1/0

performance and group exhibition

“Nothing is necessitated whose opposite is possible.”

— Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

1/0 brings together Rita Osipova, Benjamin Schoones and Noa Zuidervaart at SLUG in Leipzig, a city Leibniz left at twenty and never stopped belonging to.

In 1697 he sent the duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel a drawing for a medallion: a table of numbers written with two signs only, and above the table the words Imago Creationis. The zero is the void, the one is God, and the arithmetic between them is offered as proof that everything can be produced from nothing, provided you count correctly. It was made to be read at a glance, a doctrine compressed into a legible surface. Binary was a devotional image before it was an engineering standard, though no medal was ever struck, and the proof stayed on paper while the arithmetic went out without it.

Three centuries later the same two signs run underneath nearly everything, no longer an image of anything, only a condition for everything. To be sorted, stored, corrected, forecast or optimised is first of all to be made readable, and readability is a demand, not a description. The systems are rebuilt continuously, and each rebuilding leaves a residue. Everything the system could not read stays just outside the count.

What the three practices share is less a subject than a pressure point, the instant a structure designed to perfect something meets what it cannot read.

Memory that distorts in the act of retrieval. Rita Osipova's Soft Archive (2026) places two sculptural flowers apart in the room, built from stone, metal pipes, connectors and cables. One is larger and carries two distorted heads, the other smaller with a single bloom. The heads are made entirely of cable, gathering, intertwining and dripping downward into flowers that remain recognisable while coming partly undone. A memory begins as something lived, then is recalled, retold, photographed, recorded, stored, and arrives at the other end as a fragment. The cables read as roots and as data at once, carrying the memory between two people and altering it in transit.

A voice that seeps through its own correction. In ssh (it can do the talking) (in a quantity quantized) (2026), Benjamin Schoones hangs grey blinds from metal tube frames, with bright yellow sentences run across the slats, turning spoken language into something closer to a score. The score is activated by singing and shushing, every pitch corrected by auto-tune. Neither the voice nor the correction reaches the room by itself. What comes through the slats is a third presence, held between them and never resolving into either.

A map of reality expanding faster than it can be drawn. Noa Zuidervaart's As above, so below (2026) is a two-part mural borrowing the visual language of scientific illustration. One panel traces the expansion of the universe from the Big Bang to three possible endings. The other charts three speculative economic futures. Terminology crosses between them until economic principles acquire the standing of natural law and the universe appears subject to the logics of capital. The infographic is a form that stabilises explanation and lends it weight, and Zuidervaart uses it to ask whether the diagrams through which we imagine the future describe the world or help to build it, and whether unlimited growth is a natural pattern or a borrowed one.

To call the residue meaningful is already to readmit it, to give it a value and a place. The works resist this, not by escaping the count but by staying at a resolution it cannot reach.

Leibniz desired an image of creation. What we have instead is a grammar so ordinary it no longer looks like a claim about anything. The claim is still being made.