ELEMENTAL DISAPPEARANCES

JASON BAHBAK MOHAGHEGH

DEJAN LUKIĆ
ELEMENTAL
DISAPPEARANCES
JASON BAHBAK MOHAGHEGH
DEJAN LUKIC´

tiny collections
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface: The Marauder’s Fragment, vii

Part I: Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh, 1

Wooden Elsewhere Underwater Dance The Summoning Women
Endless Aftermath Heresy Skies Destitution Tower
Witch-Hunting Brigade Silk Rooms Micro-Impalement
Boy Weapons-Maker Wolf Installations Impossible Suspect
Cannibal Rebel Stone Garden of the Voiceless Imperceptible Someone
ELEMENTAL DISAPPEARANCES Primordial Dream 1, Animal Multigenerational Doom Death Simulation 1
©2016 Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh & Dejan Lukic´
Primordial Dream 2, Monster Automaton’s Revenge Death Simulation 2
This work carries a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license, which means that you are free Primordial Dream 3, Night Virtual Suicide Pacts All-Women Fighting Squad 1
to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and you may also remix, transform and build Strangulation Aesthetics Futuristic Solitude All-Women Fighting Squad 2
upon the material, as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors (but not in a way that suggests the Blacksmith Poet Circular Punishment Elemental Wrath 1, Fire
authors or publishers endorses you and your work), you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form Broken Staircase 1 Blade Delirium Elemental Wrath 2, Ice
whatsoever, and that for any remixing and transformation, you distribute your rebuild under the same license. Broken Staircase 2 Stone Mask — Gas Mask Elemental Wrath 3, Earth
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

This work first published in 2016 by tiny collections, Part II: Dejan Lukic,
´ 75
an imprint of punctum books
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The Material Collective is dedicated to fostering respectful intellectual exchange and innovative scholarship
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Book design: Chris Piuma. Image attributions, 141

Editorial assistance: Jennifer Borland. Informational links, 147
 v

All entries herein are excerpted from the writings of the 5th (Dis)Appearance Lab
[www.5dal.com].

A special acknowledgment to the individual artists and galleries who have courte-
ously offered their images for collaborative use here, including: Henrique Oliveira,
Shirin Neshat and the Gladstone Gallery, Adel Abdessemed, Christoph Bengert,
Diana Al-Hadid and the Marianne Boesky Gallery, Liu Xia and Guy Sorman, Daan
Roosegaarde and Studio Roosegaarde, David Maisel, Istvan, Berlinde de Bruyckere
and Hauser & Wirth, Raphaël Verona and Thomas Rousset, Tomás Saraceno and the
Esther Schipper Gallery, Univocal Publishing, Katy Sewall, Andrea Dezsö, Isaac Cordal,
Celeny Gonzalez, Neelufar Mohaghegh, and the Robert Walser-Zentrum.

Also, we would like to extend a particular affirmation to Mr. James Gregory, a tireless
ally whose exertion on behalf of this manuscript proved essential. His commitment
and insight are beyond appreciated.
 vii
PREFACE: THE MARAUDER’S FRAGMENT

Behold fragmentary enchantments. The aim of these thought-images is to enchant

through a stylistic constraint: a single paragraph. To engage the designated image
by intensifying it; by letting it out of its frame. Enchantment needs to be reinvented.
For it is by nature ephemeral, obscure, and by now only visible as a disappearing act.
Intellectual critique fancies itself too enlightened for this — too serious, too pro-
found. But this disappearing act is its stronghold. Through disappearing it appears,
through appearing it disappears, a tide following the forces of its own moons.

For enchantment to work we need a proper figure, a guide to follow into the
unknown. A figure that embodies the act of disappearance itself: a marauder.
Marauders have a bad reputation; they first emerged in the late seventeenth century
as “rogues” (this is the actual etymological root), roaming in search of things to steal,
coming out of the shadows, advancing on the borders. Sometimes they were desert-
ers, often stragglers. Nevertheless, what is important to us is their movement (always
irregular) and their non-belonging to institutional authorities. Illegitimate storytell-
ers, they share stories of adventures with each other.

To imagine the marauder’s journals, then, would be to imagine a paragraph appear-

ing as a fragment, a block of writing at the limit, because from there the horizon
turns limitless. Many authors wrote their philosophy in fragments (finer in speed and
immediacy and thus closer to lived experience than forcibly reflective texts) and so
exhibited the marauder’s dispositions. This book belongs to this line of so-called
fragmentary writing that spans centuries, even millennia.

But it would be inaccurate to depict and celebrate the marauder’s fragment (i.e., the
single paragraph) as purely incomplete and open-ended. Being a block of thought,
the paragraph contains also its own fullness where nothing is missing, like a single-
cell organism, perfect in itself. This is its elementality.

For this type of fragmentary enchantment to actualize itself, a specific alignment of

principles, and with it a strong methodological turn, is necessary.
1. The fragment is a device of alchemy (the elemental): seeking out the elemental The marauder’s fragment therefore positions itself in the prism between futility,
properties of an object or event only to transform them against themselves. 2. The annihilation, and playful diversion. And still, it is here that we find the last chance
fragment is an expression of revelation (the secret): dedicated to a non-sacred con- for a world. For the marauder’s fragment restores thought to the cause of fascina-
cept of revelation that heightens the experience of bewilderment, seeking the perfect tion; it thereby turns doom into a creative reflex that awakens in us the unfathomed,
secret which would not conceal itself but rather which becomes transparent only so the mesmerizing, and the radical outside. Nothing less than a deceptive map that
as to become even further enigmatic. 3. The fragment leans toward intimation (the nonetheless harbors the most necessary technique (of violent envisioning), one that
fractal): elevating the brokenness of forms as a superior geometry, constructing allows us to stare across the edge of all things. We must acknowledge this essential
unfinished edifices and offering partial glances that splinter the floors of perception. architectonics of captivation that he brings. We must adopt his eyes if we are to
4. The fragment compels wandering (the drift): articulations that necessarily stray make it through, and take note as he conspires either with or against this existence.
from their origins, abandoning their oppressive surroundings, playing deviant or Stated otherwise, we must enter the marauder’s hallucination.
traitor to the borders, and traverse into the awaiting desert. 5. The fragment enables
escape (the exception): a focus upon the miniature strangeness within each incident, JBM & DL
one that transports mind to the threshold of incommensurability; this is how the law Salem, MA / New York City / Istanbul, Turkey / Rijeka, Croatia
becomes its own escape-unto-exemption and time folds into the aftermath. 6. The 2015
fragment is a summoning (the cipher): a performance that calls forward and encodes,
for it aligns impulses resting beneath the obvious and turns them into a cryptic mes-
sage or fairy tale that threatens the regime of the historical, the human, and the real.

There is a special kind of pleasure in discovering the occluded, extracting from it rare
modalities, one that turns us back toward the hidden face of the marauder. We often
picture this figure hovering in the outer reaches, biding his time until the appropri-
ate post-dusk opportunity. He sits watching at careful distances, his expression
concealed from everything he surveys below. And yet this self-masking is its own
important signal, a certain destiny for sure, one that must be taken both lightly and
severely, just as his intimidating motions (of intrusion, night-raiding) are at once
ethereal and fatal for all involved. For the marauder enters the scene of history only
at its moment of greatest vulnerability. He arrives when the continuum begins to
tremble, as a neutral messenger of the awe behind every universal disappearance.
He stalks the perimeters of towns and cities when they are closest to collapse (the
hour that “comes too late”) and begins reciting as the epoch grows tired, frail, and
mortally disillusioned. His words are at once a citadel and a tonic, a dialect of omens,
signs, and premonitions. Forsakenness; entrancement; desperate quest — an atlas of
emergent and extinguishing infinities.
PART I: JASON BAHBAK MOHAGHEGH
 3
WOODEN ELSEWHERE

False prophetic wilderness. An artist-sculptor takes the debris from splintered

wood and restructures its pieces into a vast sequence of coils and turning lairs, the
pseudo-site of an uprooted forest. Once wasted particles have now become a contin-
uous network of excess and immensity, the catacomb of some child or savage’s dream
(terrifying innocence). The consequence: an assembled geography of enclosures and
subterranean halls (the tunnel, the labyrinth, the corridor, the cylinder, the cave);
appearance of an untouched world; manipulated sublimity. These arteries are but the
collective lie of an origin (only their hollowness is universal). Such is the experience
of the radical elsewhere: traveling beneath, within the underpass and the curvature.
Artificial primordialism; hypothetical exodus. Such is the experience of spatial bewil-
derment: where one goes to forever join the lost, the aimless, and the disoriented.

region Latin America

concept Myth
subconcepts Disorientation, Immensity, Exodus, The Labyrinth
description Brazilian artist Henrique Oliveira creates installation of wooden caverns.
 5
ENDLESS AFTERMATH

What are the exact properties behind this elegant work of desolation: i.e., the
complex array of colors, textures, and shapes that emerge only in the wake of
deserted and rusting edifices? An entire poetics of rubble and decay have taken
hold here, as each evacuated underground structure or broken particle sits ready
to transmit their two important messages: (1) that the world of objects will always
outlast the world of subjects (the inhuman is superior to man); (2) that there is
no death, only the dying (the absolute is subordinated to the interminable spiral).
Beyond the last remaining trace of functionality or relevance, these discarded spaces
and contraptions speak to the terrible endurance of things. Carnivalesque. Unde-
feated. No architect remains, no blueprint or creative origin . . . only the generative
matrix of corrosion into which uninvited forms shoot and perish over expanses of
time. Not just the dwindling echoes of failed utopias, but rather ongoing habitats
of insane and chilling atmospheric turns. Thus they retain their investment in the
open. And this powerful state of aftermath compels us to rethink the very concept
of apocalypse itself: for these hollowed-out nuclear bases are not quite signs of the
“post-apocalyptic” (since it is not clear that we have in fact passed some definitive
threshold of extinguishment), nor of the “pre-apocalyptic” (since it is not clear, given
our technologies of prolongation and artificial immortality, that we even still have the
capacity to die or end). Instead, we find in these wasteland chambers the evidence
of something without totality or destination, and thus far more daunting: that is, a
relentless apocalypse-in-procession.

region Europe
concept Space
subconcepts Corrosion, Rubble, Desolation, Apocalypse
description Former Soviet submarine bases continue to stand and haunt despite being
abandoned.
 7
WITCH-HUNTING BRIGADE

If every codification of the law gives rise to the temptation and transgressive pos-
sibility of breaking that same law, then it should be no surprise that every totalitarian
structure will give rise to a magical underground. The disciplinary severity of the sur-
face always necessitates the opening of an arcane world of non-conformism, heresy,
and criminal superstition. Moreover, those who would hold the reins of power are
aware of this inevitable outcome: thus the paranoiac urgency with which they stalk
down and raid any semblance of witches, sorcerers, fortune-tellers, and subversive
healers. Let them take the capital cities of empires; the others will take to the faraway
provinces, the forest hideouts, the jungles, the chasms, and the sand dunes. Let them
take the official language of the center; the others will take the illegitimate counter-
language of rumor, legend, fairy tale, and occult whisper. Inquisitions are never the
intended suppression but rather the breeding ground of evil formulations (to forbid
is to invite proliferation). If anything, this is the logical motion of enchantment itself:
accusation, judgment, sentencing (some burned, stoned, or beheaded), followed by
an inescapable supernatural backlash. Those who would build finite worlds will be
met increasingly by those who desire nothing more than gaping otherworldliness.

region Middle East

concept Myth
subconcepts Discipline, Inquisition, Magic, Evil, Otherworldliness
description Saudi Arabian police force creates special unit for tracking witches.
 9
BOY WEAPONS-MAKER

There is an unspoken history of the child in elevated conditions of war. Cradle-to-

grave fatality; death by small hands. More exactly, how does the state of emergency
(revolution, massacre, famine) thrust the child into a process of unnatural aging, as a
still-formless consciousness is told to confront thresholds of mortality far ahead of
its years? In what sense is innocence obsolesced by more vicious principles of neces-
sity, velocity, and struggle? How does this accelerated timescape — trapped within
the hyper-reality of civil conflict — impact the child’s relation to the surrounding
atmosphere and the world of objects and appearances? Is the exhausted face of the
boy weapons-maker, one who bathes in the metallic craft of missiles and ammunition,
whose face is blackened by the smoke and furnaces of this lethal factory, the banner
of a miniature Armageddon?

region Middle East

concept Time
subconcepts Innocence, Necessity, Unnatural Aging
description Photo series of young Syrian boy (Issa) working in weapons factory.
 11
CANNIBAL REBEL

He crouches above the exposed abdomen, knife aimed downward, ready to showcase
for all onlookers the timeless relationship between violence and consumption. He
penetrates the outer barriers of black fatigues and white skin, into the redness within,
and thereby raises the following questions: What are the tremulous repercussions of
the one who ingests/internalizes the enemy? How does this intense proximity with
the body of the fallen (feasting upon the wound, swallowing the corpse) and the
eventual shift toward vampirism reveal an alternative framework of anger or atroc-
ity that deviates from modernity’s increasing strategies of detached, opaque, and
technologically-mediated killing? What does this cannibalistic performance suggest
about the existential gap between the figure of the militant and the ideology of the
state? Is the extremist the last truth-teller in our age of false impressions, the only
one amid the many delusions to always keep his word?

region Middle East

concept Violence
subconcepts Mutilation, Devouring, The Enemy
description Video Interview with Abu Sakkar (Syrian militia fighter captured on video while eating
the heart or liver of a dead soldier).
 13
PRIMORDIAL DREAM 1, ANIMAL

The Dream of Animality: one of the most ancient obsessions of human consciousness
(the first gods were beasts). Myths of flight, of synchronous movement, muscu-
lar symmetry, the mastery of horizontal and vertical surfaces, predatory instinct,
affection and biting accuracy. And yet this perfect unity (of intention, design,
action, and desire) is attained through an ability to become fragmented (to aban-
don, shatter, molecularize, decompose, and leave oneself). This is why every child’s
tale of entrance into the liberated territories of animality (the isle, the garden, the
wonderland) first requires a self-forgetting that breaks apart identity. Only then are
the gifts of untamed beings seen in totems and cave paintings — realms of feeding,
sensation, roaming, sleep, violence, and endless motion — made available to the
human mind/touch. This art form of postmodern vandalism thus ironically serves to
resuscitate a primordial tradition of image-making: visions of flight, curvature, aerial-
ity, and the unbound.

