Katia Porro is
an arts writer,
curator
and
translator.

Understanding a language without being able to speak it arouses a dizzying excitement. Using signs to concoct meaning, building your own vocabulary little by little, never truly understanding everything, but being able to perceive the essence of a thing, or of the thing you want to understand. This phenomenon has a name. Receptive multilingualism: the language constellation in which interlocutors use their respective mother tongue while speaking to one another, giving shape to new dialects that defy laws of grammar and syntax while remaining nonetheless understandable to its speakers.

Artists Océane Bruel and dylan ray arnold have created a language made up by two others. In their constellation of dialects, words are replaced by objects and materials that defy their initial function to translate the poetic potential of things. In a speculative fiction on a land of lovers told through a dictionary, Monique Wittig wrote the following for the entry “word”:

“Because of all the variations in meaning, shifts in meaning, losses of meaning that words may undergo, it happens that at a given moment they no longer operate upon reality or realities. Then they must be reactivated. This is not a simple operation and it may be accomplished in various ways. The most widespread is the one practised by the bearers of fables. Since the bearers of fables are constantly moving, they recount, among other things, the metamorphosis of words from one place to another. They themselves change the versions of these metamorphoses, not in order to further confuse the matter but because they record the changes. The result of these changes is an avoidance of fixed meanings. There also exists the tribute that the companion lovers pay for words. They constitute assemblies and together they read the dictionaries. They agree upon the words that they do not want to forgo.”

If ‘word’ were replaced by ‘object’ or ‘materials’ here, Océane Bruel and dylan ray arnold could thus be the bearers of fables. Although they both have their own individual practices, they have also been developing a collaborative practice together since 2014, working under the name Touristes Tristes and creating a dialect and identity distinct from its two differing origins— yet curiously similar. It is a dialect shaped by the artists’ movements, their embrace of variation, their gestures that shift meanings, their avoidance of fixed meanings, their ode to metamorphoses, and agreements on what to not forgo. They are also companion lovers, as they form a couple, allowing for a fluidity, a sharing of the quotidian, of space, of rhythms, states of being and desires that shape their receptive multilingualism.

I met Océane Bruel and dylan ray arnold in 2019 whilst they were in residency at the Cité international des arts in Paris preparing their Touristes Tristes exhibition “Be Sure to Collect All Your Longings and Let Me Crash On Your Shore”— an exhibition that transformed elements of public transportation, the urban environment and travel to explore the idea of nomadic and carrier bodies. This introduction led me to understand how their collaboration reveals their common perception of space and a common way of making sense of the spaces they inhabit and traverse. Language, mobility, affect and a profound appreciation for how things and places shape our understanding of the world marked this first encounter and have continued to influence our exchanges, particularly as Océane is French and based in Helsinki, dylan is Finnish/Swiss and based in Helsinki, and I am American based in France.

While preparing this text, my notes have taken on the form of various diagrams, not to depict the differences in each practice, but rather to visualise the connections between them as they are intrinsically spatial. Language has been the overriding theme, not only because Touristes Tristes feels like Océane and dylan’s common language as their verbal communication occurs in neither of their mother tongues, but also because they are constantly translating materials into new forms— ceramics become blankets, glass becomes puddles, and drawers become beds, in short, a truly malleable and material language. The flexibility in language resonates with mobility, as their projects— collaborative and individual— evolve in relation to space— space of residency, mental space. These themes are accompanied by three prevailing gestures in this visualisation, serving as the common thread to my understanding of each practice within one larger constellation: chewing, articulating and folding.

Chewing appears in each of their practices in a both truly physical and symbolic manner.
A press release for one of their collaborations attests to this: “Taking their own anxieties, desires and fatigue as a point of departure, they chew ambivalent ideas, forms and materialities of contemporary mobility.” The physical action of chewing is present in its traces. For Océane, it is in her use of peach pits, fortune cookie wrappers, and artichoke petals (Regarder les abeilles, 2019; Good Luck Your Way, 2019). In dylan’s work, puffed corn is bitten, chewed and stuck together in the construction of a mini domestic space (Duplex I: The Petite-Bs Drawers, 2023), whilst hungry caterpillars seem to have eaten through the installations that they inhabit (Bedtime (after P.Thek), 2023; The Dawn of Everything, 2023). And for Touristes Tristes, chewing gum is masticated and then pressed against various surfaces: an outdated metro map of Paris (Untitled, 2019), or a ceramic floor tile (Step, 2019). The act of chewing thus represents not only the artists’ interest in the translation of materials from one to another but also the psychological rumination that is embodied in their works.

