#litó

[wowberlin-blog]

Berlin, 8th July (letter2 #litó)

 Dears,

“I will now stop and enjoy the atmosphere in this room.”

Nina wrote and did this. Yesterday. I read it. Yesterday. I wrote it a few seconds ago. I will do it. Now.

Still doing it.

And still...

Now I want to describe. I would like it to be delightful in detail, not tedious.

A description of the conditions of this being together. Or perhaps just some left overs to include before we end this residency.

Across the table from me, Steffi continues to smile behind her computer. Yesterday she said and wrote how she loves to write “the Archiv der Akademie der Künste, Robert-Koch-Platz Berlin”. I wonder what she's smiling about now. Maybe Simone Weil.

Alice, in the letter I wrote you today, I also wanted to say that I know my question is huge, especially when you've been specifically honoring practice in your program at Laboratoires dd'Aubervilliers. I wanted to pull out a beautiful sentence from your first day letter. “I often claimed coherence and clarity as major qualities I would strive to achieve. This has remained as a maybe less often told but still permanent fantasy in the background of my self-projections.” This a intuitive half-thought, but I wonder about the relation coherence and clarity have with constraint. Sometimes the constraints that support or bring me the most support or fulfillment are the ones that suspend certain coherence. So that I may discover something new, in something old or supposedly obvious or boring.

Céline (sorry I missed the accent in the last emails) When we worked together at SoDA in May you asked a question (I think you read it from your writing). I have kept hearing it since and especially with being in your presence these days. You asked “Why speak so loud?” I think I supposed you were asking me, as I was aware of the high volume of my voice. I was loaded when I met you all on that first day. First meetings always feel loaded to me, but also I had just been burning my head in my own research residency. Anyway, I had the thought these days that it would be nice, one day perhaps to write, or co-write, 'a script for amplified whispers' with you. Thank you for your letter yesterday. It was more of what I had hoped to do these days.

I want to read the letters that are piling up next to me on this table right now, so I must stop writing.

Thank you all for these magical times. Planting and cross-modifying thought-seeds with you has been a deep joy.

Full respect,

Litó

[wowberlin-blog]

Berlin, 8th July (letter1 #litó)

Dear Alice,

On day 2 of our residency you asked if I could elaborate on what I was getting at with my letter addressed to Siegmar from the first day.

When you asked this, you added that you thought you knew, but weren't sure. I thought I knew what you may have wanted me to expand on, but also wasn't sure.

I will take a guess.

I wrote about being aware of the overlapping constraints that act as frames to my perception and agency as I sit around the table with you and the others, answering an invitation to write about work. And of how I could sense us tapping into this central nerve (Nina also referred to to a central core, you also referred to the necessity of loving and caring for the things you work with) of selection, basically, amongst the many perceivable frames and contents.

These days we've expressed the dizzying effect of accumulative, entangled production of concerns that build so quickly (even after the first round of letters to each other – and for me, even from the invite's outset.)

This small reference caught my eye this morning:

“It is only by reference to the limit that what approaches it has a function: the limit is what gives the approach its effectivity, it's reality. The reality the limit gives is movement or tendency.” (Massumi, 2002: 147 – Seite 42 Performance Platform Body Affects Newsletter)

My question to you, to expand on my ideas of how constraints and frames may function to support, is something like this:

Where is practice residing for you? And where is presentation? How and where is one active in the other? For you?

In your letter to us on day 1 you wrote:

“I want to think further about the production, the emergence, the shaping of the “object” (the artwork) and how we can follow it, sense it, trying not to precede it..How we imagine a structure and what is the space for searching, hesitating and changing directions within this. How the frame can be strong and thin in the same time.”

If you take out the “we” for a moment (my dear generous Alice). What is the strong and thin, possibly micro and multiple structure that can bridge your open probing searching with evolvement and observation of object? Maybe too big a question, but I think it's one that relates to concerns we spoke also about when we worked together in Vienna with your Collective Sensations. Your quandary of how to bridge the excitements of the practice to presentable form.

To be continued. With love,

Litó

[wowberlin-blog]

Berlin, 7th July (letter2 #litó)

 Hello fellow letter-writters,

This has become the confessional letter I didn't want to write. (Keywords: Weariness, About, Practice, Community, Attention, Culture)

I'm weary about a certain aboutness tone that comes with talking about practice.

I'm working to implicate one into the other: the how and the what. I enjoy the challenge of considering all that we say and do already as specific makings and doings. I love inchoate, incomplete fragments. I cherish under-developed fleeting thoughts and micro-exchanges. These are so often over-shadowed by a certain striving for completion, understanding and recognition.

And here it is, happening to me today. The talking about is taking over! Yesterday Patricia Ticineto Clough told us she's “taking a retreat from using the term capitalism” and Celine Cartillier cited it today as “a retreat from the capitalism”.

I think I may need to take a retreat from the 'about practice', and just mainline on practice.

I want to say: what we need is already here.

What we want, we are already doing.

I'm weary about talk of community when it grows too far away from specific situations. I prefer to speak of culture. Thank you Steffi, for bringing Simone Weil into our attention. She came as a Goethe name-dropping counter balance in your letter to us on day 1 and again in relation to attention on day 2. “Culture is the formation of attention.” are words of Weil's that keep returning through my work.