region East Asia

concept Myth
subconcepts Movement, Play, Abandonment, Flight
description Secretive graffiti artist DALeast leaves massive spray-painted images (mostly of ani-
mals) across the walls of global cities.
 15
PRIMORDIAL DREAM 2, MONSTER

The Dream of Monstrosity: another of the most ancient obsessions of human con-
sciousness (the first villages had their folklore of supernatural creatures threatening
from the periphery). Myths of devouring jaws, of nightmarish forms and dispropor-
tionate limbs, of evil and miraculous traits. Ecstatic malevolence; diabolical thought.
Thus we descend upon the cellar stairs of our exhilaration before images of fright,
paralysis, awe, and deformity. The monster has always represented the excess of
human possibility, the visceral ghoulish embodiment of man-gone-too-far. This is why
they resemble us in certain key ways (our eyes, our hands) and yet deviate toward
horrid states of expansion, magnification, or irradiation (the pupils are too bloodshot,
the nails are too long). Still, it is through this hyper-mirror alone that we can envision
ourselves as the lost cause, and at the point of no return: for the monster’s face, the
monster’s body, is nothing more than the extreme limit of our own mortal intensity
(and thus made immortal).

region Europe
concept Myth
subconcepts Fright, Malevolence, Extremity, Hyper-Mirroring
description Danish artist John Kenn Mortensen draws images of monsters on post-it notes.
 17
PRIMORDIAL DREAM 3, NIGHT

The Dream of Night: a third ancient obsession of human consciousness (birthplace

of the marauder, the highwayman, and the vigilante). Myths of the shadow and of the
pitch-black; myths of nothingness and darkening, of night as abductor (that it steals
our being), night as omen (that it can be read in signs) and oracle (that it reveals
the sacred will), or night as portal (that it provides passage into the deranged, the
hidden, and the prohibited). Thus a photographer interrogates the recurring themes
of children’s nightmares — some born of sleep and others of sleeplessness, some
archetypal and others quite unique to behold — and then situates them as accom-
plices to its black-and-white recreation. As they consent to a second performance
of the terror, we are showered with images of the buried alive, of being chased,
of growing roots from one’s hands, of submergence in a house’s rooftop, and of
not-right men standing in the woods. And yet all is inviting here (one trembles, yet
without anxiety), as each instance takes its place within the larger catalogue of an
artist-turned-collector. This leads one to ask the proper term for such an album of
young visitations unto dread: can one even call this an archive, compendium, anthol-
ogy, or testimony of some kind? Perhaps no invented word yet for what it means to
accumulate the many bad sides of malediction and pretending, those which forebode
and warn the viewer of an unpromising world . . . such that the transition from dusk
to evening to midnight goes hand-in-hand with the transition from slipping away to
seduction to awful entrapment. The nocturnal therefore speaks only of the inexis-
tent — and the night always wins.

region North America

concept Myth
subconcepts Shadow, Abduction, Omen, Portal, Unpromising World
description Photographer Arthur Tress recreates scenes from children’s nightmares.
 19
STRANGULATION AESTHETIC

Visual collision, sound collision: a man dressed in white, singing traditional hymns
before a refined audience; a woman draped in black robes, emanating guttural noises
before an empty room. It is an unfair competition that illustrates the contrast of the
normalized body (in states of composure, pronunciation, and exhibition) and the
deviant body (in states of gagging, writhing, and forbidden articulation). Watching
these contestants thereby raises the following questions: What is the acoustic regis-
ter of the unspoken? How does the non-category of the banished, the accursed, or
the minoritized individual enable some visionary breakthrough towards an aesthetics
of jaggedness? What is the bond between art and vengeance, and also that between
eroticism, agony, and the creative instinct?

region Middle East

concept Body
subconcepts Silence, Voice, Suffocation, The Utterance
description Video Installation of Shirin Neshat’s “Turbulent” (male and female vocal performers in
sonic contestation).
 21
BLACKSMITH POET

The poetics of heat and steel (uncaring, mean-spirited foundation); inexorable

rhythm of the master’s arm (striking, fusion). The blacksmith’s arena is based upon
axioms of harshness, dominant motion, and the hammer’s devotion to corporeality.
There is no ideology within the forge, only the craftsman’s rage, hardening, and preci-
sion. Unanticipated, cyclonic den of movement and production. Quest for microcos-
mic perfection (the artisan as quasi-god) . . . coarse, meticulous, entrenched amidst
extreme temperatures, ever-between states of solidity (the blade), liquidity (the
melted metal), and aeriality (the dense smoke). The word must also resemble this
process, each anti-lyrical stanza an emulation of the mercilessness of iron.

region Middle East

concept Movement
subconcepts Rhythm, Harshness, Inexorability
description Afghani blacksmith (Matiullah Turab) writes poetry within the forge . . . amidst fire,
iron, smoke.
 23
BROKEN STAIRCASE 1

There are many well-known interpretive approaches to the history of the staircase:
the obvious theological depictions of stairs ascending or descending toward heaven
and hell, the cheap psychological symbolism of anxiety over a journey or transition,
the more obscure phenomenological renderings of higher and lower spatialities (the
attic, the basement), and the long-standing architectural fascination with stairs that
fall apart, twist abrasively, skip levels, or go nowhere. And yet, far from these vertical
meditations, we find ourselves confronted with a horizontal universe of black nets
strung together as suspension bridges (there can be only unstable travelers/pas-
sengers here). Thus one enters the lattice, where the same encompassing material
that forms the ground beneath also stretches round to shape frail walls against which
one attempts to balance . . . all the while sinking and coiling in arrhythmic patterns.
One places one’s hands through the perforations — surrendering to this fate of
becoming wrapped, intertwined, entangled — trusting precisely what betrays and
sabotages, and thereby advances in a kind of desperate though futile motion. There
is no good progression to be had; the laws of choreography and navigation require
more certainty than this string grid allows. Indeed, all that remains from this experi-
ence of poor “walking” or “transversal” is to be reminded of two old experiential facts:
(1) that when envisioning the philosophical image of “the abyss” in its presumed
infinity, we must never forget to also eliminate the last crucial dimension (the earth
below), so as to invite the sensation of bottomlessness and freefall; (2) that when
trapped in the desert, as a thousand pieces of medieval Arabian poetry can confirm,
when the rider’s horse has died and the dawn brings only the full inevitability of
scorching, and one stands limitless miles from any trace of salvation or oasis . . . one
walks anyway. Far less righteous than any defiant concept of “struggle” or “martyr-
dom,” this pointless movement across the sands, the cables, or the darkness.

region Europe
concept Movement
subconcepts Suspension, Waiting, Futile Motion
description Austrian museum stages exhibition of black net staircases by the design collective
Numen/For Use.
 25
BROKEN STAIRCASE 2

This staircase (itself a cascade of falling cloth, paint, and forms) leads to some kind
of altar. But what kind of sanctuary or shrine is produced through a visual criterion of
gushing and effusion? Is there a typology of the sacred that generates itself through
the forces of torrent and outpouring (that which spills infinitely, bleeds everywhere),
and then another that manifests only through processes of containment and drought
(that which wastes nothing, overflows nowhere)? Two separate portals to the celes-
tial, stretched along an axis between excessive secretion and ascetic desiccation.
In the former case, for which this sculpture constitutes a kind of hallowing (of the
history of flagellation, running wounds, and gods meant to be drunk downward), we
see a man’s torso trickling across the planks in a way that links human destiny to a
greater liquid metaphysics. And in the latter case, we are reminded of the fasting and
self-deprivation of so many monks or saints (a history of parched throats, heavily
cloaked bodies, and ethereal vows), or even the “thugees” of India whose worship of
the goddess of destruction led them to treat murder as a sacred rite . . . though to be
performed without the loss of a single drop of blood, and thus prone to committing
acts of forced asphyxiation with silk scarves. One remembers the caravans on which
they preyed, and the structure of honor/violation through which any emanation or
streaming of the veins was purely forbidden. Thus one wonders again whether differ-
ent attributes of the miraculous are partitioned along this strange choice: whether to
let flood or to bottle the world of wet and dripping things.

region Middle East/North America

concept Movement
subconcepts Altar, Effusion, Outpouring, Flood
description Diana al-Hadid creates architectural sculpture titled “Suspended After Image.”
 27
UNDERWATER DANCE

Behind old steel doors and down various twisted serpentines, one discovers a private
chamber situated beneath the surface of a lake, itself the wondrous invention of
a nineteenth-century mining tycoon attempting to flee his own tired universes of
wealth and taste. Having descended into the covert whims of a cutthroat-turned-
escape-artist, we slowly realize a psychic register stranger even than that of “the cel-
lar” (is it a barricade or an admission booth?). For here, just beyond the decorated
perimeters of the estate, we are greeted by the stone statue of a pagan sea-god who
indicates that there is yet another extravagance at work in the pools below: an anti-
establishment manor dedicated to distraction alone, and which somehow conveys
the feeling of both the sojourn and the farthermost. Hence it is in this mold-ridden
ballroom that one begins to ask: What acute morphology of choromania (the com-
pulsion to dance) could only slake itself underwater? More than this, what particular
category of fantasy compels the birth of “the hideaway”. . . ?

region Europe
concept Space
subconcepts Hideaway, Dance, Fantasy, The Miner
description Secret decaying ballroom found beneath the lake of a former Victorian estate.
 29
HERESY SKIES

“As if the sky were beneath the cyclist’s feet and the laws of gravity had fallen asleep,”
one says. And they are right to marvel at this poetic inversion of space and nature,
a lyrical transposition of earth and stratosphere that leaves the rider enchanted
along their dim-lit pathways. But heretics have also spoken and dreamt of tainted
hours when once-elevated forces would supposedly find themselves deposed like
this (to streak across heavens). Thus one wonders whether there is something else
here, amid the turning of world orders upside-down, a cosmological rebellion at work
in the gesture of bringing transcendent lairs to low ground. Does the sentimental
effusion of color mask an ulterior, hypothermic motive? Does it harbor a will to uni-
versal trampling, to the (dis)placement of once-divine registers beneath the wheels
(becoming-undaunted)?

region Europe
concept Movement
subconcepts Inversion, Displacement, Trampling
description Dutch designer Daan Roosegaarde illuminates the bike paths of a park in patterned
castings of Van Gogh’s starry night.
 31
SILK ROOMS

This rising trend of building silk rooms takes us into the heart of the fabric’s own
paradox: on the one hand, a material of fragility, softness, and smoothness (the
fine threads); on the other hand, a force of entanglement, tightness, and constric-
tion (the spider’s web). Elegant constraint; opulent binding; swathed unto light-
ness. Thus it forms a unique trap, these filaments of absolute luxury (made for the
robes of kings and queens) that are nevertheless formed from the ghastly secretions
of the “lowest beings” (made from insect larvae and the cocoons of silkworms).
However, when its thin fibers are stretched to fill an entire room, we find ourselves
caught in a register like no other, one that intertwines experiences of solidity, liquid-
ity, and aeriality: the silken elsewhere. We are woven or braided across the loom of a
dangerous question, as if silk itself were a medium of espionage (the sleeper cell or
fifth column). And so one asks: Why are the artists of the present moment evermore
drawn to this category of anomaly, seamlessness, and enveloping? Is there a rare
code at work, within the strands?

region East Asia

concept Space
subconcepts Fragility, Constraint, Entanglement
description East Asian installation artists are increasingly constructing rooms made of silk:
Tianmiao Lin (China), Do Ho Suh (Korea), Akiko Ikeuchi (Japan).
 33
WOLF INSTALLATIONS

Recurring mythologies of the wolf (i.e., its stronghold within the immemorial, the
primordial, the ancient, the medieval, the modern, and the postmodern), combining
animality, beastliness, and ghostliness. Figure of stalking and predation; the night-
mare, the fangs, the woods beyond the house, beyond the town (where bloodthirst is
the only law). Circus-like celebration of the flesh (torn, devoured, crucified); victory
of the creature over the creation (a single bite accomplishes the reversal of humanist
privilege), amidst the graceful interplay of lacerations and wrenching limbs.

region North Africa

concept Myth
subconcepts Fear (dread, paranoia), Slaughter, The Grotesque
description Installation artist Adel Abdessemed equates artistic creation with slaughter and
wolves.
 35
STONE GARDEN OF THE VOICELESS

He whirls somewhere in the dispersed junctures between nature, pandemonium,

separation, and inexplicable delight, and thereby reveals the powerful transposi-
tion of the loss of language into a spatial arena. One watches and asks oneself
(though he cannot answer): How does the anti-social pain of mutedness and non-
communication become its own expressive device? How does the impasse of a lone
man’s incomprehensibility and quarantine become an elite license to cosmological
re-creation? In what way is this transition from the abstract domain of the word
to the concrete stratum of the stone (from discourse to geology) a will to rapture,
apotheosis, and mystical exaltation? What is the final implication of this alternative
modality of belonging for our sense of being-in-the-world, and what esoteric prin-
ciples can one excavate from his dance of derangement?

region Middle East

concept Space
subconcepts Madness, Solitude, Derangement, Rapture
description Unspeaking Iranian peasant (Darvish Khan) builds stone garden and dances therein.
 37
MULTIGENERATIONAL DOOM

Cumulative agony; genealogical retribution; the corpsed multitude. What does it

mean to transmit damnation across several generational channels? There is common
knowledge of authoritarian regimes that have constructed special cemeteries for trai-
tors to the state, with executed bodies thrown in impersonal rows beneath unmarked
graves, where even the bare soil on the surface is ordered to be overturned from
time to time so as to allow no solace, no rest, for the treasonous dead. But this other
phenomenon — three-generational punishment — is a technique like none before.
A person is accused and sentenced (condemned for life), and that accusation sends
an ensuing convulsion down the spine of their child (condemned for life), and then
affixes even the forthcoming days of their not-yet-born grandchild (condemned for
life), until a fourth successor, the great-grandchild, breaks open a door beyond the
camp (if they ever get that far). A triumvirate of starvation, torture, enslavement, and
waiting . . . until the lapse. What happens here, across three rounds of tormented
descendants? What kind of burden does the original violator (the guilty ancestor)
carry in the face of an entire lineage now entrapped, incriminated, and starved of
horizon for his actions? Does he see the imprint of his own awful insignia on their
foreheads at every turn? And how does he envision the still-unborn face of the
redeemer child who will someday be let go, in some distant time most likely beyond
his own death? Does he contemplate this ethereal figure as a kind of vicarious deliv-
erance? How do the middle generations, without even the luxury of self-willed wrong-
doing to account for their condition, perceive their existential function in the world?
Are they mere transitional or instrumental beings, intermediaries who must survive
(not for themselves) but for the one who will come to end the cycle? And what of
the one who is the warehouse of half a century’s anticipation (the unchained), and
yet immediately orphaned upon arrival?

