CJ’s place

Duo exhibition at Gr_und, Berlin by Jake Kent & Claude Eigan

Opening : Saturday 17 Sept. 2022
Dates : 17.09.22 > 15.10.22
Finissage + Concert : 15.10.22
Opening group show (CJ’s place) : 08.10.22

As squatters we would take over a house that had been empty a year or many.
We’d break the door open and a gust of dust would wheeze out along with the dead

dream of somebody’s investment, motes and figures accumulating in the unmade silence
while the speculators waited for the market to crash or to cash in their
flats. But nothing is worth a shit if all it’s worth is money, and the empty houses
all knew it too, sad city drool in the rainpipes and the door maws scowling shut.
When we took over the house we would pull all our chairs in there.
Maybe a mattress or a horseshoe for luck, some flowers someone found outside a
restaurant. You and me drinking our beers in there and looking out the windows on
to the new street. Everyone living on stale loaves and chickpeas until one day
someone cooks up a pot of stew and after that we take it in turns. The old dust
gets bright and wet with the smell of cooking and people start bringing their
lovers back and we’re calling it home. And slowly, the house stops its long sulk
and we all start to go about living/ there.
It always felt fucked up when we had to go. As a matter of principle we resisted
the charge, mainly because it didn’t feel true; what is a rightful tenant after
all but someone who does the daily work of living somewhere? But every time we’d
lose or nearly. All those chairs out on the street looking like what happens
when you don’t do what you’re told, and the property cops strong-arming their
way through the spaces we called bedrooms and tearing out the furnish like it’s
personal.
And then we’d move along, and we’d start again. They always get the house but we
have, we have, we have our
*
I didn’t know another way to do it. Didn’t know which cupboard I should use or
if I’d fit inside it otherwise. So I made a new thing from an old thing and it
changes all the time but it always goes a little bit like this:
We move into an empty house. This time we pay the money and we sign down and
gather. Buy-to-lets are like neglected animals, silent & skittish: you walk
around the cold open rooms made up all nice but you know it’s still just a sell

until you find a chair out on the street and pull it inside. People bring their lo-
vers home and start cooking dinner there. You and me drinking our beers in there

and we’re cooking dinner for lovers and friends and the guests from elsewhere or
just for one another and inevitably it starts that we go/ about/ living/
until the market crash means cash for flats, and all our chairs sitting out on
the street. But the lovers and friends and the guests from elsewhere/ are what
we have left /inn/it because
They always get the house. But we have, we have, we have our –

Text by Jesse Darling

CJ’s Place presents the work of Claude Eigan (FR) and Jake Kent (ENG) in an immersive installation that hosts the two artists’ exclusive new productions.
The exhibition combines individual works with a series of collaborative paintings that explore the interconnected and overlapping themes found in each artists’ practice: the memory of alternative spaces, LGBTQIA+ clubs and bars, anarchist squats, social centres and punk venues, spaces that share a counter-cultural history and their influence on present-day (subcultural) political movements. CJ’s Place is inspired by the punk and DIY aesthetics of the cultural spaces that are dear to both artists, and in someway – an embodiment of those spaces, which are always the first to disappear when gentrification takes hold.
CJ’s Place will also host a parallel programme with a selection of artists invited to join the installation and a punk concert at the end of the exhibition.