PRESS RELEASE - Eléonore Pano-Zavaroni, The essential superfluous. Press release for the exhibition Rear Window, May 2012, Motel 763, Annecy, France

MOTEL 763 hosts you for a trip in space and in time provoked by an excess of pragmatism, an almost compulsive accumulation.

Laura Kuusk doesn't collect. She rather collects by default. She picks up, piles up, overlays, arranges, sorts, she notices different things that she intercepts in the way things go. Found elements, elements that attract attention by their recurrence. This is the way she found herself collectioning, in spite of herself, the envelopes that invaded her letterbox every day. She first keeps them systematically, surprised by the inflow. The envelopes with windows are the leitmotiv of the collection. Laura Kuusk qualifies them as "the wallpapers that one sees through a window".

From the mailbox, one starts to look through the window. A simple mistake of language, a word replaced by another, and things start to topple. Laura Kuusk works with the words, with the things that constitute us, with the things that organize our ways of being in the world, in the less visible, in the most ordinary. She exercises a sensibility for everyday clumsiness, for coincidences. In Estonian, her mother tongue, one letter is enough to slip from reality to science fiction: Olme and Ulme (Olme ja Ulme, 2010).

From the accidental collections based on an it-could-always-be-useful, emerges a temptation to interfere in the flux, to skid for a moment to open the window. Micro-vortexes are fabricated from micro-experiences. Vortexes that open to a new look. We assist at an investigation of the details of life that are often used as triggers, as excuses to get a work going. To make appear new ways of reading in the reality, from hiatuses in the repetition of generic phrases (Various small incidents, 10 notebooks A5, 2010) to tram tickets (From 5 to 1, 2007-2011). With From 5 to 1, the tramway tickets gathered during years are organized in a way that they become a sequence of growing numbers. A numeric line crossing the time, reconstructing a new one.

Recorded from the window of her apartment, a video called Proposal for happiness (collaboration with Camille Laurelli) proposes a somewhat strange atmosphere. In the distance, a Luna Park and some shouts are slightly perceptible, partly hidden by trees. The video could be a first scene of a horror film. But it is looping, and the action never starts. Only some details come from the off-screen. The latent action never comes, the image repeats itself endlessly, and ends up by erasing itself, loosing its sense. And yet, it is a beautiful image that sends us back to the fact that we are looking at nothing, a non-action. For a while, we become spectators of a void that is transforming itself.
An ensemble of gestures is employed and brings us to a thickness that could make stumble. An enterprise of inquiry on what inhabits us, codes, gestures that we integrate in spite of us. A kind of inquiry on the collective unconciousness, the way we are culturally constructed. Laura Kuusk zooms, looks closely the details that erase themselves because they are too near. She pays attention to little things that make tremble the neutral things. To pick up, collect these moments, thought of as the moments one gains back the control on the life by the means of fiction. The collection is a product of this mechanics in a sense. For a while, one takes a distance from the reality departing from one of these emerging details that open up on a story that one could construct at the same time.

In the film Brazil by Terry Gilliam, the main character, exasperated by the inflow of administrative mail coming from communication tubes, sends it immediately back by the same way and causes an overcharge, disturbs the well-oiled mechanics, and creates an explosion of networks. A soft rain of mail, formal papers storms all over the offices and corridors, and one observes speechlessly the situation.

In Motel 763, Laura Kuusk passed after the rain and unified the letters to recreate an order of things that spreads out in the space for a while before folding itself together again like a removable prosthesis.

She proposes to destabilize a certain order and puts at our disposal from what to re-establish it artificially. So the prosthesis are at our disposal. The prosthesis for looking, to look in detail, to look upside down sometimes.