region East Asia

concept Time
subconcepts Condemnation, Waiting, Vicariousness, Desperate Replication
description North Korean prison camps invoke “three-generational punishment”: i.e., life sen-
tences handed down to three generations of the same family (only the offspring of
the fourth generation to come is granted freedom).
 39
AUTOMATON’S REVENGE

There is a unique kind of horror that resides within pure stillness — an affect of nega-
tive awe that belongs to the unmoving/the unbreathing alone. The nerves run colder
here, before the dreadful image of the automaton (the doll, the statue, the puppet,
the scarecrow). Frozenness, paralysis, immutability: one cannot tell whether they are
incarnations of absolute surrender (that they have abandoned themselves to some
half-existence) or whether they embody a far more grave and perilous concept of
inevitability (that within them lies the inescapable potential to someday begin mov-
ing). At night we fear these dormant forms, these figurines and effigies that dwell in
our fields, our windows, our cellars and bedroom chairs. We fear the fragility of their
hovering and strandedness; we fear the unreadability of their psychology (or lack
thereof); we fear that the fixed, spellbound gaze is only momentary, and serves a
greater final purpose (concealed for the time being); we fear that soon enough they
will break loose and sway toward us (with restlessness and thirst), for they already
live where we live. In truth, have we not always suspected some sinister volition being
held in store, an alternative version of animus to be released at the right hour? Are
these motionless ones not perhaps the rightful heirs of futurity . . . temporarily sus-
pended, in waiting, half-wakeful, with stares like premonitions . . . and ever positioned
for an eventual overthrow of the world?

region East Asia

concept Movement
subconcepts Confinement, Stillness, Silence, Horror, Incarnation
description Artist Liu Xia arranges dolls in telling positions of interrogation, torture, and
constraint.
 41
VIRTUAL SUICIDE PACTS

What dark concerns. Four men, three women perish of carbon monoxide inhalation
in cars parked along a remote mountainside highway; four others seal themselves
within a room to meet a similar end at the hands of a disconnected gas stove. Are
these supposed to be “uprisings” (a movement-above) or “transpirings” (a breathing-
across)? More than this, what desire rests behind such recurring displays of suffoca-
tion and aerial poisoning, organized by strangers bound together only by a virtual
pact (to leave the world one night)? No, they cannot be reduced to mere suicidal
gestures: the phantasmatic factor of the screen/the image, alongside the medi-
eval factor of the oath/the vow, make this an otherwise distinct orchestration of a
calling-unto-death. If not suicides, then, are these well-choreographed acts based
in still-broader categories of harm: “malicide” (the killing of evil), “chronocide” (the
killing of time), or “famacide” (the killing of one’s reputation)? Are they agitated
yet careful attempts to remove the structures of control and coercion within oneself,
thus becoming an internal act of “dominicide” (the killing of a master), “regicide”
(the killing of a king), “tyrannicide” (the killing of a tyrant), or “deicide” (the killing
of a god)? Does the impulse extend even further than this? Could we conceive of
these simultaneous self-slayings, these evacuations of the earth, with their odd
mixture of loneliness and intimate alignment, as larger symbolic efforts in search of a
final expiration-register: i.e., “omnicide” (the killing of the entire human race)? More
clearly, are these ceremonies really just subjective enterprises, or is their mark of
collectivity a sign that they are drawn forward by a yet-grander dream for the species
itself: that is to say, the dream of extinction?

region East Asia

concept Desire
subconcepts Collapse, Disgrace, Extinction
description Individuals in Japan meet online to arrange and plan acts of collective self-destruction.
 43
FUTURISTIC SOLITUDE

What kind of bizarre hermeticism emerges from within such hyper-metropolitan cen-
ters, a product of their intense alienation and compartmentalization of human activ-
ity? Here we come across a kind of postmodern solitude: both young and old reced-
ing into the airtight enclosures of private apartments throughout the cosmopolis, as
if reeling from the accelerated velocity and theatricality of the futuristic cityscape
in order to adopt some new version of ascetic tranquility. But what kind of solace or
esoteric wisdom can one find in a small room on the nineteenth floor? Can one even
attain a sufficient level of hiddenness when protected (from an age of excessive light,
noise, and movement) by only the fine border of a window? And, more importantly,
what are they after in this sheltering act? Is this increasing pattern of self-extraction
just an attempt to recover a more ancient principle of self-annihilation? Perhaps, but
entirely misguided and anachronistic; it is not the same brand of thoughtlessness
or painlessness of the past; they are no monks with their acute despair. And so one
experiences in those four walls only the very same numbness that circulates across
the despised outside (now just disguised as insularity). From the accounts given, this
retreat tactic offers no sanctuary or refuge: rather, it is a dead end that brings only
a futile recognition of the very obsolescence of such older quests for enlighten-
ment, distance, serenity, meditative concentration. These are no longer attainable
categories; the havens are gone, and with them the potential descent into void (this
neo-emptiness teaches nothing, allows nothing). For sure, there is only a mimicry of
aloneness here: to live alone (without meaning, ritual, or reward) and to die alone
(without consecration, prayer, or transcendence). No longer the problem of “no way
out,” but rather the problem of “no way in.”

region East Asia

concept Space
subconcepts Withdrawal, Isolation, Refusal, Neo-Misanthropy
description Two recent phenomena of aloneness: (1) hikikomori (literally, “pulling inward”)—
legions of Japanese youth who have become shut-ins and total recluses, withdrawing
entirely from society, within their high-rise apartments; (2) kodokushi (literally, “lonely
death”)—legions of Japanese elderly who die within their homes and go undiscov-
ered for months or even years.
 45
CIRCULAR PUNISHMENT

Necro-memory: to recollect only the traces of the obliterated, the disappearance,

the nothing. They say the birthmark is the sole record of a foregone atrocity (not
the emblem of a past life, but of a past death), and that it can lead the elders to the
proper site of damage, violation, and cold-bloodedness. The red lines across the
child’s forehead are thus a cartographic document, a mapping of the burial grounds
for an unthinkable incident. It does not matter whether this reincarnation event is
true or false (authenticity is irrelevant), only that it effectively takes place in the
perceptual universe of the guardians of this people: that the imperfect trait of the
birthmark acts as torch or night star, that its stain guides and navigates the aged
clerics across their high-mountain passes and into the nexus of an elapsed world
of horror, that this malevolent fragment alone can facilitate the excavation of an
unfound skeleton and killer’s axe, is enough to stitch the line between revelation and
vengeance. Return of the worst piece of the puzzle — the vanishing point — in the
name of unfinished business. And so the punishing forms an image, and a circle.

region Middle East (Druze Territory)

concept Movement
subconcepts Fragment, Birthmark, Imperfection, The Map
description Three-year-old boy takes village elders to the place of his past-life murder, recalling
the skull blow of his assailant’s axe.
 47
BLADE DELIRIUM

This blade has many histories: an implement of hard labor in the cane fields and rain
forests; a mechanism of insurgent action in anti-colonial rebellions; and a transcen-
dent instrument of dream-fighting in hidden gatherings across the island. Cre-
ation, destruction, and banality thus converge here (along the sharpened surface):
immense narratives of economic misery, political resistance, and fantastical aesthetics
all find their source in the wooden handle of the machete. What is this mad potential
housed within the object, the artifact, the thing — that it might serve such mutually
exclusive forces? How does the same device that enforces daily toil and emaciation,
or which drips with the blood of concrete revolutionary action, now come to associ-
ate itself with an outsider art form (of simulated fatal movement)? What does it take
for bare technology to become theater, vision, dance? Nothing less than a colossal
semiotic overthrow: that this relic can transition between meanings so seamlessly
(part burden, part weapon, part medium), is the sign of a phenomenological break-
through . . . for it draws a calligraphic arc from the material to the immaterial, from
disenchantment to enchantment, senseless pain to ecstatic pain, from deadening
everydayness to the secretive, the untold, and the realm of cruel play.

region The Caribbean

concept Movement
subconcepts Meaning Overthrow, The Thing, Cruel Play
description Rural peasants gather in the forests of Haiti to practice secret martial art (machete
fencing).
 49
STONE MASK — GAS MASK

The mask is a paradoxical device; within its structural logic rests the potential for
simulation and dissimulation, transformation and deception, concealment and
revelation, division and seduction, sadism and innocence, terror and pleasure. That
it requires the almost total surrender of identity to the façade (one is allowed to
keep only their eyes), that it seals the world of appearances in a state of eternal
frozenness and trickery, that it lies in brazen form, that it transparently announces
its own will to mislead and thus turns duplicity and fraud into a visual apparatus, and
yet still remains a force of attraction and fixation, makes it something for us not to
underestimate. For these reasons and beyond, the mask has facilitated many axes of
human action over centuries, including those of: criminal concealment (the bandit,
the ninja, the robber); anarchistic play (the carnival, the masquerade, the orgy);
and militant violence (the gladiator, the knight, the Bedouin, the samurai, the face-
painted warrior). There are even images of various gods wearing masks. What is more,
these first gods were invented in the same region where ancient stone masks are
now placed on display in galleries at the same moment that contemporary gas masks
signal an ongoing flux of protest, upheaval, and war right outside the museum. Thus
we are compelled to ask: Is there a conspiratorial link between the coverings of nine
thousand years ago and the visors of the present state of emergency? Are these new
masks descended somehow from their elder counterparts, and hence partake of the
same matrix of power, distortion, disguise, frivolity, secrecy, and reckless bloodshed
that has always been harbored by this one accessory? Accessory to what, then? To
celebration and murder, to the simultaneity of celebration of murder, to the hour of
shamelessness and the opening of an irresponsible universe, with its light and dark
absurdities, such that it is this very same mask which at once allows us to dance
(without judgment) and allows us to kill (without judgment).

region Middle East

concept Body
subconcepts Paradox, Simulation, Dissimulation, Trickery, Shamelessness
description Exhibition of the world’s oldest masks opens in Jerusalem museum; meanwhile, gas
masks line the streets of Syria, Turkey, and Palestine.
 51
THE SUMMONING WOMEN

The poetics of the taunt, the challenge, the boast, and the provocation. This
feminine textuality supersedes its masculine counterparts at the level of sacrifice,
vehemence, and brave loss, for it is nothing less than a direct inviting of the enemy
to come kill their most intimate relations. Vituperation anthems: conversion of all
to over-aggressiveness. A speech act of mockery and contempt that masochisti-
cally dares its opponent to come closer (angered by hostile language games) and
confiscate their adored fighters: in this way, it is also a poetics of summoning and
vitriolic calling forward, one which attains its height only in the incensement/temp-
tation of the foreigner to annihilate the woman’s lineage. There is no traumatic
consciousness here (emotion is traded for tribal conviction); instead, we find a
becoming-unprotected (vulnerability as armament); we find a mode of incendiary
war-romanticism that bares its chest and begs the most distasteful ones to penetrate
and set afire the ties of kinship. Their most prized possessions placed at risk upon
the scales of combat (as they emblazon). The father; the son; the brother. All are
fair game and ventured in a campaign at once cheered onward and mourned by the
women who stay back in the tents, awaiting the results of the field, and who ready
their hands to wash, bury, and immortalize the torn bodies of their men as a final gift
to the struggle. Do not fear the rebels; fear the reciters.

region Middle East

concept Violence
subconcepts Taunting, Provocation, Intimacy, Lyricism, Immortalization
description New book titled I Am the Beggar of the World collects the poetry of Afghani women
(many of whom are the wives, mothers, and daughters of Taliban fighters and anti-
Taliban fighters).
selection “Be black with gunpowder or be blood red / But don’t come home whole and dis-
grace my bed.” (107)
 53
DESTITUTION TOWER

The key here is in the paradox, and the paradox is in the name. The skyscraper was to
be called the Tower of David, thereby equating the riches of today with the mythic
figure of a man who became king and founder of a royal dynastic line. More than
this, an ancestral line to the one who some would call the Redeemer. And yet there is
duality beneath the crown, the imperfection of a two-sided prophet: for David’s ori-
gins lay nearer to the destitute who now occupy the evacuated hallways and rooms
of this structure. He was a poet, musician, and warrior (talents of the lower strata),
someone who relied on luck and who harbored an ill temper. He even conspired to
murder out of lust, thus tying him to the hedonism and criminality of the streets. He
also was said to watch from rooftops, much as the masses do now in these photo-
graphs. No, the newcomers who clamor to fill the void of this modern tower are the
correct inhabitants after all; their squalor is its own house of the sacred; their illegal
unstoppable presence, their decadent adornment of the windows with rags, are a
close match to the artistry and rage of their namesake. They too await the accidental
fortune of the slingshot; they too may someday kill their rivals, and write songs as
they do it.

region Latin America

concept Space
subconcepts Poverty, Inhabitance, Kingdom, Temper
description Abandoned skyscraper in Caracas, Venezuela becomes world’s tallest “vertical slum”
as the city’s poor take over the empty building.
 55
MICRO-IMPALEMENT

How will the neo-aristocratic quadrants of today’s urban space accommodate the
figure of the vagrant, the drifter, and the unproductive? Micro-impalement. And so
the threat of idleness is met by the modern restoration of a classical tactic: the spec-
tacular violence of old kings who once lined their courtyards with stabbed-through
bodies has now returned in minorized form (one-inch metal spears rising upward
from city benches) as a trend to ward off the rootless and the deprived. This not-
withstanding, the old kings reserved such punishment exclusively for the traitor, for
the worst conspirators and enemies against their dominion, thus leading one to ask:
in what specific way has the beggar betrayed the modern age; in what way do these
piercing instruments reveal an accusation of full treason against power? Why does
their loitering offend to the extent of preemptive torture? Perhaps the architects of
such discomfort, the ones who nervously usher in an era of needles and thorns, who
spitefully steal sleep from the sunken, who discipline sloth with puncture wounds,
detect a kind of mastery at work within the slouched or sprawled body of the home-
less person: that is, a will to fallenness. Their lack of need to ascend, their lack of
need to generate a living or join the crowd, to prove oneself in the continuum of
social value, is also the lack of need to exist. They may in fact occupy some vantage
of Being, in a manner foreign to our definitions, but they do not require its attain-
ment (non-striving). And no doubt one should fear the man or woman who does not
need to exist, for this seemingly impoverished subject is also the one who cannot
be intimidated, persuaded, forced, manipulated, seduced unto unity, bought or sold
(beyond the torment of the others). The waiting-for-no-one; the waiting-for-nothing.
They have chosen a certain soullessness, and are the richer for it (the spikes do not
reach far enough).

region Europe
concept Space
subconcepts Idleness, Stabbing, Treason, Soullessness
description Urban planners in London install spikes along luxury buildings, stores, and bridge
underpasses in order to deter the homeless.
 57
IMPOSSIBLE SUSPECT .

