Maya Manvi and Dodi Horvat

Maya Manvi spends most of her time thinking about the spaces between people, valiancy and her grandmother, the limits and functions of languages, Vaseline, post-apocalyptic science fiction, coffee, social awkwardness, architecting nostalgia, as well as abating anxiety through list making. Maya graduated with a degree in Art from UCSC in 2009 and lives in Oakland, California.

Dodi Horvat was a science fiction writer. Her archive contains not only her unpublished writing, but also the charts and schematics she used to map out her characters and plots. Dodi might have been transgender. Dodi might not have been.

Tools for (Re)Construction/Ruelle (2009)
mixed media installation

Maya poured over the intensely detailed fictional world Dodi described on numerous handwritten pages of her unpublished science fiction. She especially tuned in to Dodi’s focus on gender fluidity, to clues inside and outside the writing that Dodi probably identified as a male in the 1970ís. Maya created a ‘ruelle,’ an archaic term for an 18th century secret bedside compartment, as the perfect metaphor for Dodi’s secret desires. And she crafted odd hybrid tools out of wax, offering Dodi a way to imagine changing his body to suit his self-image. These bone-like artifacts, along with the hand drawn instructional wallpaper, form a kind of posthumous gift to Dodi Horvat.

“Ever since I began to engage with Dodi Horvat’s archive, I think about it constantly. It’s as if Dodi’s writing and photos, in all their ambiguity, crawled their way up into my corpus callosum and carved the tissue and gray matter, made a home for themselves. There is no resolution, no closure, to my relationship to Dodi. The more I try to take the material fragments of Dodi’s life and reconstruct some sort of narrative, the more I find the story reminds me of myself. This uneasy and ambivalent place is oddly comforting. It is oddly familiar.”

– Maya Manvi