​What seems random at first holds a context of dexterity, labor, tactility, materiality.

Why is the keyboard organised the way it is? How is the path of least resistance laid out for us?

 

Manufacturers of the modern keyboard, in the 1870s, organised the current paradigm at your fingertips through a series of mechanical compromises: avoiding jams, responding to use, and arranging the machine around the limits of its own parts. HIC CONDITA EST QWERTY (and from there, asdf!). Tactile necessity created the language of the system, its symbolic ordering.

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For Nathalia Bertazi and JJ Hellerman, this inherited arrangement becomes a model for exhibition-making: not a fixed format imposed from above, but a structure which emerges through available tools, shared pressure, and collective use. Founded on a principle of open calls, the pair seeks to explore notions of material and structural emergence alongside other artists. Bertazi and Hellerman employ the exhibition as both medium and outcome of research. They are interested in moments which combine the fixed with the serendipitous, in the meeting of motion/notion/emotion.