The Impossible
This series of work, "Impossible Books", "Impossible Love" and "Line & Cut", is an opening into the experimentation with the materiality of the text and to approaching writing as making, using existing writings as sites of critical inhabitation, practicing the concept of interruption, and investigating the scale of dissidence. Using paper to produce these conceptual models deliberates the politics of fragile material and exposes the importance of working through small-scale and apparently trivial things that could become a dangerous and effective tool of dissent.
The text in this experiment, borrowed from Franz Kafka’s The Castle, hasbeen a thinking model for forwarding some driving concepts such as the ‘art of the impossible’ and the force of love. Close reading, re-writing, mate-rializing and playing with the text helped develop the idea of Pause as an interrupting tactic.
Punctuations organise and clarify the meaning of the written language; they create intonation and pauses that come naturally in spoken language. They are the translation of time in oral language to symbols, forms and material in the written text. Punctuation’s contribution is, therefore, related to time; it indicates stops and starts. When it comes to the politics of pause as an interruption, it is the semicolon that best approximates the idea of pause, the gap in speech. It is neither a comma nor a full stop; it represents a stop and a turn or shift, as made evident in its form as a symbol – a full stop and a comma.
The following experiments with Impossible Books work with the semicolon as a pause in literary texts. In these experiments, pauses in time, read through the semicolon, are translated into a material space. Theyare therefore about both identi cation of pauses in atext and the expansion of these pauses into a space of imagination that, ultimately, affects the spine of the book, and opens the book up to an alternative space. In this way, the semicolon becomes the dominant part of the book; it transforms the physical form of the book, preventing it from closing in the same way it used to.
Impossible Books
Punctuations organise and clarify the meaning of the written language; they create intonation and pauses that come naturally in spoken language. They are the translation of time in oral language to symbols, forms and material in the written text. Punctuation’s contribution is, therefore, related to time; it indicates stops and starts. When it comes to the politics of pause as an interruption, it is the semicolon that best approximates the idea of pause, the gap in speech. It is neither a comma nor a full stop; it represents a stop and a turn or shift, as made evident in its form as a symbol – a full stop and a comma.
The following experiments with Impossible Books work with the semicolon as a pause in literary texts. In these experiments, pauses in time, read through the semicolon, are translated into a material space. They are therefore about both identification of pauses in atext and the expansion of these pauses into a space of imagination that, ultimately, affects the spine of the book, and opens the book up to an alternative space. In this way, the semicolon becomes the dominant part of the book; it transforms the physical form of the book, preventing it from closing in the same way it used to.
The semicolon as a dream, a space of imagination, connects an ampossible love on the ground to a possible love underground. This impossibility turns to possibility through the mediation of death. Semicolon functions here, in imagining death as an interruption to life which opens up the world to the perfection of an eternal embrace. The gap or connecting link that the semicolon creates in the text is a chance for expanding and building imagination further, thinking differently and finding alternatives to overcome impossibility. As one expands this chance, death, as the only solution, is delayed, to the extent that the space of imagination and the contemplative moment take more space than either the impossible condition or desperate situation.
Impossible Love
An Installation of Kafka’s text - Umeå School of Architecture - October 2014.
Line & Cut
“Line and Cut” exposes the necessity of acting with delicacy when wedestruct, cut, or demolish things. How do we support and protect the things in vicinity of our target when we apply violent tools?
In this experiment with Franz Kafka’s text, the semicolon between the impossible love on the ground and possible love under the ground is turned into a line, cut between the two worlds. The line cuts open a new world, a plane for performing beyond the existing impossibilities, a performing ground that in its fragile materiality shows us the fragility of constructing such worlds and acting on them.