In their solo exhibition “Growth of the Night Plants”, dylan ray arnold offered insight into how the hermetic figure’s rumination serves as a “generative, imaginative and necessary stopping off places for transformation.” As for Océane Bruel, in hum she presented “small material motifs— or syllables— of circular thoughts and feelings.” Chewing, in this sense, is drawn upon not only as a physical gesture, but also as the representation of thoughts that eat away at us, and how, in turn, we can stomach them.

What happens after the chewing? A long process of digestion, transformation and articulation. This brings us to the notion of time as material in the three practices at hand, and the importance of latency. Samuel Beckett wrote that “The individual is the seat of a constant process of decantation, decantation from the vessel containing the fluid of future time, sluggish, pale and monochrome, to the vessel containing the fluid of past time, agitated and multicoloured by the phenomena of its hours.” Océane and dylan’s works could thus illustrate the phenomena of hours, in all of its colours. The image of liquid being poured back and forth recalls the coming and going, the idea of a recycling or entangling of forms and ideas— not to mention the presence of coloured and murky liquids in several of their works (Océane Bruel, Sleeping Phrases (Overdrawn), 2019 and r-v-s-f-t, 2020; Touristes Tristes, untitled, 2020; dylan ray arnold, by the way, 2019). Each of the artists, in their individual practices, has developed a growing repertoire of works and fragments of works that are at times recycled, taking on second or even multiple lives in their practices deeply rooted in studio experimentation. This also holds true for their collaborative practice, as part of their methodology that defies fixed meanings of things.

A birthday candle numbered 0 first appeared in Bruel’s work Dear Zero (2019), before it found itself, half of what it used to be and hanging on by a thread, in a later installation for her solo exhibition “L like Molecule” in 2020. Piggy banks that first found themselves in dylan ray arnold’s installation Fight Freeze (and a bit of relax rest digest) (2020) have now appeared in a new configuration and installation in “The Trouble and Trick of Being Together in the Season on mists and mellow fruitfulness” alongside works by Bruel and artist Iiris Kaarlehto (2023). Roots of forms from works by Toursites Tristes at times also come to blossom in works by one of the artists individually. In their 2020 collaboration “The Slow Business of Going”, a sculpture-cum-support (Pace of While, 2020) for the duo’s publication Paste of Time (time, again) seems to have been transformed and blossomed in a series of floral sculptures featured in dylan’s “Growth of the Night Plants” (Night Plant I, 2023). Sinuous lines and curves also slither their way through each practice. In “Be Sure To Collect Your Longings…”, layered and folded chewing gum is manipulated into what could recall a pensive and crouching figure— like that of the thinker in art history. I am reminded of this figure in various forms of the artists, like in Océane’s Là (2020), and dylan’s Ruminations on the contradictions of self-care, or drawer, folder, flower (2023) and And there is room in the bag of stars (solid company) (2022). The introspective and affective body is suggested in silhouette and absence gives insight into how forms linger between the artists, undergoing a long process of digestion, before arriving at a specific articulation that is subject to undergo the same cycle.

The articulating that occurs in the three practices occurs often through the assemblage of objects— both found and manipulated— and of ideas. The gestures are precise, transformative and deeply intuitive. Océane Bruel’s installations often unfold across a space riddled with works that serve as punctuation in a visual language that expresses her sensibility to the every day and the emotions entangled within it— as seen in a series of ceramic scribbles that stand as a confusing full-stop to a sentence of four oil pastel drawings (hum, 2022). dylan ray arnold, on the other hand, articulates less emotion from the every day than the psychology that shapes it. In complex drawings, collages and microcosms of psychedelic domestic spaces composed of elements of the quotidian, dylan negotiates with their understanding of the nervous systems and its effects on mental processes in spatial diagrams. In The Physical Dimensions of Consciousness with a borrowed blanket (2023), a book of that title is tucked into a drawer as it pushes flowers from its slumber— bearing witness to a need for withdrawal for growth.

