In Bed with My Sister: Nico Athene’s ‘We Need New Archetypes’

Published on ArtThrob, 9 October 2021

“Human, animal, ingredient, object – to Nico, all are invested with affect, are alive with an animism that exceeds their physical parts. A certain slipperiness of matter and its categories is central to both my sister’s practice and personhood. Any distinctions are rendered moot, the boundary line between the living and inanimate subject to much spilling over. But then, perhaps our inherited taxonomy is too rigid, indifferent to necessary slippage. ‘Empirically speaking,’ poet Maggie Nelson writes in The Argonauts (2015), ‘we are made from star stuff. Why aren’t we talking more about that? Materials never leave this world. They just keep recycling, recombining.’ Or rather, as a voice intones in artist Rachel Rose’s Sitting Feeding Sleeping (2013), ‘all you are is means to mutate material, a mechanism to redeposit your bone into the mineral-sucking ground.’”

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