Where I'm Calling From

This exhibition, a gesamtkunstwerk entitled “Where I’m Calling From’, was inspired by events and new friendships made this year in Paris when Daudy took time out to reflect on her work and do research as a fellow of Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination.

Prior to starting in September 2024, Daudy swam across the Hellespont strait. This is the body of water where Hero and Leander drowned, which Lord Byron swam, which Christopher Marlowe wrote about etc. This swim was a turning point for Daudy and gave her a sense of confidence and alignment.

In Paris Daudy made several new friends with whom to discuss literature, including the Mexican writer Guadalupe Nettel, the Colombian novelist, journalist and poet Juan Gabriel Vasquez, and the Russian poet and writer Maria Stepanova. Conversations with these inspiring individuals got Daudy back to thinking about writing, her first love.

What’s more, being in a new environment with no materials with which to make work, but rather two simple desks in an office, Daudy started writing again. She wrote poems and short stories, hence the title of the show borrowed from Raymond Carver, to represent her frame of mind as she crossed the Hellespont. During this time Daudy also started illustrating poems as a result of which she received a commission to choose and illustrate a book of poems by the Spaniard Federico Garcia Lorca and Irish poet Seamus Heaney.

People are always a great inspiration for Daudy. Another Fellow on the programme was the great translator Daniel Levin Becker, a member of the literary group Oulipo, which is famous for the challenges it imposes on its members. The members meet once a month to play with language and innovate through creative mathematical and literary tricks. Oulipo is founded on the principle that constraint provokes and encourages the search for original solutions: “It is necessary to thwart habits to achieve novelty” says Raymond Queneau Thus, the founding members liked to describe themselves as “rats who themselves build the labyrinth from which they intend to escape.”

So, as well as the writing and poetry, the total freeing and unbinding of her imagination at this wonderful institute, Daudy also realised she has long been imposing Oulipo type constraints on her artistic practice as a means of continuing to create original and innovative work eg for the body of work she is making for Madrid about man’s relationship with his own past and his environment, she is making work with using honey as a material.

For this show in Zurich with Lea Bischofberger the constraints were:

Make a site-specific work in just ten days

Use a restrained palette of ink, paper and felt, locally sourced in order that the work be ecologically sound

Focus on this recent year and her relationship with water as a medium of self-expression, and of evaluating our current position past/present/future.