Category Archives: coming-resonances

resonances, echoes, copies, translations, oppositions, differentials, subversions, additions, remembrances…

INVERSE STRIKE! – A Call to Continue to Work

WOF – World Ornamental Forum

2017

INVERSE STRIKE! – A Call to Continue to Work

 

WOF is an open work, a spatial essay subject to methodological and thematic changes. The functions of current artistic research, pressing scientific questions, as well as new methodologies are inverted: rather than institutional, they become political. As a work-oriented space WOF is neither a networking platform nor a publication tool; rather it is an incubator for radical artistic and scientific spatio-discursive practices. It offers a structured site for discursive and material reflections of open work. An integrated event, it shows the reviving power of ‘the museum of the future’ as a profoundly critical place of research.

 

The current exploitation of critical and creative intellectual work has proven to be nothing more than the expansion of the historical exploitation of the proletariat. Beyond that, however, the increasing redundancy of meaningful work within cultural, educational and research institutions of neoliberal management, signals a paradigm shift.

 

The dominating institutional preoccupation with certificates, visitor numbers, compulsion of publication, employability, questionnaires, and quality control for cultural institutions, regenerates but itself and degrades the institution to an aestheticized form of neoliberal politics. In times of the obtrusion of totalitarian tools in public spheres, the critical question of not showing such aesthetic of non-aesthetic is highly relevant. Whoever refuses to stop producing intrinsic meaningful work generates an act of political resistance: Inverse Strike!

 

WOF makes a global call to continue producing intrinsic meaningful work, from 26 to 29 April 2017 at the Kirchner Museum in Davos; to show the urgency of your work, discuss it, and continue working.

Please send a three-minute video by 1 March 2017 that shows what you are working on. Not the question as such, but the fact that there is an intrinsic question, perhaps yet unknown, that gives a sense to your work is critical.

 

There are no registration fees, however, a binding commitment after acceptance is mandatory because your presence during the entire event is indispensible for a fruitful collaboration.

Contact: info-at-worldornamentalforum.ch

Ronny Hardliz, independent artist

Julie Harboe, art historian, Future Laboratory CreaLab

Thorsten Sadowsky, Director of Kirchner Museum Davos

13 May. Radio check.

All after.

Over.

 

She wrote that they met. They found their spots and unpacked their stuff in different spaces. She told me they had lunch next to the pine. She says they worked some more, but too little. Then they walked. They walked to Kirchner’s grave and house. They walked back in the sunshine. They had dinner and they agreed to send me short messages about their day. She said that she would remind everyone. She said that was now. She sent me her best wishes from Hotel Europe.

 

In the sunshine I waited.

 

I read back.

 

The next morning, he sent me a photograph.

 

 

This was followed by another photograph.

 

I read back …

 

I was impatient. I expected more. I wondered if I had misunderstood. I did not reply.

 

A full report was transmitted: two days. It was written on the second day. The second entry was shorter than the first. En route he realised how much time he needed. He thought of the situation towards which he was heading as a time for incubation, and wrote of watering seeds, the shade, light, minerals that formed the metaphor of presence and joined intelligence. He found a space to continue to work, one in proportion to a body, testing the measured proportions, and covering everything with a gauze the colour of skin. He felt strongly about it but do not yet know why. He talked with others, knowing that interaction, like trust, was crucial. Trust was currency, current. He thought that walking was good for thinking, that is was good for sharing. He went to the Jewish cemetery and although he was moved, could not take a photograph, holding only fragments in his head that touched other thoughts. At dinner he talked with others. He started to write to me the next morning, but found that writing blocked him. He liked to find words and would prefer to talk. He wondered if he might call me. He had never liked the idea of writing a diary. He did not even like to report to himself what he felt and thought, feeling himself to be both accountable and unaccountable. Fuck, he wrote. He was looking for what was unsharp; he wanted to sense, not know, he did not want to understand. He repeated that writing often blocked him from making intuitive decisions. He liked fragmented facts, notions instead of knowledge. Perhaps he would call me the next day,

 

Read back.

