Kollwitz

There were days on earth (long ago, or not so, relatively) when earth was dark and musty 

woody it smelled always of wood pine

Now it will smell of metal and burnt plastic it will be 

dirty without dirt, without dank soil and dark again too

Only the dark will look like white it will look bright 

glass bright and becoming but

really though it is still dark it’s just that 

no longer are we entitled to pine

Why are you here, part II

Following up on a previous iteration...

Why are you here, why this city, why this program, why this [insert variable] etcetera...questions posed often to me lately as variations on: peaceful inquisition, niceties of making acquaintance that constitute, nonetheless, a prodding…undergirded by, further thoughts of, why did you not stay in the place where you are from, which must be so much more [adjective]...where, well, wouldn't you be happier wait why weren't you happy there, versus here where...Anything might happen 

or may very well not.

and I respond, in turn, by indicating that here there is indeed A Lot to do, I enumerate this Lot, I give different versions of it in explanation, I am always tripping over reasons, descriptions to explain Myself, adding that, where I am from there is really too much, a gauche too muchness of yes, things to see but primarily, ways to be seen,  involving an exaggerated straining to the point where they became, for me, ways to Not be seen, or maybe I even say, if I am feeling especially proximate and confessional, where I am from I was never seen as myself, somehow it is easier to be Other here than it was back there to be myself, isn't that funny...ha ha.

In these exchanges are questions inside questions and answers inside answers and all concern the vagaries of belonging and the presumptions we have around the state of...what it looks like to embrace and to partake of a place without a definitive pre-concept for how your budding relations will culminate; to be, still, Discovery Mode-ing and to anchor in this openness with a cool trust in the eventuality of a desired outcome. And with, too, a basic will-to-adventure and to being lost and pointed at, having to continuously re-remember your direction and arriving at the gates, towering or squat, to rap on the doorless window or is it a windowless door, hoping to be let in and to get to work. 

What I find most amusing about this template of informational, also quite existential back-and-forth baked into every new conversation and encounter is that I am asked for my Why well in advance of its organic resolution, as if I have not traveled to said context expressly to find it, the Why I imagine sitting with hands cupping cheeks, stranded somewhere along the highway of here-to-there, waiting for me to drive by and pick it up, en route to our next station. It's always seemed quite natural to me to learn about the decisions I make by making them, to be guided towards particular sites and approaches and people and slowly then do their roles in some larger scheme come into view. While that sensibility perhaps challenges normative expectations of how life works, a rhythm of...with action and belief, revelation...certainly befits an artist, suits me even on days when I do not think I am one, or a very good one...and so, suits me now. 

In this empirics we have the knowledge, too, that doubt is co-creative, hence Doubting Thomas, hence their rhetorical fingers in my wounds, hence mine in theirs, for it must be an aspect of me that has materialized, or made myself susceptible to, "doubting" discussions, perhaps as to maintain one foot out (back home, back there), or one foot in the reflective, the hypothetical...if the judgements of the external world are designed to activate your self judgements (matching pictures), and to get to you as they accumulate, a barrage, all at once, it remains that only you determine their relevance. I have had other travels, moves that defied logic or convention but after a while since, and resting in the assuredness of origin in between, the Justification game again needs some adjusting to...I had forgotten this form of self-definition instantiated by clawing at territorial validity, by claiming one's Right to be transiting existence in general, to be at school on earth, earth-school, taking notes.

images: Maria Schneider in The Passenger  (1975).

outline

Themes I am (in some cases, once again) exploring in my "sojourns"