Historical amnesia can sometimes generate the equivalent of necromancy. Combining

illiteracy with suspicion, a political regime hears the name of a long-buried dissident,
mistakes the ghost’s identity, and thereby reanimates a past force as present threat.
In this spectral ontology, the legend recirculates with new life; hence the marks of
recent vandalism are said to come from the hands of a dead revolutionary. In name
(which matters most), the stained walls are alleged to be the product of his deface-
ment. Notoriety; temporal oversight; a wanted man. From here, a phantom machinery
of power is set in motion, tracking the imagined movements of a being not of this
century (or even the last): interrogations, extortions, espionage, covert operations
in search of an impossible suspect. Wiretaps become cosmic switchboards; blacklists
become a kind of séance . . . listening for what is not there, looking for what cannot
circle back. A lapse of knowledge thereby forms an inadvertent principle of resurrec-
tion: for all intents and purposes, he is the instigator once more . . . the one respon-
sible for rising discontent (subversive exhumation). The streets belong to him again,
given a second chance to alter everything, to restore a bad reputation, precisely
because they had forgotten him.

region Latin America

concept Myth
subconcepts Amnesia, Reanimation, Discontent, Forgetting
description After hearing political dissidents speak his name over wiretapped phone calls, Brazil-
ian police force begins investigating nineteenth-century anarchist Mikhail Bakunin as
potential suspect in recent protests.
 59
IMPERCEPTIBLE SOMEONE .

There still remains a particle of Being here (enough to leave the outline, contour, or
silhouette of this someone). Still, this does not amount to anything substantial: he
is not entitled to act or speak with meaning; he is not allowed to influence the event.
He has all the agency or importance of someone condemned to watch a tidal wave:
he can only stare forward. Nevertheless, he is no survivor or even witness (both are
pathological types). Rather, he is the figure of the engulfing . . . where the immensity
of space conspires to drown one into final irrelevance. No identity or alternative to
this drifting across; no greater station than to serve as random, infinitesimal shade
against the backdrop of a coastline, stadium, oasis, apartment complex, or vacant
city square. Diminished form. His seclusion is not tragic but totally impersonal; it is
the imprint of neutrality itself. And what becomes of Man when he is no longer the
central player of history, no longer the inheritor of the destiny of the world? A gift; a
curse. Some will die from humiliation; others will learn to appreciate the possibility of
being unburdened by supremacy (toward slightness). They will learn to savor imma-
teriality, anonymity, supplication, and the imperceptible nights of the stranger.

region Middle East

concept Space
subconcepts Engulfing, Seclusion, Anonymity, The Stranger
description Artist Tarek Al-Ghoussein releases photographic series of a faceless man standing
amidst barren landscapes.
 61
DEATH SIMULATION 1

Revolutionary traces; re-conjured hysteria; virtual martyrology. Are these photo-

graphic spectacles acts of morbid nostalgia, fascination, mourning, or a double
murder? In that same line, are reenactments of historical atrocity intended as a form
of repetition or distortion (or even erasure), aligned with memory or forgetting? To
re-envision the most celebrated corpses of the past, staged with meticulous detail,
such that each coffin opens a window into a time of militancy, struggle, and brutal
enchantments. These miniature replicas of a culture’s highest death-checkpoints
seemingly restore the beautiful insanity of a utopian/dystopian hour. And still,
beneath the surface appearance of tribute is always the charade; after all, can we not
perceive at work here a more insidious strategy of desecration, defacement, and ban-
ishment of such events to the hollowness of representational universes? No longer
genuine travesty, no longer faithful haunting; without even the imitative loyalty of the
museum or the mannequin. These vistas are more frivolous in their artificial bleeding.
No, it is not clear that the accursed visitations of the photographer are meant to
honor or redeem the fallen, to iconize the sacrificial leaders of elapsed generations; if
anything, we may be faced with an artist who deploys the aesthetic zone to carry out
a second killing. Now held hostage within the purgatory of simulation, where one can
only look (but never believe), once-profound scenes of resistance keep their façade
of significance all the while having lost their power to ever return. Meaning evacua-
tion; substance evacuation (no longer even symbolic, just shown). They are within
the display case of the hyper-real now, mirages whose original affects have long since
vanished, gutted by an artist who uses flagrancy (melodramatic anguish) to conceal
subtlety (imperceptible disappearance), and who thus works behind the curtain of
tradition and false courtesy to make sure of just one thing: that the past holds noth-
ing over the future.

region Middle East

concept Myth
subconcepts Revolution, Forgetting, Virtual Sacrifice
description Photographer Azadeh Akhlaghi recreates famous death scenes and murder scenes
leading up to the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
 63
DEATH SIMULATION 2

Ultimate process; undefeated process (even amid synthetic episodes). One cannot
pretend to die so many times without eventually incurring a mortal debt. Death is
a ruthless collector; it would not allow its name to be called over and again in false
offering. And so it is that this abusive summoning does not go unpunished (the hook
remains). Rather, someone must pay the fair price for these playful cinematic depic-
tions of the last breath. This actor knows better than to believe himself unscathed; he
realizes (however distant the intuition) that some buried dimension of his interiority
endures the penalty for each terminal scene before the camera. A field within him
is burned; a voice within him is strangled; a man within him (a foreigner, stranger,
or other, though still most intimate) is executed. No, the theater is not immune to
consequence; he was never quite safe there, among the plastic weapons, nor did he
make it out uncut or intact. The forces of radical negativity always ensure a certain
taxation: each facial grimace, each feigned writhing or manufactured blood-spray,
each filmic final groan or pang or exhale, comes with its proper cost. The result: that
our stuntman is overtaken by a kind of invisible leprosy — entire regions of Being,
housed beneath the organs and the limbs, have been sold into decay and oblitera-
tion without notice (fallen away quietly). For his craft demanded that he perish in
some silent, infinitesimal place every time he lost his life on screen. Something always
weeps, grieves, cries out, goes under (though we never speak of it). The condemned
sliver; the harmed particle; the unforgiven actor.

region East Asia

concept Myth
subconcepts The Collector, Summoning, Abuse, Penalty, Infinitesimal Perishing
description Samurai stuntman Seizo Fukumoto has acted out approximately 50,000 deaths on
screen.
 65
ALL-WOMEN FIGHTING SQUAD 1

The structures of identity tend to disappear whenever individuals are flung to the
radical outside of their world (beyond the social, the political, the cultural). Moreover,
this evisceration of self (where the old “I” burns away) is only magnified when one
adds the variable of fatal struggle to the realm of experience. Thus an all-women unit
leaves behind its insular community in order to challenge a rising enemy far beyond
their midst. Their lives have been threatened; a mercenary formation to the east has
already condemned their people to certain death, and marches nearer with each day;
thus stationed at the crossroads of true peril, they find that they must either kill or
succumb now. This part is simple enough — i.e., the nature of their immediate task —
but the more complex question that remains is: Will they still be themselves once
having traversed the Uneven on the way to battle? Or is their departure from home
the first step to a dramatic trespass and reinvention? These women fighters can-
not help but be transformed at such a distance from their affiliations and city walls;
rather, this new terrain of exteriority — that of the desert, hills, or plains — is an
experience of enormity and borderlessness for which no prior subjectivity can remain.
The old self will not survive the extreme temperatures of this remoteness, and so they
will begin to formulate new definitions, profiles, appearances, and even names as they
sit together in the dark and bleed together by the light. They will compose new bal-
lads and initiate a poetic language that only they understand; this is the basic right
of their crusader’s intimacy. Hence even those who return will never fully return, and
the better for it (an existential revolution to match their practical revolution). They
will come back irreversibly transfigured and evolved, wounded and altered, powerful
in unforeseen ways, more expansive in their vision, more dangerous and capable for
what they have endured in the places no one goes. They will come back as as a band
estranged to the very ones who they were sent out to protect. War is pure metamor-
phosis, nothing less.

region Middle East

concept Violence
subconcepts War, Exteriority, Trespass, Immensity, The Crusader
description All-women Kurdish squad — the Second Peshmerga Batallion, whose name
means “those who face death”—sets out to fight radical group ISIS.
 67
ALL-WOMEN FIGHTING SQUAD 2

The operational logic of paganism is such that when a certain local god fails to
deliver its graces, one can always switch to an alternative deity (of the river, the tree,
the grove). This exchange is harder in monotheistic orders, requiring more subtlety,
yet it can be done just the same. Here in the ancient Persian city of Karaj, we find
this very kind of transition happening: a ruling sacred system has failed these women
fighters; for decades, its religious leaders have situated them at the useless outskirts
of its inner circles, denying them access to the consecrations of apotheosis and wor-
ship, and so now they turn their eyes elsewhere in search of other spirit forms. They
take to a restricted location and begin training in a martial art not of their immediate
world, with no reason other than to attempt an experimental substitution of idols.
Most importantly, however, one must note the two strands of devious irony at work
in this conversion: (1) that they have chosen for their new tradition something that
exists far outside the folds of their own cultural history and religious paradigms (i.e.,
there is virtually no meeting ground between the concepts of Ninjutsu and an Islamic
theocracy); (2) that they have chosen for their new tradition something which
demands that they veil themselves even more extensively than their last theology.
In essence, they have selected the braver counterintuitive path of intensifying the
law brought down upon their bodies; to do so, they will drape and cloak themselves
at even more severe levels than ordained before, entering into a state of hyper-
concealment that spites their former overlords. The headscarf is taken further along
the axis of its own intention, becoming a ninja’s mask (autonomous in their darkness).
This is how one surpasses oppression (through the storm). Consequently, are we not
to perceive a complex subversive trace among this camp of anomalous women, some-
thing amounting to more than just reverence, discipline, or a new trend or diversion?
Should we not take seriously the fact that they have fastened themselves to a martial
art which privileges (above all else) stealth, vendetta, anti-social codes, conspiracy,
and assassination?

region Middle East

concept Violence
subconcepts Vendetta, Worship, Autonomy, Darkness, Conspiracy
description A group of Iranian women train in Ninjutsu at the foothills of the Alborz mountains.
 69
ELEMENTAL WRATH 1, FIRE

What does it mean to aestheticize ecological disaster? These varied images (of flame,
ignition, and fever) cannot help but capture the visual glory of environmental ruin,
the enigmatic attraction of the smoke and of the hills burning down. Inferno; confla-
gration; engulfing; arson; immolation; world as furnace; world as incinerator; world of
ash. There is no speculative end to the psychoanalysis of fire, nor to the phenomeno-
logical power of the wildfire (its transmission, disquiet, and searing effects). Thought
must therefore adjust itself to the rise of an epochal blaze; it must inhabit the red
mosaic of the pyres.

region North America

concept Space
subconcepts Inferno, Conflagration, Epochal Blaze
description Photographic images of the King Fire now spreading throughout the California
canyons.
 71
ELEMENTAL WRATH 2, ICE

Once more, what is the crossing point between artistic vision and an age of ecosys-
temic wreckage? As the vanishing accelerates, the dissipation and vaporization of
forms, we come upon another series of epic images (this time of the fall of extreme
coldness, polar hostility, and the once-absolute reign of the glaciers). What does
it mean, then, to speak of beauty at the end of things? Is there no wonder at the
sight of miraculous catastrophe? Where once there was millennial/imperial frozen-
ness, there is now an alternative destiny of melting (both exquisite and horrifying).
Brokenness; downward eventuality; the crystalline; frost; chill; intersections of the
fragile and the serrated; dance of unnatural temperatures; the thawing motionless;
the colossus that withers, crumbles, evaporates. Thought must therefore adjust to
this slow languishing of frigidity, the subzero degree of arctic loss; it must train itself
to enter an era of dying winters.

region North America/Europe

concept Space
subconcepts Melting, Wonder, Brokenness, Frigidity
description Environmental photographer James Balog leads the Extreme Ice Survey, a collection of
images documenting the effects of climate change on ice formations.
 73
ELEMENTAL WRATH 3, EARTH

They appear as hallucinatory vistas, these sites of devastated terrain: thus the earth
betrays its commitment to solidity, and fractures the once-unified ground (the dust
cannot be trusted). From an inhuman floating vantage, we are made to stare upon
the surface now opening beyond recognition, and this aerial perception allows us
to detect an irreversible thrust toward debris and cracked axes: deforested realms;
excavated pits and mines; erosion patterns; seismic tremors; plane-shifting; dirt-in-
upheaval; barrenness; aridity; harsh soil; the uninhabitable. There is almost some-
thing whimsical in each cataclysmic scene, these ragged lines that form no path or
sequence (only vagueness). Planetary havoc; badlands. Thought must therefore
adjust itself to the geo-existential scraping, and walk along the compromised scaf-
folding of the underneath (that there is nothing secure below us).

region North America

concept Space
subconcepts Surface, Debris, Erosion, The Underneath
description Photographer David Maisel releases collection titled Black Maps: American Landscape
and the Apocalyptic Sublime.
PART II: DEJAN LUKIĆ
 77
RENDERING

Cities are flowing surfaces. We all know that. One inhabits not the city, nor a neigh-
borhood, but the energetic wave itself (so-called urban movement). Still, urbanity is
a tiresome term. There is no battle between nature and the city. There is ever only
one battle: movement vs. non-movement. For example, illegal immigrants, gangs,
the precariously nomadic vs. stroller-pushing corporate inhabitants. These maps
show that even this division is artificial though it is constantly implemented. People,
goods, forces seep in and out of the city, along lines both visible and invisible. Cities
as continually bordering phenomena. Horizontal roots, flowing fibers, extend as a
capillary consequence. Orifices emerge only to melt into bright lava. Hence, each
image capturing reality can only appear as windswept. A rendition, to render: from
the Latin “to give back” but also “to melt down.” The only right thing to do to reality.

region Global
concept Space (flow)
subconcepts Surface, Movement, City, Reality
description Swiss digital illustrator Istvan (“Chaotic Atmospheres”) produces “flowing city maps”
of global urban centers.
 79
DROMEDARY

