Degree Show - 13th to the 19th June.

Here is a piece that will be released in a pamphlet in the degree show.

There is a drama that unfolds in professional relationships. This is a drama that arises from the inherent performativity of project development. Projects may or may not exist at certain times, their development is never linear, for essentially the collaboration of individuals in The Project is to project into that projects future. However, in order to participate in the project it must straddle, rather inelegantly, the present and the future. But lets not reduce the project to a lifespan only in the now and the possible. Who knows when a project begins, when the narrative is started? Unfortunately this becomes no clearer if the project produces things. If there is something to look at, something that is birthed from the continuously immaterial nature of the project, this makes everything harder to pick apart. At times, during the project, things that never actually existed may have been far more ‘real’ than the object produced. And if the project is only ever non-linear and is a constant reconstitution of projections into a possible space, an inheritance of distant previous circumstances all manifested immaterially in an actual space, then the project never stops either. There are things of which I am sure, no beginning, no ending, an immaterial narrative existence during, a lot of or a few ‘things’, real or imaginary, and a conscious need to nail the jelly to the wall in order to perceive the whole thing in the first place.

“I refuse to work! I refuse to work until someone tells me who wrote this text. I will not leave, I will stay here and not work until someone tells me who wrote the text. Those are my terms.”

Accountability is a problem. It is with a prosopopoeic rhetoric that objects, either material or immaterial, can speak. But when those objects speak, the exchange can only ever be one-way, and there is a violence to the monologue of the disembodied voice. Who does the angry mob go to for retribution? And in turn, the angry mob’s actual violence is fuelled only through the momentary creation of a univocal prowess. But then again, who has to die to silence the angry mob – certainly not everyone.

“Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life”

In a text with no title that a group that I was part of wrote collaboratively using quotes from other sources, a group of collaborators explore the bonds that actually link them together, each performing roles given to them by the source material. As fictional characters their voices are just reconstituted traces of other’s. We organize only a sequence of scripted performances. Yet the characters are immobile as soon as the sources run dry, as soon as all 9 quotes are used, the story ends. The drama that is essentially enacted in the construction of a narrative is the same as the drama enacted scene by scene in this ‘actual’ partnership. And that is not to say that it is like-for-like but it is actually the same performance, ‘as-one’.
If we are also to consider that the project is non-linear, even though it produced a text and a display, and perhaps a revolt, and numerous charged dramatic scenes the authorship of these things displaces them in any form of historical recording. We can say when these actions transpired but how and with who could only ever be enacted and that the actual relationships are embodied ones. This creates the voice with which the immaterial entity will speak.
In Our text the ‘pipesmoker’ is the person with privilege, able to decide when a project is over and choose the victor over the oppressed. This person passes judgment, celebrating success and belittling the failures, but this goes in contrary to a project’s uncertain relationship with time. It is also not particularly useful to consider ‘narrative time’, projects and relationships are necessarily timetabled, scheduled and celebrated yet are consistently re-written whenever the jelly needs nailing.
This occurrence denotes the construction of an outside viewing position, perhaps in terms of this show you have to build your own watch tower. But how can one ‘participate’ in this misalignment of time, which in its performative realm is elaborate mimicry or repetition, and appear in the watch-tower practicing one’s own historicity. As people, or as a project, or any entity, the inelegant straddling continues.