A treat about clarity
(...) life is assigned to an environment, to an atmosphere. Between life and optics there is a collision of their presuppositions: the ideal of optics is empty space that does not tolerate anything that obstructs light; life presupposes a certain compactness of the environment where one can still breathe. The ideal of clarity has some connection, by its origin, with this antinomy of the optical situation.
Reading these lines, or flying over it, we may find another term to depict what was previously called confusion: life itself.
Hans Blumenberg’s theory of unconceptuality tells us how life collides with the ideal of clarity. “In an anthropological perspective, the concept emerges when the human being leaves the realm of close perception, crosses the horizon of his senses, and enters a mode of action within distance”.
This change coincides with nomadic life. As a consequence, if concepts are suddenly subjected to sedentary life, they become disconnected from the situation they served and become mis-placed. Thus, they present themselves as the residue of some purpose or action which is lost, therefore condemned to a ghostly existence, in a similar way to what happens with recordings as Octave reminds us.
Eventually, concepts re-ermerge from dark corners and make their presence felt. But there was once a time, when they resisted light and were constituent of a world in which it was possible to breathe alongside all things.
In an argument exposed to the organizers of Nexpo, on the occasion of a first “Site visit” at the abandoned cinema called Le Plaza in Geneva, captured by a team under the supervision of Eva Zornio, Adam Szymczyk proposed to turn the page of an era of nation state exhibitions in order to embrace a world of global migration, where the inhabitants of cities respond to the category of passengers. Developing from that statement, he suggests substituting the concept of site-specificity – a common place implying that there could exist something outside of the realm of specificity –, for site-responsiveness.
We, in turn, ask ourselves how to be responsive to childless concepts, orphan concepts, unborn concepts. Those so called ideas, which fiddle with threads of different temporalities and make a tissue out of the presence of evanescent thoughts as if they were a cover in which you’d like to wrap yourself up, before stepping into the world of dreams. In this regard, vorstellen.network offers no clarity. We ain’t no ghostbusters.
Much rather, a theory of unconceptuality suggests to work on a “marge de manœuvre” in and around concepts, as if we were trying to loosen up the threads of a ball of knots: Dreaming of forks; Populating the sky with birds; Picking up buttons amongst stones; Following corridors; Recording noise. Until we actually hear what is calling for response.
It’s a journey through realms of collaborative imagining, before ideas become concepts, before they themselves shift to metaphors. A journey through chaos in search of poetry:
Poetry is a matter of words. Poetry is a stringing together of words into a ripple and jingle and a run of colours. Poetry is an interplay of images. Poetry is the iridescent suggestion of an idea. Poetry is all these things, and still it is something else. Chaos in Poetry - D.H. Lawrence
In this spirit, Axelle is frantically scrabbling some sort of spiderwebs to illustrate the platform for non-initiated explorers. (Thanks Octave for introducing us to the Scapple tool !)
Here she draws the line
And here she walks the garden
While wandering, she eventually fell into a rabbit hole, which discovered way too many gardens, which she spares you the report.
She shall prevent you nonetheless that the team of vorstellen.network dares to engage into conceptual thinking once in a while.
The 20th of May, 2-5pm welcomes one of those occasions thanks to Lucie Kolb, who invited us to participate in a workshop organised by the Sitterwerk on site-specific vocabulary in response to the library’s catalogue.
Watch out to movements on the platform, or maybe think of forking something around those days, ‘cause we will be live, and perhaps even with you
– in motional forking !
"Suddenly I am aware of the body as both archive and archivist – in a crucial sense, it gathers its own materials. Control over the assemblage that I am turns out to be pure fantasy.“ Julietta Singh – No Archive Will Restore You
quoted by Elena
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