A primordium is the first thread of a web, laid before anyone knows what it will catch. In PRIMORDIA, Ohii Katya and Izzy Waller turn the Backshop of Culterim Spaces, a former bakery in Berlin, into a chamber of wood, caramel, silicone and metal wire, then enter it as bodies that have not decided what to become.

The word belongs to biology before it belongs to art. A primordium is an organ or tissue at its earliest recognizable stage, the cells at a shoot’s tip that will become a leaf. The Latin root is stranger: primus, first, and ordior, to begin, and more precisely to begin a weave, to lay the warp. And it is plural: not one origin but many, none of them promised a finished form.

The Backshop is a former bakery of eighty square meters, in a building Culterim keeps open as interim space until its demolition, and Culterim’s text for the show starts in the oven, with life worked like dough into living things by a botched experiment. Of the artists’ materials (wood, caramel, lights, sound, silicone, metal wire), caramel is the one that answers the room. Sugar carried past sweetness by heat, it pours while hot, hardens to glass, and turns tacky again in damp air, never agreeing to remain one thing. In a room built for bread, it is the old trade gone feral.

Culterim reads the installation as the aftermath of an eruption. In its account, the sculptural structure “splashes out of its vessel and slithers as a centipede across the floor” while creatures pull free of a central mass, like the people of Pompeii held at the moment of catastrophe. The figures of Pompeii are not bodies but casts, voids the dead left in the ash and later filled with plaster: an ending that became a figure only because someone poured something into it. The artists tell the opposite story, an environment “where creation is not a deliberate act, but a consequence of chance: messy, unstable, and endlessly generative.” One text freezes the accident; the other keeps it running, a catastrophe that will not finish happening.

On the closing night the room receives its inhabitants. Meta Menardi, a live performance by both artists, who share its direction, costumes, makeup and set design, runs to a soundscape by Furia Mistica, with video by Oleksandr Radomskyi. The artists call it a Butoh-inspired movement improvisation in which choreography is never fixed, and state its aim: “The performers seek not beauty, but a state of trance, allowing instinct and raw presence to guide the body.” Butoh dates its beginning to 1959 and Tatsumi Hijikata’s Kinjiki (Forbidden Colors), and grew with Kazuo Ohno into what Hijikata called ankoku butoh, the dance of darkness: a turn from ballet, modern dance and classical Japanese polish toward the grotesque and the taboo. Hijikata distrusted any method that would make it teachable; Meta Menardi inherits that distrust not as a style but as a condition.

The title comes from Meta menardi, the cave spider, a long-jawed orb-weaver of caves and tunnels. The artists take its life cycle as a score: the adults shun the light and keep to the dark, while the young are drawn toward it and then return underground, a cycle they read as “a passage between instinct and consciousness, darkness and emergence.” The eggs hang from the cave roof in tear-shaped sacs, hundreds of beginnings on a single silk thread. Through the spider, the performance stops being a descent and becomes a commute. In a room the performers lit themselves, with Oleksandr Radomskyi, that old pull becomes something the body both obeys and designs.

Ohii Katya, a Ukrainian artist born in 1993 near Kharkiv, who trained as an engineer and lives and works in Berlin, describes her practice as exploring “transformation as a survival strategy in conditions of instability and continuous change”. She works with yarn, branches, sugar, resin, silicone, metal and organic matter, and treats them as participants rather than props. PRIMORDIA, made with Izzy Waller, carries that position into shared hands. Both artists are also the show’s curators; direction, costumes, makeup and set design carry both their names, and the lights carry three. Nothing in the credits separates one hand from the other. Authorship behaves like the choreography: never fixed.

This is where PRIMORDIA earns its plural. An installation is a set of decisions that have stopped: caramel hardens, wire holds, silicone cures. An improvisation is a decision that has not yet been made. Meta Menardi puts the second inside the first, two bodies moving through a room that has already finished moving, and leaves open which of them is the fossil. Ritual, which Ohii Katya calls an adaptive mechanism, is here less ceremony than organism: it has to keep mutating to stay alive.

A primordium does not know what it will become. The building around this one knows exactly. PRIMORDIA lives in the gap between the two, a beginning staged inside a structure already promised to its end: not origin but onset, not the birth of form but the hour before it. The young spider turns toward the light, the old one back toward the cave, and in a former bakery two bodies go on laying the first thread of a web whose shape nobody has been told, least of all its weavers.