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“however uncertainly, across space”
19th November 16:00 on ABA Air Salon
Video Piece will run from 15:00 19th to 15:00 20th November
ABA Air Salon with Eloise Sweetman, featuring audio from artist Damon Zucconi’s work Jailbreak accompanied by Eloise’s text Not Knowing. Intimacy. A Door A Jar. At Haus der Statistik, the video work from Jailbreak will be on display from 15:00 19th of November to 15:00 20th of November.
Throughout the radio show, you’ll hear the audio from Zucconi’s video piece Jailbreak, a shifting, shivering portrayal of a chandelier. Its lights flicker—on, off, then on again—capturing a sense of instability and incompleteness. This piece isn’t fully present on the screen; it exists both here and somewhere else. Overlaying the video are voices reading fragments of a text—unseen figures reaching out to someone distant and unreachable. Much like this broadcast, both the video and text enter the world with no fixed destination. They embody hope, intimacy, and a longing to pass through thresholds—to communicate, however uncertainly, across space.
Opening music is Clouds by Pastel Ghost.
About Eloise Sweetman
In many of Eloise Sweetman’s exhibitions, she works with artists and artworks to gradually reveal the entire art experience over time and space. In Sweetman’s effort to find a way to linger with art, she has developed a curatorial style that pauses, hesitates, and sometimes returns to an artwork within the exhibition. Her projects center around the concepts of “not knowing” and “intimacy,” as well as the roles of intuition and emotion in curatorship. In this way, Sweetman’s work seeks to keep meaning open. www.eloisesweetman.com
About Damon Zucconi
Damon Zucconi frequently uses custom software and scripts to create his works and has been engaged in the practice of computer programming since 2010, producing works that are typically accessible online. His works utilize vision, literacy, and pattern recognition to make plain our perceptual experience. https://www.damonzucconi.com/
References
Robert Aitken, ‘The Mind of Clover,’ in The Mind of Clover: Essays in Zen Buddhist Ethics (New York: North Point Press, 1984), 136.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘The World The World of Perception: Sensory Object’ in The World of Perception (London: Routledge, 2020), 47
On perpetuating a submissive position: Although at the time it had not even entered into my mind that the women who taught me and the girls and women I grew up with, nor even myself, could perpetuate toxic gender stereotypes.
Deborah Bird Rose, ‘Val Plumwood’s Philosophical Animism: Attentive Interactions in the Sentient World,’ in Environmental Humanities, vol. 3 (2013): 93–109.
Marc Lesser, Not Knowing is the Most intimate (March 1, 2010). Accessed on November 14, 2016, www.marclesser.net/not-knowing-is-most-intimate/.
Koun Hamada, Great Faith, Great Doubt, Great Determination (Summer, 2015), Tricycle Magazine, accessed on 14 April 2021, https://tricycle.org/magazine/great-faith-great-doubt-great-determination/
Thich Nhat Hanh. “Insight of No-Self”, Last Talk of the Third Week of the Summer Opening Retreat, Plum Village, July 26, 2013, live speech, Youtube, 1:40:17, http://tnhaudio.org/2013/08/05/insight-of-no-self/. Accessed November 14, 2016
Marcus Boon, “To live in a glass house is a revolutionary virtue, par excellence” in Nothing: Three Inquiries into Buddhism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015)
This version was of Not Knowing. Intimacy. A Door A Jaar was originally published in “Curatorial Feelings” edited by Jo-ey Tang published by Shimmer Press, Rotterdam in 2021. I originally wrote a piece for a talk at De Appel, which I then developed as the foundational essay for an exhibition with the same name. It was slightly revised as published in the book School of Missing Studies (Sternberg/Sandberg 01, 2018). I have reworked the texts a little bit but it is close to the original text that I presented as a lecture at De Appel.
Through a gradual unfurling, Roll on, roll on, phenomena (until you are no more) opens up ways of coming together through acts of not knowing and intimacy. Beginning in the studio, the program unfolds over time with a shifting rhythm, as it expands outward it moves through different spaces. Over time the program radiates out into the city where the studio circles back as an ever-changing space of communal gathering and momentary encounters.
Roll on, roll on, phenomena (until you are no more) looks at not knowing as more than saying ‘I don't know’. Rather, it is an entwined act of vulnerability and responsibility. Intimacy is proposed as the interconnected relationships that emerge, flicker, and disappear over and over again; that is opened out by not knowing. As an exhibition the artworks, readings, talks, and audience become companions, intersecting, breaking apart, and reconfiguring in an iterative and continuous becoming with the world.
ABA Air SALON is a radio format produced by Air Berlin Alexanderplatz, a Berlin based artist initiative dealing with the distribution and documentation of forms of collective and experimental knowledge production. The broadcasts come from different locations in Berlin where we organize salons. At these salons we meet with local actors, artists, scientists and other cultural producers to exchange around research based artistic projects and practices. You can find more information about our program at www.airberlinalexanderplatz.de
ABA (Air Berlin Alexanderplatz) e.V., is a research-oriented artists' initiative founded in Berlin in 2009 by the artists Susanne Kriemann & Aleksander Komarov. The programme focuses on ephemeral artistic research and collective and experimental knowledge production. ABA’s operations consist of the conception, curation and implementation of various presentational formats: The organization of salons in different locations across the city, the release of publications, the stewardship of a residency-program and the maintenance of a website as a central place for documentation and archiving of these forms of ephemeral knowledge production.