PASSAGE TOMBS invites you to recalibrate, remap, and reconfigure the coordinates of your world. In this space, we encourage you to scratch the existential itch and meet the possibilities of shedding, shifting, and shelving what was once assumed to be fixed. These states affect and question our orientation.
A moment of stasis is followed by acceleration, where we free fall. Allow yourself to free fall, trust in the disruption to see it through. This disequilibrium of our organism, of balance, disrupts our navigational system, namely the ground and the horizon. In these moments our understanding of relational networks can morph into something other.
Follow the path, and settle into an ‘oceanic state’. We follow Jackie Wang who expounds upon this notion: ‘Given that the oceanic has the potential to unsettle subjectivity; I argue that the oceanic can be a point of departure for new socialites and political models that do not rely on discrete selves’.1 Wang dispenses with an idea of selfhood as a kind of property relation characterised by self-ownership. Being is not self-possession or even self-determination, it is movement and circulation.
Lin’s work traverses various states of intimacy, looking into orientations and particularly — where do we orient from? Who do we orient towards and against? What rhythms in life hold or are held by us? They investigate pluralities, multiple scales and spaces of relationality. PASSAGE TOMBS opens with an industrial appetiser. Slithering through the scaffolded arch, grab a palate cleanser, and get seated for (Tending) (to) (Ta), the main course. We provide snacks along the way.
And so our perception of time and space moves from the historical linear to the spherical future. Here, a case is made for groundlessness: the point is not to deny that grounding exists, but to understand instead how it is never permanent. Contingency is a necessary condition and a constant presence in the attempted manifestation to ground, be grounded; two halves of one dynamic.
text by Colette Patterson and April Lin 林森
1.Jackie Wang (2018), Oceanic Feeling and Communist Affect
Part of the series Meanwhile in Messy Aporia. Kindly funded by Kulturamt Stadt Leipzig
Photos Moritz Richter