Cycles and systems crucial to the every day— sleep cycles, weather cycles; nervous systems, immune systems— play a large part in their respective and collaborative efforts of articulation. And if we understand articulation in its definition as the state of being jointed, we can understand how their works address the corporeality of the everyday. Their investigations into our relationship with objects and spaces reveal how bodies are vessels of affect— of all the minuscule and molecular events of the unnoticed—, and how they operate within the world.

“[...] affect is persistent proof of a body’s never less than ongoing immersion in and among the world’s obstinacies and rhythms, its refusals as much as its invitations. Affect can be understood then as a gradient of bodily capacity [...] that rises and falls not only along various rhythms and modalities of encounter but also through the troughs and sieves of sensation and sensibility, an incrementalism that coincides with belonging to comportments of matter of virtually any and every sort.”

Folding affect into matter is thus yet another gesture that Océane and dylan share and explore together— sometimes quite literally. For our first collaboration in 2019, Océane enfolded sentimental objects of mine into a package whose envelope was made from an uncooked ceramic mould of bubble wrap. This fragilely packed secret eventually faced its demise due to pests that attacked the organic matter it once concealed. In dylan’s work, folds appear not only through gesture but also as a motif. For their exhibition Nervous System(s), snooze(in9), they wrote, “the works are wrinkles in a strained world where resources, explanations, and meaning are at once plentiful and scarce.” Folds, or wrinkles, thus explored in their capacity to resist and conceal, envelope and protect.

Side by side, three works could perfectly illustrate the receptive multilingualism of Océane Bruel and dylan ray arnold— not only in their form but in their use of chewing, articulating and folding: Océane Bruel’s al solito posto sera (2020), dylan ray arnold’s Metabolic Silhouette (2023) and Touristes Tristes’ Body Doubles (2018-2021). All floor installations— a standard practice for the artists— with a pale yellow delineated space— a familiar colour for the artists—, the works evoke the presence of a ruminating body. Océane’s piece— thin waxed yellow fabric full of creases upon which sit a knife and a ceramic lemon— reminds me of what I once described as “sticky sheets, and the mixing of sweat. Feverish, summery, sick sweat,” or the place of a body fighting sleep or an eventful reverie— yet the body is absent. In Metabolic Silhouette, dylan laid an anthropomorphic figure articulated by wooden flowers and a complex ceramic digestive system to rest on a yellow towel, summoning metabolic and mental processes. Body Doubles can thus be understood as the perfect derivation of the other practices. Composed of two moulds of garment bags (folding) composed of recycled silicone from previous production, the body is suggested not only in the title, but in the pistachio shells (chewing) that become eyes, and candy mouth smoking a cigarette that could easily go unnoticed to the non-attentive viewer. Océane’s preferred suggested body combines with dylan’s often present body— albeit fragmented— as they merge their ways of working, revealing how, perhaps, their collaboration allows for a certain freedom that the other has yet to explore on their own.

Together and apart, Océane Bruel and dylan ray arnold present us with a material poetic approach to understanding the everyday and all that it entails. Their languages use objects and materials in a partition of gestures to translate the human experience— an experience that cycles through joy, grief, pleasure, sadness, anxiety, calmness, and so on. Often inhabited by familiar objects— affective and sticky objects to cite Sarah Ahmed— their works evoke elusive and strangely relatable sensations. This phantomatic experience is summed up perfectly in a poem by Jimmie Durham:

“It must have been an odd object to begin with.
Now the ghosts of its uses
Whisper around my head, tickle the tips
Of my fingers. Weeds
Reclaim with quick silence the beams, pillars
Doorways. Places change, and a small object
Stands defiant in its placelessness.
Durable because it contains intensely meanings
Which it can no longer pour out.”

Similar to how the bearer of fables and companion lovers reactive words after a loss of meaning in Wittig’s fictional world, Océane Bruel and dylan ray arnold revive the object's whisper and reactive its tickle on the tips of the finger when it can no longer pour out meaning on its own.