Tom Burr is here in conversation with himself; for a project due to show in Milan in March, before its perpetual postponement, the artist set to questioning himself, producing an interview in which he plays both parts. As memory work, the piece is reflective of Burr’s interest in temporality and subjectivity. The transcript marks a moment that never happened, irrevocably intertwined with Pasolini’s screenplay for a film that was never made. 

Now rendered in print, the piece has become a work in its own right, both preceding and replacing the show. For Burr, Modern Matter has become a curatorial platform: an unofficial catalogue, exhibition space, and site for art production.

The designers Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin – who operate under the name Formafantasma – have seized every opportunity to confront the ecological and political responsibilities of their discipline. In the last decade, their research-based practice has often called on materials that remind us of our precarious place in the world: lava and volcanic ash, animal bladders. Charcoal. Wood. A fortnight before the UK lockdown was announced, the pair opened Cambio at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery – a tender show that laid their ongoing investigations into the governance of the timber industry bare. Behind bolted doors, an archive of rare hardwoods first exhibited in the Great Exhibition of 1851 sat gathering dust; the devices spewing an aroma of wet forest earth switched off for months. The show lives on as an orgy of pixels online. A post-pandemic world is a world full of questions. What do Formafantasma do now?

Flowers are helplessly symbolic. Cut fresh stems, slotted into cool water-filled crystal vases, endure as perilous effigies of our existence. Beside hospital beds they give solace; on vacant family dining tables they scatter joy. Passed from one hand to another they commit to kinship; loosely tied to metal railings, they ask for remembrance. In their loveliness is tenderness, in their tenderness brutality.