Siegmar, as part of your invitation you wrote: “We are sick of not giving value to the work we do here. Here in Berlin.” Do you really not value what you do in Berlin? I wonder about the proximity of 'giving value' and 'giving attention'.

What I appreciate about Berlin is the live affect of permeable contexts. I appreciate the blurriness of the borders between fields of work, and even the continuous flux of people present and not present. In Berlin I feel people working beyond an over-definition of which community they are part of. It's not to say that there is no community, but rather that community is defined by specific situation. And that situation may be incomplete, temporary, fragmentary. It may well be micro, but the importance (the value?) is its detail and care.

Alice, on day 1 you wrote to us: “You know, the thing about contexts is that they're permeable to each other, that we weave them together through our multiple commitments. Yet the addition of these individual cross-overs doesn't make enough of a change on a wider scale; we need to think of it as an “art project” and a “society project...” And the next day Siegmar brings us the great term of entanglement. “Entanglement is my favorite community formation. It is made by knots and spaces in between and every movement drags at the other knots and changes the space in between them.”

I don't know about the change on a wider scale, but for the weaving (and gardening!) and for continued entanglement, I think we need listening. As Steffi responded to Sophie in her letter of day 2 “And you wonder who will listen? I am listening.” I'm more excited about a culture of listening to each other than of visibility. What do we need to do, to listen? Or to keep listening?

Rather than speaking about practice or community, I prefer to speak of culture. Tomorrow I would be much happier if the letter I write to you all could speak of the conditions that have cultured this 4-day community of ours. I will say goodbye to the details we've exchanged and let them be what they are, become what they will. And I look forward to relishing in the proximal environmental conditions of our writing; The ones of anticipation, preparation, suspension, contemplation, consequence, accident and surprise.

Sorry for this one.

Bis morgen, Litó

[wowberlin-blog]

Berlin, 7th July 2012 (letter 1 #Litó)

Hello dears,

I must admit today has become more full of turmoil than I had expected.

Yesterday I was on the way to writing episodic transductions or transductive episodes echoing the mounting magic that had already passed between us from the first day. Then I diverged to address the destined future location of our letters, which was gnawing at the edges of my nerves.

Today I began a letter articulating my weariness in relation to talking about community and practice. My aversions seem to be taking over. I will try to follow through with that other letter, as I am learning to listen more to my aversions (my subterranean babies). But now I'll try to touch the magic. As I have lost my time with writing the other letter, please take this as an inchoate thought-rehearsal.

I'd like to share with you a definition of episodic:

1670s, "commentary between two choric songs in a Greek tragedy," also "an incidental narrative or digression within a story, poem, etc.," from Fr. épisode or directly from Gk. epeisodion "addition," originally neut. of epeisodios "coming in besides," from epi "in addition" (see epi-) + eisodos "a coming in, entrance" (from eis "into" + hodos "way"). Sense of "outstanding incident, experience" first recorded in English 1773.

And also some thoughts on the term transduction:

[...] transduction is characterized by the fact that the result of this process is a concrete network including all the original terms. The resulting system is made up of the concrete, and it comprehends all of the concrete. The transductive order retains all the concrete and is characterized by the conservation of information, whereas induction requires a loss of information. - Gilbert Simondon

With episodic and transduction in mind, these are a few of the echoes I'd like to re-listen to with you:

Include the dirty side of work. Let’s say there is a basement baby down there and it deserves a little limelight, too. Limelight as in attention. Attention as in shared time (Steffi) Stuttering language and stuttering language “This could be precised, I am sure it can be, before it changes.” (Celine) Siegmar's love confetti that don't leave the house for weeks, Alice's call to make a garden together with an over-abundance of fruit, Sheena's call for us to see what's in front of us NOW, Sophia's letter of comfort like a snow globe in the night, Nina's bringing up of the slight absurdity of writing next to each other, rather than simply 'meeting'.

To be continued.

With love, Litó

[wowberlin-blog]

Berlin, 6th July 2012 (letter 1 #litó)

Dear Wall,

I do not like to be here. I do not want to be wallpaper, like the wallflower of the party.

I do not want, either, to be newspaper. I'm not news or fact. I want something much less graspable, and that's how I like it. But that's not to say that I don't want to be seen or heard or felt or even noticed.

The thing is, I've existed already, in another place, at another time. And now this being here on the wall, is a re-telling of that. So as it's a re-telling, I wonder if I need another kind of treatment? Or if my primary existence, my context of creation, should engage constraints that already implicate invitation for extended charged experience.

Well I guess, dear Wall I have under valued you. In fact you are reading me, so that's something. Perhaps you being the Wall and me being the Letter, we have the privilege of this kind of private exchange. And the specificity of this privacy, I actually do enjoy. You and I, we are a circuit of exchange here, and the others, well, they can do or not do with us what they want. Is that careless? Selfish?

Perhaps. But for now I confess, I need you. And although this letter didn't begin as one, it has turned out, in the end, to be a love letter of sorts.

I'm stuck on you,

The Letter