{"id":48930,"date":"2023-10-16T07:30:36","date_gmt":"2023-10-16T05:30:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/a-desk.org\/?p=48930"},"modified":"2023-10-16T15:01:36","modified_gmt":"2023-10-16T13:01:36","slug":"cosmology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/a-desk.org\/en\/magazine\/cosmology\/","title":{"rendered":"COSMOLOGY"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Maartje Fliervoet<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dear Constanza,<\/p>\n

Thanks so much for all of this information. I am looking forward to talking to you.
\nI thought I could send you the introduction to our upcoming publication. I think it says something about our way of collective reading and writing but also connects to notions of Cosmologies.<\/p>\n

Best,
\nMaartje<\/p>\n

My Garden\u2019s Boundaries Are the Horizon<\/h3>\n

An Introduction<\/strong><\/p>\n

The appearance of this publication is flexible, as is its multidirectionality. It is meant to be read by several readers simultaneously. This work can be folded in a multiplicity of shapes, making it a performative document that focuses on an embodied, collective reading. Part of our writings for this publication come from texts written between Spring 1399 and Spring 1400 for the Remote Archivist<\/em>, by invitation of de Appel, Amsterdam. Other fragments were taken from performative readings that took place at Stroom, The Hague (1400, de Appel (1398) and PrintRoom, Rotterdam (1401, based upon a contribution to an anthology of performance scores by Notes On Hapticity Collective). The collaborative writing of these texts naturally demanded the three of us to gradually merge into one voice, a transformative I<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This changed in late 1400. We had started planning for a trip to Iran, to take place in Mehr 1401. The intention was to work on this book through the lens of traditional Iranian architecture. Yet, as events developed, each of us was confronted in a highly individual way with the possible implications of this journey. During our preparations, we realised we\u2019d become personally involved with the borders we\u2019d previously written about, albeit with more distance. In our minds, we increasingly embodied these boundaries and the violence they bestowed upon us. In the end, only one of us actually went. Being physically separated and not always being able to be in contact, we started writing each other secret letters testifying to our respective positions, sharing our fears, traumas and dreams. This brought us to a deeper understanding of our more private experiences, and eventually our collective writing came to embrace them all.<\/p>\n

We see this publication as an object through which we want to question the practice of archiving. We focus on archiving as a s\/State of mind, rather than on those spaces generally called \u201carchives\u201d and their objects in captivity. This state is a mode of thinking with which we are each challenged on a daily basis, the mode of sticking to \u201cthe familiar,\u201d opposing change and \u201cthe unknown\u201d. We think momentarily interrupting this mode is crucial. To do so, we depart not from physical archives, but from (fictional) stories surrounding certain traditional Iranian buildings, the Persian garden and in particular an entrance room called the hashti.<\/em> We compare such historical architecture to public and private spaces of our time like museums and archives, airports, subways and urban apartments, focusing on power relations between bodies moving through such sites. Through this comparison, the tension and hierarchy between gender, class and sexual orientation is encountered and unfolded. In short, the practice of archiving to us becomes a tool to look at social relations.<\/p>\n

As a consequence, the nature of the collectables or the architecture that contains them, are of less importance to us here than the power dynamics keeping them in place. Because in a way \u201cto archive\u201d is to exert power, to take control, retaining the collected as it once was, in a desire to freeze time, enforcing a process of inertia upon it. The archived is \u2018taken care of\u2019 to such a degree that one could even speak of a violent form of care, accommodating a longing for an imposed isolation. The same happens in architectural forms such as walled gardens, where nature is supposed to be kept in place. A tendency that is in stark contradiction to the universe, which is in constant transformation, far from being stagnated.<\/p>\n

The practice of archiving can be aimed at any pile of material anywhere\u2014from your home\u2019s library, your closet, a paper trash bin to your phone’s photo database. The act of archiving is not reserved to those professionally called \u201carchivists,\u201d and practising the archival doesn\u2019t even require the pile of things usually referred to as a \u201ccollection,\u201d for the same mechanisms of inclusion, exclusion and conservation can be put to work on the level of many human activities and (inter)human relations. Archiving as a striving for stagnation and domination can equally be observed in how authoritative structures repress certain groups of people. Regimes have a tendency to strive for a freezing of time, an unnatural status quo.<\/p>\n