 

He sent me a film. It turned. No, he turned. No, the camera turned. He was wearing a Hilfiger tee-shirt in blue. To his left was a pile of books, and he was reading from a paper placed on the on the table in front of him. He was in front of a window. Outside the wind blew through the trees. Some things, he said, did not work. Difference, rhythm, of rhythm, curatorial knowledge. There was a burning house, yes, the maison brulée filmed by Georges Bataille. Exhibit of fire, I missed this. Brand mark. Brand marking. Post irony. Irony of post irony. Utopian paradigm … imagination. I am trying to type as he speaks, as he spoke. A pinhole. Inside of another outside Line of flight, Unscheduled. Back to… yes, back to the outside… time, something about time, time drills? Studied exhibits. Verso of politics, no, versus of politics. The angelic messenger who has absolutely nothing … nothing to add. Politics of versus.

 

Say again.

 

The angelic messenger who has absolutely nothing … nothing to add.

 

Read back.

 

I waited another day, then another. There was a break in transmission. I could not send. I waited to receive. Silence. Dead air. The wind was still blowing through the green trees.

 

He wrote to tell me that my request, which he also called my challenge, was ‘in the air’ all the time. I was off air for which he chastised me, for some invested time and energy thinking about what to write or produce for me, or writing and producing for me. This was their precious time. They could have used this time differently. I did not acknowledge their reports I received. There was waiting on both sides: on air, off air.

 

He beat out a tune: This rhythm is for you. This rhythm is for you. This rhythm is for you. This rhythm is for you.

 

I did not know who was you. Moi ou toi. For me. For you.

 

Read back.

 

She wrote to tell me that she informed and that they all reflected on the idea of the radio transmission. Everyone was interested and into it, she said. But then later they were confused when there was no answer from me. Then, well, then, the present was more present.

 

From where could these messages come? The present has past. It always does.

Deux fois.

I repeat.

The present has past. It always does.

 

Read back.

 

OUT.

Response to Proto-Calls by Lars Schuchert

proto-call-reaction-framework / c. lars schuchert

 

  1. With the WOF 2016 we are setting aside time for a journey. Following the un-necessity of ornament, we will go for walks – metaphorically and in reality, discovering places of E.L. Kirchner – setting forth to dreams may come. Finding ourselves in unexpected topoi, implanting the uncontrolled challenge of serendipity by trusting people to improvise navigation, and provide models as toys for tools. Within a given rhythm of walks and talks, we will meet in matter, performances, presentations, and dialogue. [Lars]

 

  1. They [all these roles which you will create youresves] can work alongside Voltaire and his optimistic hero, Candide, on the vision of an ideal world designed to meet the requirement of being “the best of all possible worlds,” or they can follow the example of the English scholar Robert Burton and fully surrender to melancholy, failure, and the great No-Purpose. For sometimes the one who fails is indeed the smarter one who is above the illusionism of the realitycapable and the hubris of the winners and doers. Where all of this is heading is thus completely open and depends on the ideas and inspiration of the participants. Left or right turns are possible at any time and the so-called “magic roundabout,” a supreme challenge for traffic planners and participants, is therefore the appropriate symbol for this challenge. [Thorsten]

 

  1. At the WOF we will offer a rhythmic space of situated effectuation and exploration in which the work of both artists and researchers can be generated, experienced and transformed as indifferent examples. All artists and all researchers will choose their particular site and time-slot of exhibition, presentation, or other form of effectuation, inside or outside the museum building. There will be times of isolated concentration alternating with times of encounter and exchange. […] Ornament is always also an indifferent example of how it could be different. There is playfulness involved, however, this playfulness is serious in terms of what other uses could be imagined. In ornament, the passage from one use to another (or the transformation of ethos) does neither happen as continuous evolution nor as sudden break. It’s just an allusion of another possibility of use, both disruptive and embedded. Ornament can therefore be seen as the primary site of a rhythmic philosophy of indifference. Ornament creates rhythms of potential uses while it is simultaneously indifferent to both the thing as such and that what it could stand for. [Ronny]

 

  1. Therefore you are kindly invited to participate in the creation of WOF 2016; we invite you to send to WOF till 30th October 2015:

Letter of Intent  (Short description of “What WOF 2016 will have been?”)