• Rootless cosmopolitanism and lineage-based imaginaries of self/Other
• American myths: abstraction, projection, decline
• The axial centrality of New York, what it outwardly represents (totality, dynamism) and harbinges ("danger", competition). Versus, in my years of observation, its actuality as a kind of supremely provincial, dense experience like any other, and specifically designed to support lower-level inquiry (money, power, glory). Grossly over-aware of its inspidity, smugly so, lacking in life force because of too much false-force. For me, evoking a sense of pride and a quiver of arrogance, with embarrassment at both, when raised as a topic of conversation
• So how to show the superfluity and likewise, the distinct affordances, of New York, in framing my own orientation? And to argue that all places offer variations on such conditions, and their effects can, or should, be quite personal
• The remit of the English language: its functional necessity and therein, the hubris of round-accent fluency in it (obvious point, but anyway)
• Internet consciousnesses vis a vis the maturation of the divine feminine archetype *more later
• Aporia: memory fishnet with so much seeping through, lost?, to make room for fresh information, difficulty calling on certain key pieces (words, vibrations, philosophies) at key moments amidst the rush of additional variables for inscription. 
• Reduction to aphorism, common terms for ease of conveyance
• Conventional initiation rites of (Young) Adulthood, such as: tools of proximity (alcohol rears its head), the ubiquity of urban housing crises
• How to feel at home in body, anywhere
• Alongside: nature, devic kingdoms
• Suspending the anxiety to allow for...

Foreigners Everywhere

Performing at the Cabaret Voltaire this evening (of all places), Ingo Niermann read from a text evoking the exilic legacy of Zurich—artists there to wait out wars—and the Swiss cantonal model as a baseline for socioeconomic stability amid surrounding European turmoil. Now, as ever. Seeking to playfully counter what he argued is a dearth of European "conspiracy thinking", at least relative to the US, Niermann introduced his own "Dadaist" concept for exploiting and disrupting reliable Swiss neutrality as, so he posits, the country embodies a highly migratory, anonymized future. 

For my part, I have not felt very anonymous this week, rather the opposite, reporting to the registration office, the phone company, the bank, the train line, always needing to prove my identity, verify my presence, corroborate my positioning—fiat and physical. (Such bureaucratic machinations were later taken up by Hanne Lippard in her portion of the night’s performances, in their relevance, perhaps, to her residential status in Berlin). What I have experienced thus far: someone in the crowd was talking about all the cushy, well-paid jobs that bring foreigners to Zurich, versus Basel, where the population is still more native, interactions more personal. That feels true. When you hear English on the street here, you think, Googler, or, Zuri Disney theme park moment.

In my German class, I am the sole native English speaker, everyone is learning German twice or thrice removed from their "mother tongues", a predicament I do not envy. So the connection to German in the room is predominantly through tertiary mediation. One thing we do all seem to have in common: the wish to make a life abroad, away from our home territories, irrespective of where and why or how. Such is the prerogative of the artist, attuned to the fictions of a set of given circumstances and so more inclined to seek out others. Palpable here is the nature of electing for exile (self-imposed), or in many cases, its necessity. How big the world is being what Niermann suggests as smol Switzerland's reminder, its utility as a conduit and paradigm for true "democratic" relations.

Walking by the lake at night as I made my way home, I contemplated how these topics entangle with two things: first, a recent giobiology newsletter heralding the BRICS summit and anticipating a larger global shift to Swiss-style direct-voting cantonal governance, particularly in the US, in the coming decade. From my new locational vantage, American capital certainly appears to be on the decline, or the fact that being an American, despite its fictive cache and select freedoms therein, is such a logistical pain in Schweiz underscores that likelihood. (If it were good to be American, wouldn’t it be easier?). And second, the 2024 Biennale theme, Foreigners Everywhere, with its Claire Fontaine source material, this title ringing in my head all the time now.

My first name, my Vorname, as a few people have asked me about lately, means "from the water," after: Moses, the archetype of diaspora, of in-betweens, he who leads towards land but is left without it, denied a landing so as to be kept at the penultimate crest, in the inframince, like an observing gusset, a reminder of desert-past. In its full extension, my last name, my Familienname, means “small-er,” an elaboration of the petite objet. So cumulatively, we have a "smaller exile," a shorter climb, or in my current Venus phase of watery murk, a dispatch to the riverbeds, overlooking and waiting…in watch for something firmer.