Claude Eigan & Jake Kent

Psychotic Property, Neurotic Garden

Our pants are covered in dust

We sit on the floor while others walk around and everybody does their own thing but we all feel this interconnectedness.

A patchwork pile of fluff. A cozy clump of dust.

Crawling around on all fours, gaffer-taping the whole place back together. We got our hands dirty. We are perpetually getting our hands dirty. Cleaning, fixing, repurposing, resisting.

Turned a room into a house. Turned a house into a punk venue. Turned a punk venue into a community. 

When I think of punk rock I think of a belly full of hot soup sitting in a squat in “anywhere” Europe. When I think of punk rock I think about the people that clean the floors in the morning. 

A stained reality

Powered by squat slop, cauliflower soup, kidney bean stew and vegan chili. 

When I think of landlords I think of no money all month and gruel for breakfast. When I think of landlords I think of moving house constantly for the rest of my life.

A violent reality.

Eviction notices, debt collectors, bureaucracy and cheap suits. 

Our rage turned into objects and images and slogans. 

Fissures full of what deranged people call weeds. 

All we have is the dirt and leftovers. We make them ours for a time, and then…

Words by Claude, Jake & Marta

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‘Psychotic Property, Neurotic Garden’ is the second double exhibition by Claude Eigan and Jake Kent, curated by Marta Santi at Klemm’s showroom. The show exists as a sequel to ‘CJ’s Place’, a show produced at Gr_und in Berlin in 2021, representing a first meeting point or potential site of community.

‘Psychotic Property, Neurotic Garden’ is an homage to pre-existing and existing subcultural and/or queer spaces, and a reflection on the soft-spots and rupture lines of the communal. The exhibition creates an immersive environment that triggers memory and intimately links the space to its temporality and impermanence. A house facade is built, acting both as ‘physical border’ and as an architectural device that opens the discussion around property, ownership and function.

In embracing the transient, communities find strength and adaptability. Social spaces and sites of community are constantly in survival mode, reflecting the struggles of a community in need to hustle at all hours. ‘Psychotic Property, Neurotic Garden’ is an attempt to redefine the concept of ‘space’ based on the collective memoir of our cultural landscapes — not without a sense of hope in our ability to adapt and create, and putting trust in the potential of resistance.

Claude Eigan (FR) is an artist living and working between Berlin and Marseille. In his practice, Claude Eigan anchors physical places and personal references to objects whose familiar connotations are at times replaced by something strange and potentially hostile. Through gestures of physical confrontation, the visceral materiality of his works opens a gaze on the complexity of bodies and their interconnectedness with the spaces they inhabit.

Jake Kent (UK) is an artist and musician, living and working in Berlin. Working predominantly in ceramics as an individual and on canvas in his multiple ongoing collaborations, Kent produces work that is rooted in the exploration of subcultures and their persistent presence in society. The works are less nostalgic and more centered on the combined and uneven resistance subcultural spaces and underclass people continue to maintain against rampant capitalist-totalitarian domination of all aspects of life.

The artists would like to thank: Marta Santi, Cody Toth, Joe Highton, Sabrina De Martini, Dietrich Meyer, Barbara Quintin, Ivanna Heredia-Torres, Lucci Arietti, Gaba Szalanska