Formalities:     Max 2 pages A4 or 2’500 characters

Content:          My description of WOF 2016 on my way back home

Biographical data

Formalities:     Max 50 characters in prose

Content:          You may know

Yout contribution to WOF 16

Formalities:     Max. 1 page or 1’500 characters, pictures, tables, foreign languages allowed

Content:          Description of the intervention you propose for WOF 2016 and its function within the program

 

No jury of any kind will judge your inputs! The definitive program and speakers list will be distributed on registration desk WOF 16. So be prepared to your phantasms falling apart and your dreams turning real!

Sketch of Program WOF 2016:

Thursday 4th May: Starting Day, presentation of the “Review WOF 2016” and other basics
4.00 pm    Registration and greeting note            by Thorsten Sadovsky, Head of Kirchnermuseum
4.30 pm    WOF? WOF!                          by Ronny Hardlitz Head of Head of WOF
5.00 pm    Program and schedule             by Julie Harboe Head of WOF
5.30 pm    Aperitif and “historical slides”            by and with Heads of WOF in parallel
6.00 pm    Presentation of “Review WOF 2016: What WOF 2016 will have been? 42 appliable
paradoxes of (un-) productivity”
7.00 pm    Dinner and “Academics, so what!”     by May Beyou

Wednesday 5th May: Stationary Day
9.30 am     arrival and coffee
10.00 am   plenary session, Keynote 1     by May Beyo
10.45 am   panel 1
11.30 am   “Gesture and Model*”                        by May Beyou
12.15 am   discussion and lunch
2.00 pm    Specification workshops:
a.         “quantic physics or we don’t know, what is going on*”
b.         “craftsmanship is academic gesture?*”
4.00 pm                reporting in plenary session
5.00 pm                “Practical theory or theoretic practice: Ways out” by May Beyou
6.00 pm                Aperitif and “historical slides”            by WOF
7.30 pm                Dinner and cultural presentations

Fryday 6th May: Ambulant Day
9.00 am     coffee at Kirchnermuseum; physical check-up
10.00 am   departure from Kirchnermuseum to Stafelalp by foot
12.00 pm  visit of and lunch at Kirchner’s chalet on Stafelalp and lunch
2.00 pm    “Woodwork and painting: models and / or / of gestures?*” by May Beyou
4.00 pm    strengthening drinks and departure to Davos
8.00 pm    Dinner and Discussions

Saturday 7th May: Recovery
9.00 am     “I would prefer not to!” productivity, unproductivity or opposition, really?
By May Beyou
10.00 am   Discussion
11.00 am   Plenary session: “Reflexions about coming up pasts and past futures”
12.00 am   Discussion
1.00 pm    Farewell-Aperitif, -lunch and –dinner
3.00 pm    Closing session
4.00 pm    closing of WOF 2016

*These topics are set as examples and not as models! [Martin]

 

  1. Key topics: new vocabularies, format of the format, coming–, temporalities-eventualities, altitudes, sea level, sound theory, meta-phrasing and un-phrasing, ornament, architecture, periodicals, commons and the humanities, scores, stars down to earth. “A new setting dictates a new modus in which to work: there is no material to quote from on hand. The modus is prompted by …” (Sergei Eisenstein, 1988). Ten successful applicants will be invited to take part in a prize draw! [Verina]

 

  1. Like a museum, like a dream, like art, and maybe even life, WOF entails PARADOX. PLAYFULNESS chases away the hovering shadow of PRODUCTIVITY and yields spaces of careful unlimited activity. Retracing gesture as form and ornament as intermediary WOF is a dancing EXCHANGE of elegance and SIGNIFICANCE. Go for it like an unfolding vortex, like the almost invisible entasis.

WOF 2016 will meander between model and gesture:

 

Case study – example – Fallstudie – paradigm – Beispiel

Praxis – visualisation – movement – performance

 

WOF has a virtual and an analogue existence here and there. You can log into www.worldornamentalforum.ch and be in the WOF any time or you can ascend into Davos and be with Kirchner and others who expose themselves to the pleasant anxiety of no-how. (*see texts and talks by Sarat Maharaj

 

WOF is an academic and abstract endeavour into the territory. We need to hack and circumscribe the assignment and we have to engage not with structures but with the material itself always in situ. WOF gives you a space to check your thinking with others, picking up the energy between Sein and Schein necessary today. WOF moves from craftsmanship-to object-to discourse, it asks you to get in line and talk to the people next to you do as much and as little as possible. Folding and unfolding. Welcome to WOF. [Julie]

Response to Proto-Calls by Verina Gfader

  1. My vote is for Thorsten’s proto-call

A model art biennale!

