Repair/Re-pair

Abstract

The present flyer-series (#01-#06, 1HEX) is a parcours, in which an attempt is made to tile a specific realm: a tour of KHiO—reminiscing from home, and on campus receptively—in a particular phase of the pandemic. The three-score work of covering a field (damage/repair), programming a pattern (re-pair) and the two remediating each other. Parcours before discours.

The parcours runs through Bracha Ettinger’s contribution to the SALTWATER Istanbul biennale in 2015, a dance performance (Displaced Shadows, KHiO), 3 operatic essays on Sophocles’ Antigone (Triologue, KHiO) and reflections on displacement from 3 different vantage points—a post-collapse scenario (KHiO)— in the context of the C19 pandemic.

What is attempted—through the passage points of a parcours—is to depict KHiO at the brink between two social phases: before and after vaccination. Artworks are here scoped as ‘labours of transition’. The transition from the liminal space of the lockdown (some performances video-transmitted, others are live) to what may turn out to present itself as yet another liminal phase.

The set aims to learn by doing: what is the impact of record and replay, under such circumstances, and what does it represent as a candidate form of action? The agency of lateral drift, and moving sideways like a crab, where ascending/descending existentially may be implied, but never immediately revealed. Implied through implication.

Indeed, what qualities of repair can be envisaged by re-pairing vantage points that at first appear to be opposed, if not outrightly incompatible? Can we engage differently with opinion, fame, scale, impact, wounds, healing? With the unsettling, uncanny, and anachronistic; in the afterlife (Nachleben) of Covid19?

Bracha Ettinger’s ‘saltwater’ passageway from wit(h)nessing to witnessing: an attempt to join the works we execute and the situation we have designed (and have caused in more mediate ways), in a fashion that may be illuminated and raised through the sideways gait of the crab. Parcours…