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Incomplete and Self-Dismantling Structures:The Built Space, the Text, the Body
Get PDFThe present essay engages with the short story ‘The Burrow’, written by Franz Kafka between 1923 and 1924, a few months before his death. The ambiguity of the original title, ‘Der Bau’, which defies translation by pointing at the same time at a construction and an excavation work, anticipates the multi-layered image of the burrow itself. While both nature and function of the burrow are hard to pinpoint (is it a dwelling, a shelter, a fortress, a labyrinth, a ruin?), the initially reported success of its construction is revealed as illusory, thus prompting the ongoing first-person narration of the incessant builder’s work. Similarly unsuccessful is any attempt of the reader to attain metaphorical closure. In the light of other impossible, i.e., unfinished, bound-to-fail, ruinous, or self-dismantling structures portrayed by Kafka, as well as on the background of coeval texts by Paul Valéry and Georg Simmel, the essay investigates the wide and deep significance of the burrow’s countering the classical ideal of architectural wholeness
Introduction
Get PDFWhat do the Pixelvision videos by artist Sadie Benning and the tentatives by philosopher and social educator Fernand Deligny have in common, and what links them to the question of models? Both want to change the existing view of the world and its respective models that are firmly anchored in society — in its values, feelings, and affects. And both build on the singularity and contingency of the present in order to initiate a practice of worlding that is less exclusive and less violent. And yet, as I will show, models play a crucial role for both in their exploring different forms of worlding. The question is, of course, what we mean by ‘model’
Walking Away, Walking in Circles, Writing Lists
Get PDFAumiller writes lists to externalize what overwhelms her. To be in control. To master and move on. Yet, her lists circle back to her. The process of writing the same list every day or the same act of writing the list is a looping. She returns to herself, to the parts she can remember and to the parts she can’t remember, but also can’t leave behind
The Punakawans Make an Untimely Appearance:In Praise of Caves, Shadows, and Fire (or A Response to Plato’s Doctrine of Truth)
Get PDFThis paper begins with a Bakhtinian reflection on Javanese shadow puppet theatre (wayang kulit), and explores errancy through carnival laughter embodied and performed by the wise, grotesque figures of clown-servants (punakawan). I argue, however, that here the real subversive power lies not in a combative position that erupts in a social revolution but in offering an alternative way of thinking and being, a deviation from the philosophical (Platonic) obsession for truth and heroic/historic gestures that claim to overcome ignorance and hegemonic/normative structures. Responding to the critique of so-called feudal elements in ‘Javanism’, I explore how the Javanese mantra, ‘manunggaling kawula gusti’ (the union of servant and lord), incessantly rehearsed in the stories and life of the people, reveals neither blindness nor self-dissimulation
‘Interrupting the Present’:Political and Artistic Forms of Reenactments in South Africa
Get PDFA sense of repetition pervades contemporary South African political and cultural debate. Several recent studies have drawn attention to the fact that the renewed student protests since March 2015 parallel several features of the resistance and liberation movements of the 1970s and 1980s. At a pivotal position between the two moments of political struggle stands the ‘miracle’ of the peaceful transition in 1994. Within this set of circumstances a group of curators, artists, and writers, Gabi Ngcobo and Kemang Wa Lehulere, amongst others, formed a collective under the name CHR (Center for Historical Reenactments) in Johannesburg in 2010. The CHR has pursued several questions that interrogate the complexity of a shared memory bridging segregated Apartheid legacy: how do readings of the past inform contemporary urgencies, and what are the political potentials of artistic interpretations of histories? How do they participate in the formation of new subjectivities
Reconciling Authenticity and Reenactment:An Art Conservation Perspective
Get PDFLocating authenticity in artworks that are remade (all or in part) or re-performed over time presents a unique challenge for art conservators, whose activities have traditionally been oriented toward caring for the material aspects of art objects. The paper offers a brief overview of perspectives on authenticity and discusses various theoretical models that have been developed to conceptualize how media, installation, and performance artworks are displayed and cared for over time. These include the score/performance model, the concepts of autographicity and allographicity, the concept of iteration, and authenticity as a practice. The author proposes a theoretical model based on the ritual aspects of presenting artworks, arguing that authenticity, repetition, and community participation can be reconciled within a ritual context
Catalysts Somatic Resonance
No full textCATALYSTS – Somatic Resonance is an installation exhibition of somatic states from the work of Icelandic choreographer Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir. The exhibition is a choreography of mixed reality technologies, kinaesthetic algorithms, affects, archival material, and live bodies. Visitors are invited to download the CATALYSTS app to immerse themselves in the resonant states of the dancers informed by Guðjónsdóttir’s meditative de-conditioning practice ‘FULL DROP into the Body’. States of affective potential arise from awakening latent energies over time, across media and flesh, expanding what dance can be and how bodies can remember. This work is created by an interdisciplinary team of artists and researchers and is an intervention in the tensions and potential of current digital cultures. It participates in ongoing discussions around the expanded choreographies of interconnectivity of mediated bodies, healing, feminism, notions of energetic citizenship, AI and the pathology of the wider social-political body within our bodies. Visitors to the exhibition carry the states from this choreographic exhibition outwards, like ripples in a collective somatic field.
Opening: Thursday, 24 February 2022, 19:30
This exhibition can be viewed through an app that can be downloaded on your phone or iPad
What Was Open in/about Early Scholastic Thought?
Get PDFThis chapter examines the meaning of the term aperire (to open) in the schools of the twelfth century and within early scholastic thought. It argues for a shift from a traditional understanding of opening as a revelation received from God, towards a more technical definition of opening as applying dialectical logic to a text. The act of opening was employed polemically, both in debates between scholastic masters and to distinguish Christian from Jewish exegetical practices
Enclosure and Exposure:Locating the ‘House without Walls’
Get PDFThis chapter explores medieval exegetical and affective characterizations of the birthplace of Christ. It focuses in particular on evocations of this birthplace as an exposed, liminal location and argues that the radical exposure endured by Christ at the moment of his birth was crucial to medieval understandings of the significance of the Incarnation. But it also points out that its condition of openness is always in a dialectical relationship with its capacity to enclose and protect