The engravings are done by scratching the rock, then applying color in order to make
silhouettes of moving images, flashing riders on animals we call camels or dromedar-
ies. The image is frozen (that is its nature) but we of course see the movement of
this frozen moment. The rock is the most static object; depending on its scale, mon-
umental and permanent. No wonder it is often used for shelter (where the movement
rests) or as a final resting place (a tomb). And yet the drawings on these static walls
show the kinetic drama unfolding outside: running, transporting, traveling, warring,
playing. In fact, the word “dromedary” comes from the Greek root “dromas,” mean-
ing runner. Camel thus equals swiftness. This speed is harnessed and implemented
through a number of elements: (a) the animal, (b) the human rider, and (c) the con-
straining devices such as saddles, reigns, whips, all of which have changed very little
since their invention two millennia ago when they were composed together to form
that imposing desert-machine-ship we still see today. But besides the functionality of
this animal-vessel, with an ascetic metabolism that makes it perfectly suitable for the
atmospheric extremes of the desert, we also see adornments, or abstract drawings
on the blankets falling across the humps and necks of the animal, protective fabrics
veiling the riders, all of which make this arranged animality perfectly immanent to
the sphere it occupies (to its beauty and its ruthlessness): the desert. And strangely
enough, if we look closely, the rock drawings go beyond the photographs, turning
into pixelated images similar to those we see in video games. The hand that drew
the lines has not only represented his or her experience; it has also tapped into its
elemental particles, those that belong neither to past nor to the future, but to the
virtual, to the creation itself.

region North Africa

concept Movement (swiftness)
subconcepts Drawing, Rock, Silhouette, Animal, Desert
description Saharan rock art reveals the importance of the camel in the nomadic cultures of Libya,
Algeria, Chad, Niger, and others, as well as the timelessness of the drawing gesture.
 81
GEOMETRY OF SHADOWS

There is an enormous history behind these patterns, alluding to a sacred space of

creativity in science and religion. The title references the intersections of cultures
that passed through the palace and the region: Arab, Berber, Spanish, Jewish. Strictly
speaking, intersections are points where two or more diverging lines cross each
other’s paths. Hence, a point of intensification. But more importantly, as we swirl
around the space illuminated by the crocheted box, we start to hallucinate a bit. We
see a box which is empty but which emanates light. Through this emanation, the
radiating light, a new surface is created (projected on the walls), and the entire space
is filled with intricate patterns. The inside of the box is unfolded to the outside. The
innate curiosity we have about a closed box and its contents is thus spectacularly
resolved. Here it is just a gift of the new surface. The secret (meandering intersec-
tions) is manifested and projected to the outside. A feeling of confidential immensity
imposes itself. Expansive infinity envelops us in a closed room through the intricacy
of the patterns: a constellation of a universe. The hierarchy between shadow and
light collapses, as both are equally important and cannot exist without one another
(“Night too is a Sun,” says one philosopher). Finally, in this immensity the walls of
the room become canvases, as we the spectators too become canvases, our bodies
points of intersection. There is no audience anymore, only meeting points.

region South Asia/North America

concept Space (intricate surfaces)
subconcepts Intensification, Immensity, Shadows
description Anila Quayyum Agha builds a box of casting shadows reproducing the geometry of
Alhambra, a famous fortress in Granada built beginning in the ninth century CE.
 83
NAKED ISLAND

The immense water that surrounds it: indifferent. The perfect blueness of the water
that competes with the lightness of the sky: indifferent. The stone quarries aban-
doned (as if the prisoners left for a lunch break and never came back): indifferent.
The lighthouses and the bunkers: indifferent. The rocks, one by one, out of which
the winding roads proceed, and buildings rise: indifferent. The torture pit: indifferent.
All the materiality of sensation that being-here produces, attests to that enormous
feeling of indifference created by the former Stately power. Communists, fascists,
Habsburgs . . . all different temperaments that laid down their teachings in the man-
ner of absurd pedagogy. And yet tiny wild flowers dot the rugged landscape. Where
do they come from? Precisely from this indifference which cannot but also lay down
seeds that eventually bloom into their own color, their own elated forms, their own
stubborn vulnerability. In due course the rocks will disappear, and the weeds will
spread in all directions, and no one (not even an archeologist, or a historian, or a
pilgrim) will realize that the wild plants won. The stones and the sea are only the
background against which they open their protean power onto the world.

region Eastern Europe/Adriatic

concept Space
subconcepts Water, Stone, Flower
description Former Communist prison-island slowly fades into an archeological site of the future.
 85
WAX AND FLESH

Without doubt, a confrontation occurs when one lays eyes on these installations: a
form of a horse carefully crafted yet frozen in development before it is fully actual-
ized; a human body that extends into heavy branches pulling its back toward the
ground; a body with missing parts; or else isolated parts (antlers of a deer) piled
together. This is the work of a new butcher, one that has certainly learned from the
old masters, but then in silent solitude went to invent her own counter-procedure:
the flesh (which looks alive) is rendered with wax, a material that does not rot; the
bodies are not open through the wounds that announce its death, but rather, each
is closed in on itself. Sometimes we do not even see the transition or a surgical scar
(there are no seams); all is smooth, curled, curved, coiled. There is no specific wound
because the entire body is a wound, closed but not healing, suspended in what it
exactly is: a constant mutation of forces that inhabit the flesh and thus form the
body. The act of twisting as a gesture of cruelty already. She is a rare and original
butcher that does not open up but instead twists, smooths, and transmogrifies so
that it is hard to see fleshy deformations. Yet the more one looks the more one sees
the beauty: the tactile seduction of the wax, the horse hair and skin, the pillows and
the hooks, the marvelous wooden tables and cabinets which surround the bod-
ies simultaneously exposing and protecting them. In the end, nothing but beauty
extracted (slowly and brutally) from its own infinity.

region Europe
concept Body (fleshiness)
subconcepts Mutation, Transformation, Vulnerability
description Artist Berlinde De Bruyckere creates sculptures of bodies in vulnerable modulations.
 87
SOUND OF THE SPHERES

We always knew that darkness is palpable, first and foremost from cats and from fairy
tales. Perhaps we also always knew that it cannot be fully mute. But what does its
sound say, besides that darkness is darkness? Let us proclaim: darkness speaks. Is
this not what the very first impulse (of a child) announces before she can articulate
anything (fear of darkness)? And further, are not symphonies of great composers the
accurate and infinite articulation of this impulse (that darkness is alive)? Does not
the sound itself occur in the first place to dispel darkness (lullabies)? Or better yet,
to tell us that there is no such thing as darkness, only very low degrees of light . . .
True. Infinite space “sings,” that is to say, the spheres sound back at us, wailing,
squeaking, vibrating. The cosmos is a dance of high-energy electrons; accelera-
tions in the electromagnetic field which suddenly sound like birds. (This also means
that birds can sound like something completely different than themselves.) Indeed,
insects and birds: two of the most important groups of animals for the understand-
ing of music. At the heart of their sounds lies darkness that moves. And solarity is
therefore heard (with one’s eyes).

region Outer Space

concept Movement (soundings)
subconcepts Darkness, Music, Physics
description The solar system is populated by sounds that result from various movements of high-
energy electrons.
 89
VISION MACHINES

Are these strange contraptions put on one’s head someone else’s eyes? One of them,
turning the human head into an engine, touches the core of perception’s physiology:
“Light-Pump or Phantom Brain”. These vision machines prove one thing: that human
eyes, the organs of perception, are not competent enough. We never fully trust them,
even though they are the primary tools of so-called objectivity. The machine-maker
builds his devices clunky and awkward on purpose. They are not just extensions,
they are burdens, proper crutches of the eye (sometimes on wheels). They do not
“enhance” the performance of sight; on the contrary, they “refute” it. And after refuta-
tion, a dreamlike state comes into view, unpredictably. The world as we once saw it
changes. Is there a more significant revolution? “What is left is right, what is behind
is brought forward, what is in the vicinity recedes into distance; the drops of water
fall upward, the pit becomes a hill, the blades of grass grow downward, the birds dive
into the grass . . . ” All in order to transform reality, to make the delusion apparent,
and to create another one. Out of failure, a revelation. Only then come veritable
visions: appearances not seen by the naked eye.

region Western Europe

concept Movement (vision)
subconcepts Optics, Devices
description Swiss artist Alfons Schilling creates machines that dislocate human perception and
thereby create unforeseen visions.
 91
BOSCHIAN EMANATION

There are paintings that go beyond their frames. In fact, the narrative or form they
provide within their borders is only secondary to the supplement (a metaphysical
vitamin) that seeps out of it. Of course there is a technique of the master inscribed
in the treatment of light and darkness, figures and shapes. But it is the vision which
cuts through the image that counts the most. And the vision is always enigmatic;
that is to say, it requires deciphering which no specialist knowledge of historical
context or technique can reveal. There are some artists that provide a diagnosis of
an entire “age” in which they live. Then there are few that go even further by care-
fully placing nothing short of a new form of life in their seemingly ordinary practice
of painting. It is only then that their object (painting) becomes a collection of forces
that goes far beyond their respective contexts. One will easily know which works gen-
erate this kind of power: in front of them one does not simply reflect, one levitates,
now released from physical laws (gravity) just as the painting itself is released from
the confines of art (it is now something else). Enchantment means experiencing the
miraculous. All sharing of a vision in this respect is self-deception. And yet deception
of this kind is intensification of the world; i.e., creation of something against which
one can measure oneself. And is there anything more powerful than measuring one-
self against the landscape of Hell, from which all sorts of beatitudes emerge?

region West Europe

concept Myth (vision)
subconcepts Miracle, Painting, Enchantment
description Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Last Judgment (1504–08) stands inconspicuously
in the last room on the top floor gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, still
emanating its power of attraction not just toward the mind of the curious viewer but
also toward his or her body.
 93
DEMAND OF THE DRUM

The drums have an irrefutable connection to thunder. They both reverberate, or

relentlessly vibrate, and in this way extend into space, folding it into its sound. The
incessant reverberation is their presence through which they conquer space. One
could say that palo drums are tamed thunders, which is the only way that the human
body can take them in without exploding. Even with these subdued thunders, the
body is already taken to its limits. For it is hard not to move accordingly in the
presence of the roaring drums. They are capturing chosen degrees of thundering
so as to make them closer to the human heartbeat. The result is the production
of the cardiac beat. Repetition turns it into an ecstatic body, transformative for
the sole reason that it necessitates stepping outside of oneself. A rare demand in
today’s world. A primordial demand since the world started by stepping outside of
itself: a thunder and a lightning that opened up the infinite unfolding of the galax-
ies. Thunders we hear during storms are good reminders of that initial crack through
which the flow of life ensued. Most creatures still cower when they hear it, unaware
why, unaware of their own sensibility to the cosmic vibration. But it would be wrong
to think of palo drums as merely a domesticated force of nature, thunder pacified.
Rather, it is a force of nature molecularized into controlled tonality that then perme-
ates the listeners and turns them into dancers (a higher form of listeners). Let us not
think of this drumming as an obscure practice. There is a geo-affective thread that
connects drums to thunders, all the way to that initial rupture, the coruscating sound
of cosmic outpouring. In the beginning there was not light; there was a clang.

region The Caribbean

concept Movement (drumming)
subconcepts Reverberating, Outpouring
description In the Dominican Republic palo drums connect the human body to cosmic rhythmic-
ity through repetition of basic sounds, fusing the sacred with the profane.
 95
POWER OF A CURSE

Who is to say that the snake did not materialize from the interiority of the minister?
That it did not curl out as the very modality of his ethnocentric delirium, affirming
the world that favors transmutations in which there are no solid forms and where
strange animals can transpire out of certain emotions? A world not separated into
distinct objects that have nothing in common, but where things are seething, churn-
ing, and swelling into inexplicable occurrences; where every negative utterance is
therefore an informal curse, a metabolic principle that eats away the unprotected
interiority of the person who receives it, no less than, albeit more imperceptibly, it
eats the curser himself. This is an ancient problem of health, where sentiments of the
society fold into sentiments of the individual, just as the outside folds into the inside,
thoroughly following the logic of the fairy tale, the power of which is only seemingly
enclosed inside children’s books. In reality, the more it is dismissed the stronger it
becomes, because it lives not outside our world, but rather, it is our world (the world
as a spell that needs to be broken). Hence a fable at the heart of contemporary
politics of the crudest kind.

region West Europe

concept Myth (curse)
subconcepts Metabolic Principle, Racism, Politics
description Italian right-wing politician and former minister claims he has been cursed (as revenge
for his vulgar racist statement) by a sorcerer in Congo.
 97
SORCERER’S CLOTH

Some days, when the circumstance calls for it, the human being stops being just a
human being. The marvelous takes over. Invoking the marvelous simply means being
able to astonish (but astonishing the other is not a simple matter). In the hills of
Altiplano, colorful figures appear: the color of their garments differentiates them
from the surrounding world of nature. For example: the bright red against the light
grey of the fog. We see the opulence of masks and dresses in juxtaposition against
the bleakness of rooms, the everyday poverty. But it is only here that the word luxury
attains proper value, of excess in austerity, a distinctive splendor, and thus bright-
ness, or light. Do not forget: the witch doctors that wear them and transform into
zoomorphic beings are still “doctors.” They heal by opening up the borders, physical
and moral, taking one by the hand into the underground tunnels (the mines carved
inside the hills). The world becomes paradoxically less differentiated (even though
the garments and masks are over-pronounced) and thus horror and excitement ensue.
The forbidden is formidable; the deceivers, seductive. These basic formulas are so
powerful that even after the objects and the garments are fully removed their hum-
ming presence remains.

region South America

concept Body (Costume)
subconcepts Poverty, Healing, Excitation
description The popular and the religious collide in the diverse fashion of local healers.
 99
VAMPIRIC CHEMISTRY

Dracula has never been more popular, as numerous TV shows and movies attest.
Perhaps that means that he is truly dead, now living posthumously not as the aristo-
cratic undead but as a pastime of bored twenty-first century audiences. Journalists
are quick to announce that he is a “fictitious character” (they are not fooled, the
fact-checkers). In Transylvania his castle is being sold. (Yes, the castle of Vlad Tepes,
the legendary prince upon whose exploits the tale has been based.) It currently
belongs to the Habsburg family, former rulers of the Habsburg Empire. But let us get
our facts straight. Dracula is just a spectacular manifestation of a much older, subter-
ranean force that runs through southeast European tales and the everyday in the
1700s: that of a vampir. It is no coincidence that vampires rose (from the dead) to
prominence when the Habsburg empire was at its peak, like a counter-current running
from the edge of the empire, spreading disbelief and paranoia. What is more, this
vampiric chemistry trickles through centuries, even millennia, both as a political and
as an aesthetic force. It always appears as a disturbance at the heart of a “civilization”
(Mesopotamian, ancient Greek, Roman, Chinese, etc.). Contamination, proliferation.
Is there a more revolutionary tactic for a movement? And yet, the greatest terror
does not come from the spilling and sucking of blood but from an internal compul-
sion, a terrible flaw: arithmomania (obsessive need to count actions or objects in
one’s surroundings). One can only hope that new owners of the Bran Castle will also
get bit (it is the least they deserve), then close the castle to swarming tourists, and
count the bags of spilled peas into eternity. A passionate mania is always better than
a passionless spectacle.

region East Europe

concept Space (vampirism)
subconcepts Dracula, Contamination, Arithmomania
description Dracula’s castle goes for sale and inspires speculation on the nature of vampiric force.
 101
VITAL SPACE, KITCHEN .