“For this construction of a possible biennial world various roles are to be assigned that you can apply for: Exhibition designer, Exhibition technician, Architect, Biennial blogger…“

This proto-call seems most attractive to me as it speaks to a larger audience, and yet remains loose, potential, without emphasizing any kind of ‘direct production’.

Yes, ‘biennale’ as some sort of anchor point is urgent to address, bringing to light places you’ve never heard of and you trace… and the whole mythology around them.

Highly relevant, fun, in-time yet ahead, ‘ornamental’

The title would need reformulating, it sounds to ‘occupying’ – hierarchical.

PS1.

The theoretical tropes in Ronny’s section ISSUE’ sound promising, yet perhaps Deleuze and Guattari are already projecting a most significant (and partially misleading?) grounding.

Paragraphs 2 and 3 great.

PS2.

Julie’s ideas > To me some great links set up, yet to attract a wider audience it may need more detours/elaboration.

I love some of the phrasing…

Image or diagram would need to be carefully chosen. Maybe call just nicely designed, with lines, arrows etc.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

reply

I actually found the WOF experience to be very relevant to my work and research and it already informs my current and future projects.

In addition to the conversations we had around and during the WOF, the workshop part in which I was part of a group of three participants, produced some valuable insights that I took with me. Namely the realization that there are vast fields, discourses, knowledges, skills and resources that are imperative for a project to materialize regardless of funding.

What I mean by this is that the workshop phase at he WOF enabled us to analyze and map the various resources needed for setting up the WOF. Though this process we realized how late in the life of a project money comes in, and how much every project is dependent on the commons – on shared and co-dependent values and tools – education, transportation, information, curiosity and so on. I have taken this method and its conclusions back with me and have been implementing it as part of my position as a director of a museum and my practice as a curator of contemporary art.

Why am I here?

I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans.

Nay, I often did better than this. There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and still- ness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller’s wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. For the most part, I minded not how the hours went.

The day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished.

Extract from Thoreau’s Walden, 1854

1

By Definition

ac·a·dem·ic [ak-uh-dem-ik]

noun

a student or teacher at a college or university.

a person who is academic in background, attitudes, methods, etc.:

(initial capital letter) a person who supports or advocates the Platonic school of philosophy.

slack·er [slak-er]

noun

a person who evades his or her duty or work; shirker.

a person who evades military service.

an especially educated young person who is anti-materialistic, purposeless, apathetic, and usually works in a dead-end job.

slack·er·dem·ic [slak-uh-dem-ik]

noun

an especially educated person who is anti-materialistic, purposeless, apathetic, and a student or teacher at a college or university.

a person who supports or advocates the evasion of duty or work.

The Good Craftsman

The Good Craftsman

We live in a time of excessive organisation, in which the idea of ‘order’ has become overvalued, and in which conflict, in its political sense is repeatedly circumnavigated in favour of consensus. In the light of this all of us involved in the field of the arts might best invest in the dissolution of the concept of organisation altogether; both in sense of ‘putting things in order’ with its administrative and systematic connotations, and of the ‘group of engaged in a common endeavour’ with its suggestion of agreed aims and goals. We need to have the courage to stop organising things and to see what emerges, and the first step in this process for freelancers is to stop shoring up our craft in a rational and managerial way and to consider our own contribution to the institutional sector (whether state or self-organised) as exemplary of a different mode of production – which I will call de-organisation. To imagine the characteristics of this approach at the current time is difficult, because unlike other takes on organisation, it argues for the production of less rather than more. Less organisation for sure, but also less of everything else: less doing, less talking, less making, less thinking. De- organisation begins with switching off the overheated machine and relaxing to the sound of the descending hum as it grinds slowly to a halt. In the silence that follows, faith in the de- organised approach involves embracing those before mentioned ‘indefinably valuable qualities’ latent within the process of working together on our culture. We need to develop a sensibility and patience in the face of these abstract qualities, listen to them and let them guide our actions. It is only at this level that ‘more’ comes in: de-organisation involves more waiting.

