Preserving the void
By Laboratorio Curatorial 060
Mexico City

Adjustments
We received “the thing” sometime last year. We were amazed by its size. We walked around it, turned it over, gazed at it in despair. What to do with it? We could just sell it in a flea market and pass the problem over to a candid buyer. But then the lack of sense associated with its formlessness, with its functionlessness, would be disseminated without a frame that would endow it with a meaning. After all, we cannot just reduce “the thing” to something “known” by finding its resemblances, by binding it to the familiar. That would be like turning the Unheimlich to the Heimlich, wouldn’t it? How to keep our own amazement as a foundation for further possibilities? How to fuse creativity to the unknown? How to shatter “cultural meaning” altogether while avoiding the permanent hunger for the difference with which the cultural industry deglutes everything that comes close to it? How to bring this thing alive without its integration to our own comfortable, petty lives? How to let it really affect our everyday activities, and not just adjust it to our cognitive structure? How to come to terms with the void that it has and that it represents?

Displacements
Well, let’s get it back to its manufacturer; let’s follow the production process backwards. But to do it right, let’s make “the thing” portable, wearable, usable, watchable. The familiar again, we mean? No. Quite the contrary. Let’s fill up this thing with signs and traces, marks and clues of its dwelling in a hostile world which has no precise room for it. Appropriation not by acceptance, but by conflict. Destruction for the production of traces. Demolition of form for the creation of meaning. Let’s only maintain that which its shape poignantly preserves. The hole in the middle, the lack in the body, the frame of the window out of which one can look through it, from it, into it. That void in the center. And otherwise, let’s wear it out heavily, industrially, mechanically. Let’s use it, force it, abuse it till it shrinks, till we can bring it with us back to its maker, as a gift. A potlatch, so to speak. Then the problem of the un-sense would not be ours. If they want to keep it in a safe, so let them do it. If they want to inoculate the threat, so be it. The challenge would now be theirs. Creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing) was a notion which producers of cultural meaning once posed as a limit. But in the quest for that limit, inventivity was taken to reverberate as a process of Sunday inspiration. What about creatio ad nihilo? Sometimes it seems invention and conception (our search for something close to what we call sense) would be best served by the originality of the paths into the unmaking of things.