If the fairy tale is a re-enchantment of the world, in what kind of dwelling should
one live for this to occur? Is enchantment not equally an expression of our inner
dispositions (delight), as well as our environment? In fact, our inner disposition can
only change, start to “sing” internally, when it perceives the outside in a new way
(re-vitalized). Should this not indeed be one of the basic human rights: to live in a
revitalized space? Or should it not at least be what we strive for? Interior designers,
spectacular clowns of fashion: what damage have they done to the world by ignoring
this disposition? Perhaps Goethe thought in precisely these fairy tale terms when he
said that architecture is frozen music. He must have been enchanted by the frozen
German winters. Yet one has to look into the interior. Stepping inside, there is pure
pulsation. Re-enchantment is designed through a paradox: the decomposing façade
(of lost innocence) at the center of which emerges a shining new heart (or hearth).
What better image for this than the kitchen? Walls darkened by the smoke are sud-
denly brightened by the smoothness of the perfected cooking surface in the burned
belly of the house. Dwelling here, working here, would it not intensify us a little
beyond the ordinary, turn us — preternatural?

region Switzerland
concept Space
subconcepts Interior Design, The Preternatural, Enchantment
description Stone oven in the smokehouse patiently awaits its inhabitants.
 103
THE SEA 1, STOWAWAYS

Here they come. The unwanted. Latitudes and longitudes, their lifelines. Here they
come: throngs of people hiding in the belly of the ship, sometimes in the lifeboats.
But even there, no hope. They are discovered, discarded. They play the oldest game:
hide and seek. Or in metaphysical terms: concealing and revealing. Movement to and
fro, just like that of the tides, the planets, the lovers. An ancient game and equally
eternal. Yet they wager their lives this time. It is said that the Sea is hostile for it
swallows thousands each year. Yet the Sea embraces everyone into itself without
judgment. It forces immanence. Perhaps this devouring that is beyond good and
evil is what scares us most. Do waves and droplets of water have feelings? We don’t
know so we choose hostile lands with detention camps on Europe’s shores instead.
Perhaps we should learn how to swim better than any generation has ever swam, and
swim away from the shores, away from the boats, until we are concealed not behind
the ship’s flags, but behind the rumbling waves that turn into a mist, warm and com-
forting, floating forever. For in today’s age, dreaming only leads to drowning.

region West Africa (Atlantic Ocean)

concept Time
subconcepts Illegality, Drowning, Dreaming
description Immigrants from Africa try to reach Europe at the price of their own life.
 105
THE SEA 2, SURGES

The Sea holds the greatest mystery, which is fortuitously also a great theoretical
axiom. As with all great mysteries and theories, the core of it is a paradox: transpar-
ency of the impenetrable. Writers and philosophers attracted by the Sea knew this
secret and it made them smile. To become like the Sea, translucent and impervi-
ous. Could these characteristics also be embodied as virtues? The painter comes
even closer to this possibility because he mediates light itself, gradations of surging
brightness and dimness. So much so that one cannot differentiate anymore between
“himself” and the canvas (a thousand iterations). By extracting the fragment from
the Sea, he became the Sea. The only virtuous thing left is for our theory to do the
same: surge.

region Crimea
concept Myth
subconcepts Transparency, Light
description The nineteenth-century painter Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky painted over 3,000
paintings depicting the sea in its splendid transparency.
 107
DRACULA RAVEN ORCHID

How can a flower contain within itself a tale from a part of the globe other than its
natural habitat? Dracula (meaning “little dragon”) is a name that carries the slight
sensation of fright. Yet not of an order that would repel us; on the contrary, it is
just intense enough to attract our curiosity, which can even turn into obsession.
The flower itself looks like a strange attractor, glabrous triangle, ominous, with a
pink lip (labellum) that looks more like a tongue. Without doubt, it is waiting for a
wasp with even stronger fascination than ours, which will rub itself amorously, after
being deceived visually, and in this way initiate the process of pollination. The flower
carries modalities of insects and of vampires, just as Dracula too carried nonhuman
modalities.

region Central America

concept Desire
subconcepts Tales, Plants
description The 118 species of the orchid genus Dracula grow quietly in Ecuador, Mexico, Colom-
bia, Peru, and Central America in general.
 109
DESERT LEAVES

More than anyone else, librarians must feel like the guardians of secrets. Walking
constantly amongst closed books, which they can open at will and find something
that very few other people know. It is both a thrill and a burden. Then every now and
then an exceptional librarian emerges, one that is not only a keeper but also a smug-
gler. Hiding sixteenth-century manuscripts from the militants; and if he’s found, his
hands will be cut off. What possesses him to risk the well-being of his body for old
book pages? Is it their age (older than any human)? Is it the (outdated) knowledge?
Or some affective power lying dormant in the text and at the same time not part of
that text at all. Yes, it is this power, equally ancient and contemporary, that fuels the
librarian-smuggler. Even at the risk of death he can’t deny this emanation from the
manuscripts. The books themselves now carry the air of the southern Sahara desert,
they are deserts themselves, at times unbearably hot, at times freezing, with unex-
pected oases. Through the desert arrived first the rebels, then the militants, crossing
it like the pirates would cross the great seas. Indeed, the desert is the sea. The books
simply tell what the desert-sea has seen throughout the ages. No, I change my mind:
books are not the same as the desert; they are its fractal eyes.

region Africa
concept Movement (smuggling)
subconcepts Manuscripts, Sahara, Affect
description Librarian Abdel Haidara organizes the smuggling of ancient manuscripts from Tim-
buktu to safety before al-Qaeda–related militants destroy them.
 111
THE SPIDER 1, INSTRUMENTALITY

These creatures not only live their entire lives on the “edge,” they actually create
it: arachnids. They hunt, copulate, and die on the line, i.e., on a mass of lines which
turns into a web. The line is a string and as such it contains musical modalities. It is
plucked by the movements of the air, or of another insect which gets caught in the
web (with all of its complex multi-lens eyes that cover a radius of 360 degrees, the
fly does not see the web), or else of the spider moving (with its eight legs, although
blind). Much of its life is spent in waiting, being still on the web, on this giant instru-
ment. The visual beauty of its appearance is proportional to the horror of its func-
tionality (the most sophisticated trap, ruthless). The web is an instrument of capture,
a dwelling place, a world of its own. Yet its micro-vibrations sound throughout the
universe. . . . It is said that Spinoza (in the seventeenth century) amused himself by
observing spiders fight. What is not known: Does his intricate philosophy of imma-
nence actually come from these moments of arachnean observation?

region North America/Europe

concept Space (spider web)
subconcepts Musicality, Strings, Cosmos
description Artist Tomás Saraceno creates installations with different species of social and soli-
tary spiders who sculpt their microcosm.
 113
THE SPIDER 2, AUTISTICITY

The spider is inseparable from its web. In fact, the spider’s silk is an extension of
its body, secreted right from it, a biochemical formation of extreme toughness and
ductility. Yet its enigmatic contradiction is its lightness. This is reflected in the name
itself: arachnean means “of/or related to the finesse of a spider web.” In addition, the
word spider comes from the Old English spithra, which means “spin”. To spin is thus
to be spider-like (it is inevitable). Someone said accurately, “The path is never written,
it is spun.” Indeed, we turn, whirl, get dizzy. From angular momentums of subatomic
particles to planetary phases, everything dances according to its own symphony: a
self-created chaotic harmony consisting of billions of participants, all different from
one another. Difference in repetition, as some philosophers say. All this is visible
in lines drawn from the movements of autistic children that Deligny’s extraordinary
hand produced. They reveal the beauty of the autistic molecule which hallucinates
networks through new types of movement, and perhaps as a result creates new dia-
grams of relations between things (relations are determined by types of movement).

region Europe
concept Movement (network)
subconcepts Autism, Diagram, Spinning
description Social psychiatrist Fernand Deligny develops diagrams which resemble spider webs
based on the movements of autistic children.
 115
THE SPIDER 3, AFFECTIVITY

Is the solitary artist, writer, religious ascetic, child, not closer to a solitary species of
spiders than to other humans? She certainly is — at least on the level of affects, the
filaments of her temperament that exceed her personal feelings and make her act in
a particular way. In the same vein, a little boy says on a talk show, “I love all animals,
but for some reason my favorites are cold-blooded ones, the insects.” He knows
everything about insects. Louise Bourgeois is an expert on affects, the molecular
network of influence. Her large spider installation is a literal manifestation of encom-
passing feelings of protection (one can hide under it) and durability (it’s almost
indestructible). It is an expression of a spider-character (an invitation to embody it).
Great storytellers and artists are spinsters (they twist the threads of textiles, clay,
paper, feelings, thoughts, words) and nothing else. Endlessly indifferent, endlessly
vulnerable, endlessly passionate all at the same time.

region North America/Europe

concept Desire (insect affect)
subconcepts Twisting, Feeling, The Spinster
description Artist Louise Bourgeois creates mother-spider installations in different locations of
the world.
 117
LAND 1, THE UNEARTHING

The earth is a boiling pot with a solid core and liquid outer core rising to 10,800
degrees Fahrenheit. There is a constant interplay of solid turning into liquid, and vice
versa. Volcanic explosions give us a glimpse into these combustive layers. Earth as an
incendiary device. But its internal combustion is not only geological, it is also politi-
cal. Human groupings hide micro-volcanos, i.e., landmines, just beneath the surface
in order to maim and kill their enemies (another human grouping of a different ethnic
or ideological persuasion). There are millions of landmines scattered upon the earth.
They wait patiently, unconcerned by the politics above and the circumstances of war
or peace. They have only one purpose — explosion; only one feeling — tactile. There
have been many attempts to find the best ways to discover them. The most recent
one: giant pouched rats (they are too light to set off the explosion). There are now
armies of rats reared for this task, the unearthing of the surface. Hence the animal
yet again proves closer, more intimate, to the earth than the human. But this is what
old deminers always knew; this is why they normally chose animal names for their
units and brigades (e.g., the Mongoose). Despite this dramatic interplay of life and
death on its surface, the earth just keeps on boiling and boiling.

region Africa
concept Space (demining)
subconcepts Explosions, Incendiary Device, Animality
description Scientists are training special species of rats for global demining purposes.
 119
LAND 2, THE MIGRATING

Migrant: a dangerous occupation. But should it not properly be called a destiny (an
inevitable chain of events under certain circumstances)? Moving from one place to
another, from one habitat to another. Is this not in fact more natural? Should this
not be the desired disposition of all people? By contrast, belonging to a delineated
and bordered territory is a theological disposition that designates a particular soil as
sacred and only accessible to the chosen ones (those born on it). What an arbi-
trary criterion. And yet one codified in law and politics. Nevertheless, the highways
continue their call for movement, like capillaries leading to open cities. As a counter-
act, new fences are built on the land and primordial blockages (walls) regain their
status. Bodies jump across or climb over the lines cutting through the image. And yet
with awe we look at the birds passing by on their migration route. And few know that
even the cells in our skin, which form pigment, migrate. Blood does not equal soil; it
equals migration.

region Europe
concept Movement (migration)
subconcepts Death, Law, Awe
description Thousands of migrants are crossing the borders at the edge of the European Union
daily.
 121
PENTAGONÍA

What can we learn from a writer, or writing itself, about delirium as a condition of
living? The Pentagonía cycle (described as the secret history of Cuba): five books,
five agonies, five delirious inscriptions of the struggle to stay alive. The agonies of
life under dictatorship, under pathological atmospherics, populated with clear but
delirious language. Delirium as a medico-political condition, one of peculiar outpour-
ing whose intensity is found on each page. But the page is only a mark of the general
outpouring envisioned as resistance to everyday life. Ideological delirium of the state
vs. the writer’s delirium. Delirium as a furrow in consciousness, a rut, through which
the writer forms trails leading to an escape. An aberrant physician that turns delirium
into health, constructing a new sense of the world. Just like the image of the mul-
titude of flags in movement that turn into kites, or decompose into elementary
particles, the writer’s language is one of the falling façade where the revelation of
interior corruption creates crumbling folds on its outer surface. The delirium reveals
the double life of the inhabitants: publicly they praise the success of the revolution,
privately they curse all its manifestations. The writer, an agonized physician, diagno-
ses social delirium and produces language that escapes the text. Only by becoming a
secret can he write about the secret (agony).

region Cuba
concept Body (delirium)
subconcepts Writing, Agony, Health
description Writer Reinaldo Arenas writes his own hallucinatory history of Cuba in five novels.
 123
THE CROW GIFTS

Crows served as totemic animals for many native peoples. Totem’s purpose: to
bond into oneness. As such, the characteristics of the animal transfer into that of
the human, as a metaphysical force of attraction turns into a chemical one. Now an
unusual event has occurred: the crows are bringing shiny objects to a little girl who
feeds them. From the most ancient times, the gift was an expression of adornment,
luxury, something that adds power to the body upon which it is bestowed (a little
bit of excess around the neck and arms). That is why they are often precious stones,
shells, metals, textiles, things that go onto the body and thus intensify it. However,
the greatest gift these crows delivered was not one that beautifies: a severed crab’s
leg. Giving a piece of another animal is a reminder of the viscerality of the relation-
ship. This time it is not the crow that is a totem for the humans; rather, it is the little
girl herself, for the birds. For crows clearly know their obligation and their bond,
which is in fact not just intelligent but religious (from Latin, religare, “to bind”).

region North America

concept Myth (gift-giving)
subconcepts Luxury, Viscerality, Totem
description An eight-year-old girl receives objects as gifts from crows that she feeds in her
backyard.
 125
LORD OF APPEARANCES