By waiting we buy the time to witness that there is a power that is distributed and ambient, alive within forms, rather than busy authoring them and, due to its heterogeneous and continually changing character, irreducible to any singular agreed upon statement of identity. Here is the germ of de-organisation, a subtle suggestion of what might arise from the dissolution of organisational hegemony. In place of the organised it evokes a moment of trust in the ongoing life of something without assuming responsibility for its planning. This also points to one aspect of the term self-organisation that is frequently overlooked in the arts and complicates any overly simplistic reading of it as a tool for self-determination amongst artists. This is precisely not the simple idea that artists can ‘do it themselves’ or ‘take control’, but instead, the more abstract idea that left to their own devices structures, including culture, may begin to organise themselves. To explain what this might entail, the definition of self-organisation used in the natural sciences is useful. In that field the term describes the way in which particular natural systems have a tendency to develop, and take new and more complex forms, in a seemingly unplanned fashion, without the influence of an external or central authority. In such cases changes in the nature of the whole system occur on account of numerous actions at a low- level, with the smallest parts interacting locally without the need of an overall view of the whole. This is what scientists analysing systems have come to call ‘emergence’.

It may appear dilettantish to suggest that we should communally place more trust in the intangible and unfathomable aspects of ‘how things come to be’ and practically speaking it is, in so far that these are things that we cannot preconceive, which therefore lie outside the realm of the organised. But, meditations of this kind are important because, on the face of it, the cult of professionalisation and the resulting equations of better organisation, quality and transparency has had an increasingly stultifying effect on our museums and academies in recent years. This is having the same effect as excessive performance feedback and employee monitoring in business and our own stress-inducing predilection to remotely steer all aspects of our lives from our laptops and iphones. It is time to face the fact that there is no neo-liberal bogeyman forcing us to do things this way and no cabal to overthrow. In fact, if we draw from a comparison of the institution, the organisation and the individual today, we see, more disturbingly, that we are doing this to ourselves; we are willingly ushering in an era of self- imposed micromanagement that borders on the institutionalisation of the self. Maybe, in the spirit of dilettantism, it is time to re-assess the benefits of a life less organised.

extracts from Barnaby Drabble, ‘On De-organisation’, 2013

WOF notes

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/Which key-notes would you like to share with all of us?

Participation is a practice based activity, a performative action, an unfolding of experience, an open work, an exchange. Participation accents the embodied nature of encounter, be it with words, ideas, images or forms, accenting the powerful resonances that may come about through contact and connection.

Engagement is central and time mediates the activity. Shared articulations of different conceptions of being in the world, different perspectives, different voices bring a conceptual site of dwelling: Thorsten’s support brought a physical site of dwelling.

Contributions could be considered speculatively through dialogue and exchange. Informal approaches supported equality, a non-hierarchical space.

The event brought a physical and psychological space of creativity, where participants were able to engage in different ways, with different persons, different concepts: the event highlighted the challenges of managing the more subtle modalities of thought and action.

That which may be captured may be explored. Art-making as an expressive practice occupies an uneasy territory between speculative and empiricist practices.

To reach beneath the obvious, one must be at ease and open to possibility.

Pluralistic approaches supported mobility between the particular and the general. Different frameworks marked out different territories as separate and significant, mirroring back to audiences and augmenting existing perspectives. The event brought different ways of seeing and experiencing, thinking and untangling.

Attunement to different perspectives can be exhausting and needs time and training to balance the needs of body, mind and spirit.

Ornament and gesture are intrinsically linked through the action of doing and being in the world.

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/What is the relevance of WOF in your work? How do its aspects reflect in your current projects and how could you imagine integrating the questions WOF raised in future projects?

Ornament and gesture may be explored as operative elements of art–making: that which at first may appear random, unreadable, unfathomable or nonsensical may build over time to inhabit new spaces of creativity and assert agency of the individual. Ornament as gesture: a gesture towards a manner of capture through which a telling is made possible.

Attunement to different perspectives may be explored through a commitment to artistic process. Metaphorically walking the territory, exploring marginal areas, resisting the banalisation of the everyday through artistic practices.

To reach beneath the obvious, one must be at ease and open to possibility. Ideas of the pause creates an interruption in the continuous flow of the everyday. Practices of mindfulness may support letting something into its own presencing, resisting conceptions of complete knowledge towards examing interstices, exploring liminal spaces at the meeting point of a number of ideas. Challenge the authority view: the pause supports narratives to emerge that are particular to the person.