In terms of duration, in our writing we have opted to link the desire for inertia to the circulation of water, and \u2018leaky\u2019 concepts or categorisations, transforming over time. The texts therefore touch upon resistance, movement, secrets and porosity. These subjects are paired with social, political and material boundaries, and to the sphere of traditional archival practices.<\/p>\n

The uprising in Iran, starting in Shahrivar 1401 (mid-September 2022), has played a significant role in the coming-into-being of this publication. We want to dedicate it to all those who resist, in any possible way.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Triangular Reading,<\/em> 2020 A research into Stroom\u2019s archive, making and performative reading of two triangular book objects.\u00a0 \u201cUncertainty Seminar: care\u201d, Stroom den Haag.<\/p><\/div>\n

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House of Secrets in Geometric Structures; study of the octagon in two dimensions. Fold on paper, Arefeh Riahi, 2021.<\/p><\/div>\n

From Constanza Mendoza<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dear Arefeh, Maartje and Martin,<\/p>\n

Yesterday was a real pleasure to talk with you. Unfortunately and to my huge regret I made a mistake with the recording by using the headphones to avoid the noise of the renovation of the facade of my building and only my voice was recorded. I apologize for this mistake. I also think that in many ways, yesterday’s conversation and your practice addressed this kind of issues.
\nI think it is not now a matter of trying to reproduce the conversation again but it could be more interesting that we explicitly cover this mistake as an example of these questions that you work on so carefully.<\/p>\n

Best,
\nConstanza<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

My Garden\u2019s Boundaries Are the Horizon, 2023. Preparatory readings that were part of this multidirectional book design process. Design by Elisabeth Klement.<\/p><\/div>\n

From Arefeh Riahi<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dear Constanza,<\/p>\n

I also think that we shouldn’t be worried about the problem with recording. In fact I see it as an anarchival coincidence. Perhaps an interview with To See The Inability to See couldn’t be more accurate than this.<\/p>\n

It reminds me of another similar incident that happened to us in our first collaboration. During my residency in De Appel, I gathered the discarded material of the archive for about two months, then I invited Mart\u00edn and Maartje to work with me on them. Through this material which we considered “the outsider” we wanted to re-read what remained inside the archive. More often our meetings in the archive would begin with a personal story. It was then, the beginning of the Estallido Social, <\/em>the Chilean protests, and Mart\u00edn’s stories reminded me a lot of the Green Movement <\/em>of 2009 in Iran. Our emotional stories would lead to political, philosophical, artistic and anarchivistic narrative\/threads that would take us to different corners of the archive. And revealed what was hidden, what we couldn’t see.<\/p>\n

In this process, one of the assignments that we gave ourselves was that each of us take home a bunch, from the pile of discarded material, and study, select and work on them and bring them back in two weeks. I worked on my share of the material, but the night before our next meeting, as I was bringing them home from my studio, so that I could take them to the archive the next day, I lost them in the tram! The next day, our conversation began with this personal story of loss. Here is a fragment from the publication 16\/10\/20 A project by Notes on Hapticity Collective, <\/em>in which we wrote further about the incident:<\/p>\n

“When I got home in the evening, I tried to rebuild a new version of the lost material for as far as I could remember. Yet I could recognize in me the desire for having the actual material back: that strange two-fold feeling when you value something more knowing that it’s lost. Having lost my ‘homework’, I felt like a bad student. In order to distract myself from the feeling of guilt, I took the Book of Anarchiving and came upon this passage: “The Anarchive resists the object, the it, the deliverable. […] this it… carves out space and time, makes cuts in the wave field\/function, and momentarily articulates something out of chaos. Nothing is lost. It is all there and nowhere at the same time.” [1]<\/sup><\/a> The go-to, How To Book of Anarchiving. Edited by Andrew Murphie. Montreal, December 2016. Deliverable by Thea Patterson.<\/em><\/span><\/span>