We usually see his face frozen, immobile. How can such an expression of disinter-
est provoke feelings of fear and comfort at the same time? Pharaoh meant “a great
house”: i.e., the ruler was an all-encompassing space (a dwelling place) and a ter-
ritory. Yet in this case he was not only terrestrial; he was obsessed with stars and
astrology. According to an ascetic from the ninth century, one transcription on an
ancient Egyptian temple reads: “Man is ruled by the stars and does not know it. He
who commands the stars does what he wishes.” (It is said that Dante too believed
that love can move the Sun and other planets). The greatest planet in our intimate
universe is the Sun, of course. Perhaps this is why the prenomen “Ra” was used to
designate the ruler’s emergence as the offspring of the Sun. Ra, the god of Sun and
Radiance, is depicted with an image of a Sun disk above his head, encircled with a
serpent; the pharaoh is depicted with a crown on his head. However, no actual crown
has ever been found. Everything else has been unearthed except for the very thing
that made the ruler divine. We only see it in drawings, which also serve as writing
(hieroglyphs), and where animal, human, divine, and the planetary share the same,
barely differentiated plane of immanence.

region North Africa

concept Space (the pharaonic)
subconcepts Astrology, Hieroglyphics
description Archeologists in Egypt accidently discover a tomb of a pharaoh that ruled around
1650 BCE.
 127
THE SCULPTURAL 1,
MONUMENT TO THE REVOLUTION

It is only posthumously that great ideological monuments attain their quiet glory.
No wonder contemporary architects are jealous. For a monumental materialization
to occur, monumental ideas are necessary. And communist monuments in the former
Yugoslavia lacked none. They now stand like archeological artefacts from a long lost
civilization. As such, they look equally futuristic, for they were made to glorify an
idea alien to most in today’s world: revolution. From being affective manifestations
of a traumatic event, they now stand free of any symbolic burden, with a new, yet-
undetermined sculptural energy; for nothing simply dissipates, only changes form,
just as communism transmuted into nationalism, just as utopias turn into gradations
of cynical weariness. So, what kind of beauty is left in the absence of memory?

region Eastern Europe

concept Myth (monumentality)
subconcepts Sculptures, Ideology, Abandonment
description In the 1960s and 1970s, the great political “curator” Josip Broz Tito commissioned
monuments throughout the former Yugoslavia to commemorate important World War
II sites which attracted masses of people, only now to be largely abandoned.
 129
THE SCULPTURAL 2, DESERT HAND

Has the giant drowned, his hand the very last part left to be submerged? Or is he
rising, a part of his hand the very beginning of his ascent from the belly of the earth,
from the desert sea? Being in the desert, the scale of the hand changes depend-
ing on our proximity to it (it can be tiny or enormous). The open hand, a salute, is
undoubtedly non-threatening. It makes us pause. This sense of calm is due to its
disposition of receptivity (a recognition of our presence), which all creatures of the
globe intuitively understand (even snakes are pacified by the lulling hand of the hyp-
notist). The great vulnerability of the hand lies in the fact that it allows you to touch
it, to even scratch upon it. This is its power too, the mystery of allowing violence
against itself. The glorious anatomy of the outside: open hand in the open desert.
I decided: it is an image of ascent, the hand is taking off; and it is not any figure
attached to it (it is the “hand of the desert”, not “hand in the desert”), but rather
the entire barren surface which will pull and wrinkle and rise with it. The desert is its
mind and its body: a singular haptic omnipresent exteriority. The face upon which we
tread.

region South America

concept Body (vulnerability)
subconcepts Omnipresence, Calm, Surface
description A sculpture by Mario Irarrazabal, 11 meters tall, stands in the Atacama Desert in Chile.
 131
THE ARSENIC BREATH

There is a desert where the soil and drinking water contain high volumes of arse-
nic. Manifested as orpiment, a bright yellow mineral (used also as artist’s pigment),
arsenic was always a royal element despite its mortal properties: from the Arabic
al-zarnik, “the orpiment,” based on the Persian zar, “gold.” Through veritable unnatu-
ral selection the poison becomes enriching. Atacama is not only the name of the
desert and the driest point on the planet; it is also the name of a people now extinct
(through what chemico-political powers?), dissipated throughout the desert line
along the Pacific coast. Arsenic is their revenge: as they disappeared, they turned
alchemically into bastardized gold infused in the ground and underground waters.
Not human anymore, but now elemental, they conspired against the humans: arsenic
is their breath, all that is left in the wake of their disappearance. In light of this, is it
a coincidence that a giant hand appeared precisely in the sands of Atacama, rising
upward, ushering the arrival of a new creature who inhales (ingests) not oxygen but
arsenic, neither human, nor animal, but mineral (an inorganic, metallic, toxic, efferves-
cent substance of pure health)? In a reverse act of creation, it is not divine breath
that creates the earth (soil and waters) but a terrestrial mineralogy that creates new
arsenic-laced air (condensed golden clouds).

region South America

concept Time (toxicology)
subconcepts Breath, Alchemy, Conspiracy, Dryness
description In the Atacama Desert situated in the Andes, spanning parts of Chile, Argentina,
Peru, and Bolivia, geneticists believe they have found a gene which allowed the local
population to survive high concentrations of arsenic in water and soil.
 133
FAIRY TALE 1, SOOTHING FEAR

Fairy tales tell us that everyone is hungry. Not everyone, but everything. Human,
animal, plant mutate into each other, and the essential characteristic of existence is
to devour. This is what frames all the stories, a blueprint onto which the seemingly
innocent narrative is laid out. To devour: out of love or hate or desperation or sheer
physical need. It is biological as much as it is metaphysical. It is concrete: “I have to
eat you,” the mother says to her children. “Bring me her liver so I can eat it,” says
another character. In devouring we have both the act of cruelty (dismembering) and
the act of highest intimation (engulfing). Devouring leads to transmutation and
intensification of the body. In this respect, fairy tales come closest to the essential
characteristic of the earth: that in order to proliferate one has to consume the other.
As we all know, beautiful yet strange forms grow out of the mud, or out of compost.
This is why in the hands of master painters and writers across centuries “The Garden
of Earthly Delights” always depicts devourings of all kinds. The brutalist (from Latin
“brutus”, meaning “fierce”) principle lies at the core of Life. The degree of fierceness
that inhabits children and animals in fairy tales no doubt emerges out of night and
madness. This is also why fairy tales eventually condense into lullabies which are
meant to lull us into sleep and calm us down, as they take us back into the night
(reality pacified). But even in sleep a certain fierceness abides. How else would one
dance with the devil?

region Northern Europe

concept Violence (devouring)
subconcepts Brutalism, Lullaby, Sleep
description Drawings by Andrea Dezsö populate new translation of the Brothers Grimm’s fairy
tales, which reveals radically different content from the old stories.
 135
FAIRY TALE 2, THE CONVALESCENT

There is a writer who wrote short stories on scraps of paper with a special type of
microscript in pencil that took decades to decipher. He thought it a proper way to
write stories which basically continued where the older fairy tales had ended: for
what happens to the characters now? This little sliver of a secret requires discovery
through humility. For this writer does not advertise his visions; on the contrary, he
buries them within a miniscule script. He writes for himself (to make his gift of writing
stronger) and for the imaginary characters themselves (to heal them). Indeed, they
are all healed (as philosopher Walter Benjamin claimed), and so is he in the process.
Convalescence means a reinvigorated desire to act and nothing else. Suffering means
the inability to act, a kinetic failure. Stories: carefully crafted lucid hallucinations. And
if fairy tales are trying to trick the readers and listeners with their innocence that
masks ruthless cruelty, the author here is trying to trick fairy tales themselves, the
entire history of them, by hiding his characters who have overcome their pain behind
hallucinatory movements of the pencil, into scattered and fragmented stories, zigzag-
ging in all directions, only in the end to disclose that they are all part of the same
story: the work of the convalescent. However, for all this to become clear there is a
catch: we need to become a little schizophrenic.

region Europe
concept Body (healing)
subconcepts Deciphering, Writing, Lucidity
description Swiss writer Robert Walser writes stories in microscript that potentially reveal the
afterlife of fairy tale characters.
 137
THE DROWNING

A liquid gathering. One doesn’t see the bodies anymore, only heads. Even still,
acephalic creatures would be more interesting. The contemporary spectacle is alive
and it is dead all at the same time. Cement crumbles. The virtues of the leaders
are fake and simulated like the reality they govern. Capitalism is an architectural
pathology and symptomatology, a bad offering. What binds us then? What binding
agent makes us move toward the powerful? As the washed-out clamor of the leaders
drowns, the smooth surface of the water remains, reflecting the image of the future,
one of new inclinations and enticements.

region Europe
concept Myth
subconcepts Capitalism, Cement, Future
description Artist Isaac Cordal creates a city in ruins as an image of contemporary global society.
 139
THE AMBULATORY

He who binds understands the habits of his creations. In fact, he provokes them.
These beasts have one desire alone: to move. Their energy is of the most supreme
kind: kinesis. They rely on the wind, for only through engagement with its erratic
swirls do they exist. And unlike all other creatures of the earth, they do not need to
eat in order to move. They have no organs. For this reason they seem otherworldly,
for they resist the axiom of the earth: that in order to live, one must eat. Further-
more, there is kindness present in the movements of these creatures (made of
yellow plastic tubes) that everyone recognizes, which makes it accurate to say that
everything which moves lives. Is it possible then, that at the core of the violence that
initiates all life lies tenderness?

region Europe/Elsewhere
concept Movement
subconcepts Wind, Kinesis, Tenderness
description Artist Theo Jansen creates kinetic sculptures whose locomotion is tied to evolution-
ary concerns.
 141
IMAGE ATTRIBUTIONS

page source
cover ISS/NASA. ISS046-E-693 [Kavir Desert]. 2015. Public domain.
i Jeff Schmaltz and Joshua Stevens, LANCE/EOSDIS Rapid Response. A Bliz-
zard by Moonlight. 2016. Public domain.
iv Neelufar Mohaghegh. North African Columns. 2012. Courtesy the artist.
vi RLS. Watchtower. 2014. Courtesy the artist.
2 Henrique Oliveira. Transarquitetonica. 2014. Museu de Arte Contemporânea,
São Paulo, Brazil. Courtesy of the Artist. http://www.henriqueoliveira.com/
4 Alex Malev. Balaklava. 2012. CC BY-SA 2.0. https://www.flickr.com/photos/
alexxx-malev/8563615369//?rb=1
6 Iranischer Meister (Unknown). Sixteenth Century. Public Domain.
8 Unknown. [Silhouette]. 1909-1932. Public Domain.
10 Jean-Louis Théodore Géricault. La Balsa de la Medusa. 1818–19. Public
Domain.
12 DALeast. London Dare IV. 2013. http://www.daleast.com/
14 Unknown. Masks, showing different stages in the work done by Mrs. Coleman
Ladd of the American Red Cross. 1918. Public Domain.
16 Neelufar Mohaghegh. Coney Island Structure. 2012. Courtesy the artist.
18 Shirin Neshat. Turbulent. 1998. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and
Brussels.
20 Alice S. Kandell. Sikkim Jeweler. 1969. Public Domain.
22 Numen/For Use. Opbouw / Construction NET. 2011. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/z33be/5888355699
24 Diana Al-Hadid. Suspended After Image. 2012. Courtesy Marianne Boesky
Gallery, New York.
26 Msemmett. Neptune at Wiltely Park. 2013. CC BY-SA 3.0 US. https://com-
mons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Neptune_at_Wiltely_park.jpg
28 Daan Roosegaarde. Van Gogh Roosegaarde Bicycle Path. 2014. Courtesy Stu-
dio Roosegaarde, Netherlands. https://www.studioroosegaarde.net
30 Do Ho Suh. Home Within Home. 2014. National Museum of Modern and
Contemporary Art, Korea.
32 Adel Abdessemed. Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? 2012. Courtesy of the
Artist.
 143

34 Parviz Kimiai. Baghé sangui. 1976. Public Domain. 70 NOAA’s National Ocean Service. An iceberg captured on camera dur-
36 Roman Harak. North Korea, Chongchon Hotel Courtyard. 2010. ing a 30-day mission in 2012 to map areas of the Arctic aboard the NOAA
CC BY-SA 2.0. https://www.flickr.com/photos/roman-harak/5799810630 Ship Fairweather. 2012. CC BY 2.0. https://www.flickr.com/photos/
38 Liu Xia. The Silent Strength of Liu Xia. 2012. Italian Academy for Advanced usoceangov/8290528771/
Studies in America. Courtesy of Guy Sorman. 72 David Maisel. The Lake Project 17. 2002. Archival pigment print, 48"x48".
40 Fuji Jyukai. Aokigahara Forest. 2008. CC BY 2.0. https://de.wikipedia.org/ Courtesy of the Artist.
wiki/Aokigahara#/media/File:Aokigahara_forest_01.jpg 76 Istvan. Flowing City Map (Map of Tokyo). 2014. Courtesy of the Artist.
42 Moyan Brenn. Tokyo. 2014. CC BY 2.0. https://www.flickr.com/photos/ 78 Clemens Schmillen. Untitled [Cave of Beasts, Wadi Sura, Egypt, fifth mil-
aigle_dore/16043023330/ lennium BCE]. 2014. CC BY-SA 3.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
44 Wolfgang Sauber. Archaeological Museum in Herakleion. Golden minoan File:Bestias11.JPG
labrys. 2009. CC BY-SA 3.0. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ 80 Robert Bradley. Intersections. 2014. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. https://www.flickr.
File:AMI_-_Goldene_Doppelaxt.jpg com/photos/poolside/15407864986/
46 Gibran Torres. Citadelle Laferrière. 2010. Public Domain. 82 Roberta F. Goli otok, Croatia. 2006. CC BY-SA 3.0. https://commons.
48 RLS. The Sectarian. 2014 wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Goli_otok.jpg
50 Dirk Haas. Woman with Burqa. 2010. CC BY 2.0. https://www.flickr.com/ 84 Berlinde De Bruyckere. Schmerzensmann IV. 2006. Courtesy of the Artist
photos/afgmatters/4324680171 and Hauser & Wirth, New York. http://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/6/
52 Damián D. Fossi Salas. El Helicoide. 2008. CC BY-SA 2.0. https://commons. berlinde-de-bruyckere/images-clips/144/
wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Helicoide_roca_tarpeya_caracas.jpg 86 NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA). William Blair
54 CGP Grey. Westminster Cathedral. 2006. CC BY 2.0. http://www.cgpgrey.com (Johns Hopkins University). Hubble view of barred spiral galaxy Messier 83.
56 Nadar [Gaspard-Félix Tournachon]. Mikhail Bakunin, Russian Anarchist. Circa 2014. Public Domain.
1860. Public Domain. 88 PIRO4D. Untitled. Public domain.
58 Neelufar Mohaghegh. Crowd Before Mosque. 2012. Courtesy the artist. 90 Hieronymus Bosch. The Garden of Earthly Delights. 1480–1505. Public
60 Unknown. Summer 1357/1979. A Wounded Rebel amid Protests against the Domain.
Pahlavi Regime. 1979. Public domain. 92 Jordi Torrents. Water under 11 Hz vibration. 2015. CC BY-SA 4.0. https://
62 Felice Beato. Armoured samurai with sword and dagger. Circa 1860. Public commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Water_under_11_Hz_vibration.jpg
Domain. 94 Visconti coat of arms. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Français 5617, f. 3v.
64 Aszumila. Weapons used by Polish insurgents during the Warsaw Uprising, Seventeenth century. Public domain.
Muzeum Powstania Warszawskiego. 2007. Public domain. https://commons. 96 Raphaël Verona and Thomas Rousset. Diablada. From Waska Tatay. 2011.
wikimedia.org/wiki/File:B%C5%82yskawica_and_other_insurgent_ Courtesy of the authors. http://www.thomasrousset.com | http://www.
weapons.jpg raphaelverona.com/
66 Neelufar Mohaghegh. Cistern. 2012. Courtesy the artist. 98 Florin73m. Castelul Bran, Brasov, Romania. 2010. CC BY-SA 3.0.
68 US Forest Service, Gila National Forest. Whitewater-Baldy Complex, Gila https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Castelul_Bran.jpg
National Forest, New Mexico, May, 2012. 2012. CC BY-SA 2.0. 100 Michael Treu. Untitled. 2016. Public domain.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/gilaforest/7175101925/
 145