That which may be captured may be explored. The person comes to know her–/himself through encounters with the other. Observing, looking, noticing, speaking and listening are forms of performative action. Sites of encounter where multiple resonances, multiple intensities may be explored are crucial. Discernment, trust, presentness, ‘anti–numbness’ strategies, developmental methods, speculative actions may be explored.

The event brought a physical and psychological space of creativity. An existential space, in which body and mind may take up their residence in the world. A space for in the moment action, improvisation, elaboration, a testing ground for new ideas, movement from inertia to possibility.

Contributions could be considered speculatively. Brings opportunity to critically review processes and methods to consider the ways in which various stages of artistic action and reflection may work together productively.

Engagement is central and time mediates the activity. Commitment to process is an essential aspect of developmental activity: time may be mediated by artistic means, in the moment encounter, embodied experience. Different rhythms support different conditions. Change may be both temporal and temporary.

Participation is a practice based activity. Without action there is inertia. Participatory action may take many forms from speaking and listening, to simply being there. Action and reflection are part of artistic practice.

Afterwards

A circle in the room. No introductions. Nodding of the head, yes, yes, I am listening. A circle in the snow. The reminder of long acquaintance in passing. Reluctance to speak until the moment when it was possible to speak of children, of absence and the longing to return. Trying to balance; but perhaps a matter of depth and surface, of trying to keep the head above water. A blue shirt, but casually worn; the serious, the earnest and confident discussion, surprising dropped. An insouciant alacrity to dance, but this is later. The long explanation of a simple and ugly thing. A moment of account. A neat suit, a sweater, a charming smile, one responding to everything, with constant note taking. The air of paying attention. A late arrival; immediate reaction. Another late arrival. A third arrival. Forgetting where we are; being reminded of where we are. Beautiful stockings, embroidered boots, laying down words and gestures as material things. One story among others. Thinking on the spot. A stone in the hand. A stone on the floor. A stone in my hand, which does not rest there. The ability to appear as one that is performed, until there is little or no difference. A straight back, a careful and particular style, including fabulous boots. Imagining common ground. Refusing common ground. The desire for common ground. Finding common ground; the relief. Waiting to speak. Not speaking. Listening. Pretending to listen but checking email instead. Checking email while listening, yes, yes, I hear you. The identification of an accent or a certain tone of voice, yes, yes, I hear you and in hearing you, I recognise something about you. Black lace-up shoes, and quite a formal jacket; the assuming of a critical position as a matter of position. Making a point forcefully. The problem of making a forceful point, the insistence on participation; forgetting at times to leave space for nothing to happen. Introductions at last. No more than names. Too late for naming: what do you do? A sudden lack of vocabulary. Obscure or irrelevant or inappropriate examples (on my part, anyway). Sending a script as though it mattered, expecting its enacting. Reluctance with good humour. Voices raised obligingly; two refusals, one covert but unengaged, one declared in the seizure of mastery. The formation of small groups, consciously or unconsciously, despite the democratic round table, the sharing of hospitality. The importance of lunch. Premature indulgence. Looking forward to supper. Waiting for a friendly move. Reading aloud. The outside. The inside. An extravagant sweater. The invitation to touch one’s own hand as though it might belong to another. A story that provoked interest and anger. Positions taken up, but as an undercurrent. Standing in the snow looking at the mountains, which are almost impossible to see. The nervous plucking at the skirt of a dress. Pretending we do not know each other, or at least, not under the circumstances we did. Glances exchanged and eyebrows raised: an unexpected complicity. Duration, endurance. The inability to leave the room. The impossibility or remaining. Day-dreaming. Making a sign in the air. Making an internal sign, Thinking of being elsewhere. Returning to the present. Passivity disguised as participation. Aggression disguised as dialogue. Active production. Obliged production. The rejection of collective work. Communication but not transmission. The noise of sharing. Exposure, in a practiced way. Greedy reflexes. Opening holes. Closing gaps. The occasional moment of an exchange always ruptured. Pretending to have a headache. Having a headache. Not being asked a single question. The porosity of spaces. Clearing up as though we had not been there. Meeting in the street. Arriving on time. Putting in the hours. Early departures (why?). Leaving in time. The bitter end, of course; sticking it out to the end. We must. We do. We will. Slipping away quietly.