the members of a community.” Under the premise of language as indicator and reproducer of the social, we invite you to experience Coderch’s work while considering the dual meaning of “mantra” as provided by a digital dictionary. One definition is a spiritual principle used to aid in meditation; another is a mass-produced slogan. These definitions exist with simultaneity in a society shaped by the ongoing corporatization of affective, spiritual life and interpersonal care. Coderch’s practice softly and directly immerses in this contradiction.