102 Chief Information Systems Technician Kenneth Anderson, US Navy. 124 Steve F-E-Cameron. Temple of a million years of Rameses III, Luxor, Egypt. Entry.
060121-N-5358A-008 [Crew members assemble on deck aboard a dhow sus- 2005–06. CC BY-SA 3.0. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
pected of piracy after being intercepted by the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Winston File:S_F-E-CAMERON_EGYPT_2005_RAMASEUM_01360.JPG
S. Churchill (DDG 81) . . . ]. 2006. Public Domain. 126 Tomislav Medak. Podgaric. 2012. CC BY 2.0. https://www.flickr.com/photos/
104 Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky. Among the waves. 1898. Public Domain. tomislavmedak/7684614560
106 Eric Hunt. Species from Ecuador Grown by Hawk Hill Nursery, Pacifica, Califor- 128 Marcos Escalier. Panorama around Mano del Desierto. Desert’s Hand.
nia. 2009. CC BY-SA 3.0. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dracula_ 2006. Sculpture by Mario Irarrázabal, 1992. CC BY-SA 2.0.
vampira_3.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mano_del_Desierto#/media/
108 Ahmed al-Rasmuki. Explanations of Problems in Arithmetic with Examples File:ManodelDesierto(Panoramica).jpg
[Commentary on medieval mathematician al-Samlali, Timbuktu]. Eighteenth 130 NASA. Atacama, NASA World Wind 1.4. 2008. Public Domain.
century. Public Domain. 132 Andrea Dezsö. The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. 2014.
110 Tomás Saraceno. Exhibition Vanitas. Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin. 2014. Courtesy the artist.
Omega Centauri 1 Nephila Kenianensis 4 Cyrtophora citricola. © Photogra- 134 Robert Walser. Microscript 107 recto. Sept.-Nov. 1928. © Keystone /
phy by Studio Tomás Saraceno, © 2014. Courtesy of the Artist and Esther Robert Walser-Stiftung Bern. Courtesy of the Robert Walser-Zentrum.
Schipper Gallery, Berlin. 136 Isaac Cordal. Follow the Leaders. 2013. Courtesy the artist.
112 Fernand Deligny. Monoblet. 1976. Image: Archives Jacques Allaire and Marie- http://cementeclipses.com/
Dominique Guibal. Reproduction: Anaïs Masson. Republished courtesy 138 Robbert van den Beld. Beach Beast. 2014. Sculpture by Theo Janseen, 2014.
of Univocal Publishing CC BY 2.0. https://www.flickr.com/photos/robbeld/15987079578/
114 Mark B. Schlemmer. Fujiko Nakaya, Fog Sculpture #08025 (F.O.G.),
1998 engulfing Louise Bourgeois, Maman, 2001 at Museo Guggen- The above rights information is believed to be true and accurate. Please contact the
heim Bilbao, Spain. 2015. CC BY 2.0. https://www.flickr.com/photos/ publishers if you believe your image has been miscredited or used in error.
mbschlemmer/16430531495/
116 Austrialian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Cleared Ground Demin-
ing and Todd Essicks. 2010. CC BY 2.0. https://www.flickr.com/photos/
dfataustralianaid/13252932693/
118 Noborder Network. Migrants Trying To Get Into the Eurotunnel Terminal
in Sangatte, France. 2008. CC BY 2.0. https://www.flickr.com/photos/
noborder/2429412496
120 Celeny Gonzalez. Banderas con Barreras. 2015. http://miscelenyous.
squarespace.com/fotos/
122 Mary Bailey. Crows. 2012. CC BY 2.0. https://www.flickr.com/photos/
milesbeyondthemoon/6647191393
 147
INFORMATIONAL LINKS

The following comprise online links to the stories, events, figures, objects, and art-
works invoked in the book’s many entries.

Part I

wooden elsewhere
http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2014/05/henrique-oliveira-wood-tunnels/

endless aftermath
http://io9.com/journey-into-the-dystopian-world-of-abandoned-soviet-su-
1602292367

witch-hunting brigade
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/08/saudi-arabias-war-
on-witchcraft/278701/

boy weapons-maker
http://in.reuters.com/news/pictures/slideshow?articleId=INRTX13ER0#a=1

cannibal rebel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JUt7-iesfc

primordial dream 1, animal

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2392721/DALeast-Breathtaking-work-
secretive-Chinese-graffiti-artist-world.html

primordial dream 2, monster

http://www.boredpanda.com/creepy-monsters-sticky-note-drawings-john-
kenn-mortensen/
´
primordial dream 3, night
http://www.boredpanda.com/childrens-nightmares-
surreal-photography-dream-collector-arthur-tress/
 149

strangulation aesthetics multigenerational doom

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2DNMG2s_O0 http://www.cbsnews.com/news/horrors-revealed-at-north-korean-prison-camp/

blacksmith poet automaton’s revenge

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/19/world/asia/an-afghan-poet-shapes-metal- http://untappedcities.com/2012/02/13/underground-chinese-artist-liu-xia-
and-hard-words.html on-exhibit-at-the-italian-academy/

broken staircase 1 virtual suicide pacts

http://www.dezeen.com/2014/10/25/numen-for-use-net-staircase-linz-gallery- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/4071805.stm
austria/
futuristic solitude
broken staircase 2 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23182523
http://www.dianaalhadid.com/work/suspended-after-image http://invisiblephotographer.asia/2014/03/24/kodokushi-soichirokoriyama/

underwater dance circular punishment

http://www.messynessychic.com/2014/12/11/the-rotting-underwater-ballroom- http://wallstreetinsanity.com/3-year-old-claims-to-remember-who-killed-him-in-past-
of-a-victorian-bernie-madoff/ life-leads-police-to-body/

heresy skies blade delirium

http://www.boredpanda.com/van-gogh-starry-night-glowing-bike- http://m.apnews.com/ap/db_268779/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=F60lmy4w
path-daan-roosegaarde/
stone mask — gas mask
silk rooms http://asianjournal.com/arts-and-culture/ancient-masks-go-on-display-in-jerusalem/
http://beautifuldecay.com/2014/09/26/lin-tianmiao-spins- http://www.dawn.com/news/710200/pro-palestinian-activists-dismiss-israeli-
ethereal-sculptures-silk/ warnings
http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2013/11/do-ho-suh-home-within-home/ http://www.i24news.tv/en/news/international/middle-east/140416-syria-blames-
http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2011/04/the-silk-vortices-of-akiko-ikeuchi/ israel-turkey-us-for-chemical-attacks
http://boingboing.net/2013/06/03/gas-mask-dervish-occupygezi.html
wolf installations
http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/nathan/adel-abdessemed-2-24-12.asp the summoning women
http://www.slate.com/blogs/behold/2014/03/05/eliza_griswold_and_seamus_
stone garden of the voiceless murphy_document_afghanistan_s_landays_in_i_am.html
http://historicaliran.blogspot.com/2009/12/darvish-khans-stone-garden.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAISFy9sZL4
 151

destitution tower elemental wrath 3, earth

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2014/apr/03/tower-david- https://cuartmuseum.colorado.edu/exhibition/david-maisel-black-maps-american-
caracas-venezuela-in-pictures landscape-and-the-apocalyptic-sublime/
http://www.steidl.de/flycms/en/Books/Black-Maps/0615374955.html
micro-impalement
http://mashable.com/2014/06/12/anti-homeless-spikes-london/

impossible suspect Part II

http://revolution-news.com/19th-century-anarchist-bakunin-investigated-by-brazils-
police-as-suspect/ rendering
http://chaoticatmospheres.com/125670/5337435/gallery/flowing-city-map
imperceptible someone
http://www.taymourgrahne.com/artists/tarek-al-ghoussein#18 dromedary
http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/research_projects/all_current_projects/
death simulation 1 african_rock_art_image_project/themes/camels.aspx
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2014/apr/09/azadeh-akhlaghi-
photographer-who-stages-murders-iran geometry of shadows
https://www.artprize.org/anila-quayyum-agha/2014/intersections
death simulation 2
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/aug/12/japan-most-killed-samurai- naked island
stuntman-seizo-fukumoto-prize http://www.goli-otok.com/britain/golio36a_e.htm

all-women fighting squad 1 wax and flesh

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2680820/The-women-trained-fight-ISIS- http://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/6/berlinde-de-bruyckere/images-clips/
Elite-Kurdish-unit-prepare-imminent-threat-Islamic-militants-Iraq.html
sound of the spheres
all-women fighting squad 2 http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Sounds_from_space
http://www.majalla.com/eng/2013/11/article55246675
vision machines
elemental wrath 1, fire http://www.alfonsschilling.net/werke/sehmaschinen/
http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2014/09/californias-king-fire/100815/
boschian emanation
elemental wrath 2, ice http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org/the-last-judgement.html
http://www.chasingice.com/about-the-film/james-balog-photo-gallery/
 153

demand of the drum the spider 1, instrumentality

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=musg3_xx7y8 http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/881828/tomas-saraceno-co-opts-
the-communal-habits-of-beatnik-spiders
power of a curse
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/italys-deputy-senate-speaker- the spider 2, autisticity
who-compared-countrys-first-black-minister-to-an-orangutan-claims-he-is- https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/mapping-the-wander-lines-the-quiet-revelations-
cursed-by-african-spirits-after-spell-of-bad-luck-9695231.html of-fernand-deligny

sorcerer’s cloth the spider 3, affectivity

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/23/waska-tatay_n_5611515. http://www.phaidon.com/agenda/art/events/2011/may/27/louise-bourgeois-and-
html?utm_hp_ref=tw the-mother-of-spider-sculpture/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/mbschlemmer/16430531495/
vampiric chemistry
http://www.businessinsider.com/draculas-castle-costs-80-million-2014-5?op=1 land 1, the unearthing
http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21603239-clearing-
vital space, kitchen landmines-despite-sophisticated-new-technology-many-explosive-
http://www.durivital.ch/chasa-not-vital-tschlin devices-are

the sea 1, stowaways land 2, the migrating

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/19/world/stowaway-crime-scofflaw-ship.html http://edition.cnn.com/2015/08/28/europe/migrant-crisis/index.html

the sea 2, surges pentagonía

http://www.boredpanda.com/mesmerizing-translucent-waves-19th-century-painting- http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/03/04/fata-morgana/
ivan-konstantinovich-aivazovsky/
the crow gifts
dracula raven orchid http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31604026
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracula_(orchid)
lord of appearances
desert leaves http://www.upenn.edu/spotlights/penn-researchers-help-unearth-forgotten-
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/23/book-rustlers-timbuktu-mali- egyptian-pharaoh
ancient-manuscripts-saved
the sculptural 1, monument to the revolution
http://www.cracktwo.com/2011/04/25-abandoned-soviet-monuments-that-
look.html

the sculptural 2, desert hand

http://www.artificialowl.net/2009/03/giant-hand-of-atacama-desert.html

the arsenic breath

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/13/science/an-unlikely-driver-of-evolution-
arsenic.html

fairy tale 1, soothing fear

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/12/grimm-brothers-fairytales-
horror-new-translation

fairy tale 2, the convalescent

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/scribe-of-the-small
http://www.5cense.com/14/358.htm

the drowning
http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2013/08/follow-the-leaders-isaac-cordal/

the ambulatory
http://www.strandbeest.com/
A former communist prison island in the Adriatic sea, now
abandoned and overgrown with wild plants; the stone garden of
a voiceless Iranian peasant who dances ecstatically among his
geological formations; a Belgian sculptor who combines wax and
flesh to depict human and animal forms in states of incompletion;
a cultural movement in Brazil that transforms the discarded debris
of urban centers into massive labyrinths and underground caverns;
a blacksmith poet in Afghanistan who alternates between tasks of
hammering metal and writing lyrical verses amidst the smoke-clouds
of his forge; a Cuban writer whose delirious fixation with the sea
compels him to invent a language of pure untimeliness.

ELEMENTAL DISAPPEARANCES casts a wanderer’s eye upon an ever-

expanding configuration of sites of disturbance. The things sought
after are apparitional: they appear and disappear at will; they perfect
the art of materialization and vanishing. Such is the nature of living
dangerously, and with it the short duration of enchantment. This
collection tracks provocative ideas, artifacts, and phenomena rising
and fading across different territories of the contemporary world.
Through a constellation of powerful thought-images, the authors
uncover spaces of an ephemeral and fugitive nature in order to
generate a fractal vision of our time and beyond.
Mohaghegh, Jason Bahbak; Lukić, Dejan

Elemental Disappearances

punctum books, 2016

ISBN: 9780998237558
https://punctumbooks.com/titles/elemental-
disappearances/
https://www.doi.org/10.21983/P3.0157.1.00