PART ONE
reFor two years the group SWA has worked around the question what we can and cannot say, and by doing this questions the group as a collective decision-making body. The paper room is the paper trace and trail from various organized workshops worldwide and has become the support of conversations and micro events. It is not in itself a work but material space for research defined without apparent hierarchies. This is an activated area to invest in. For Speech Objects, it becomes the structure for new interventions and is constituted as a living archive which interacts with additional elements as the work progresses. The space is thus re-played or replaced as new materials are added to those already there. At the heart of it, we question modes of the appearance and dissemination of knowledge and transmission, the original, the re-make and re-see and re-interpret.
the thing that continues to come up in the group is the lack of interest in and inadequacy of documentation for the archive, no number of video cameras or recordings will ever capture what happened (italics). What we collectively decided was that this work, this beingtogether, will be archived in speech. What we say about what happened, over time in different places, what we present it to others will be the archives
Speech and What Archive is a gang of professional and emerging artists, curators and art historians who have come together to find a new use-value for speech and the idea of archive. Including Marie Gautier, Yann Sérandour, Anna Hess, Sébastien Pluot, Fabien Vallos, Clémence de Montgolfier, Etienne Bernard, Liv Barrett, Jesper Frilund, Matthew Rana, James Deutsher and initiated by A Constructed World, the group is based in Australia, Sweden, USA and France..
to co-produce a shared space of not-knowing... a space where we can get close, take risks or fail. where we can ‘look at the strategies and uses for ignorance’. it’s a space in which to shake off the socioeconomic demands of virtuosity and mastery, the various pressures to perform that can normalize and stifle. but it’s not necessarily about doing things ‘badly’, or not meeting expectations. nor is it just about blindly acting on your desire, recoding one’s actions in order to assert a sovereign subjectivity or resist established notions surrounding knowledge and professionalism, etc. rather, we proceed alreadyknowing that whatever we might do, and however we might do it, is incomplete and to some extent, incoherent. in other words, we act knowing that things arrive in fragments; there is always something missing. instead of ‘focusing on the delivery and consumption of knowledge products’ whatever is done conserves a fundamental lack, but it also shows the potential and the desire for something else to materialize, which both constitutes and is constituted by the group itself.
Speech and What Archive has participated in events and exhibitions including, ‘Paola Pivi’s GRRR JAMMING SQUEEK presents A Constructed World’, Sculpture International Rotterdam 2011; ‘Speakeasy Medicine Show’, Biennale de Belleville 2010, ‘Speech and What Archive, Melbourne Flottante’, Y3K Gallery, Melbourne 2010, ‘Explaining contemporary art to live eels #6’, Villa Arson, Nice 2010.
Instead of exhibiting the anxious drive to record, represent and preserve the way something really was (whether it be a person, an event or an epoch), a sympathetic approach in fact anticipates a fundamental instability, contradiction and loss. Nothing is true, everything is real. As part of a shared space of not knowing,it becomes a generative framework, relying on the continued articulation of a collective memory, a contagious and excited state of fragmentation and contact.
SWA is not about being the best, it is about finding what we want together. It is not about the past, it is about how we can look at the past from a shared present, and consider what we are going to do with it. It is not about a future that we aim for, that would be better than the here and now, because trying to be together today is the limit of what we know, and it is what we can act upon. It is about putting our unperfect knowledge, thoughts and embarassment together into a common space, and see what happens. And what is happening is a form of trust between us and in each other. At first you feel like what you do within the group, is for the group (because you’re asked for it) rather than for yourself ; and at some point you realise that you really want to do all of those things, not for the sake of fantasized conceptual ideas of an art collective or of art itself, or as one may think, in order to transmit a hidden meaning. But because doing those things (speaking, singing, acting, wearing costumes, dancing, walking on a circus ball) has changed your relationship to the reality of what groups and art are and can be. It might take a while to lose your old ways (what you have been taught you should do, and what you have been taught you should think or feel). The reason for SWA happening at all is to me a deeper, and yet very simple, questioning of why we want to be together and what we want to do together, instead of why we should be a group or what we should do to be taken seriously. And this recognition of ‘serious’, who would we be expecting it from ? As a matter of fact as a group we can constitute an audience in the sense of oneaudience-addressing-another, that we have been talking about. By redesigning the traditional roles of artist and audience, as well as the internalized hierarchies, both within the group and in a larger artistic context, we can see and act within new possibilities of existence.
A few thoughts about being together and telepathy A- Maybe I am doing telepathic exchange right now with Liv B- Maybe Liv and me are thinking about «Speech and What Archive» at the same time? Maybe we have the same idea? A- Often with friends you don’t need to talk (whether they are there or not) B- You can live far from your friends, your best friends, and you don’t need to speak with them everyday. Sometimes you don’t talk for a few months but you know that it is not a problem for your friendship. You still have this special link together (the blind trust?). C- Sometimes I think about some of my best friends who lives really far from me... especially one who’s artist too. I imagine what could I do with her in spite of the distance. And it happens sometimes that the day after she write me an email... So I do believe in telepathy exchange! The question now is how could we do that together? D- When you know somebody, you can know what he likes or doesn’t like and you can please him. If you know one of your friend is sad, you know what to do make him happier. Imagination / intimity / consciousness A- there is a link that’s not material D- Could you have a relation with someone without seeing him? How to know when a friendship is begining? D-When two people work on a same project or study, they don’t need to be together to think about the same thing or subject, they go in the same direction, it’s a lonely reflection even if it is shared with the other. While the phisical contact allows the exchange and confrontation of ideas which brings new perspectives. Parallel relation / crossed relation A- we didn’t need to speak because we could already understand without talking C- One of my friend is German. I don’t speak German. He doesn’t speak French. And it happens sometimes that I understand what is saying in German (not literally of course but the meaning). Maybe that’s because I understand what is on is mind. Sometimes understanding the feelings is deeper than understanding the language. A - if someone knows you are worried about someone else close to you, they don’t bring it up A - It can also be sadistic to care about someone C- Let’s try the sadistic way! D- Do you know Scanners by Cronenberg? A- sometimes if something bad has happened to you only your close friends know C- It’s really hard to hide something to your close friends, because even if it’s good or wrong they feel that something happens to you. Freaking! A- but there are no ideal relations between us, most of them are probably imaginary, I’m interested to consider how we might represent these slippery ideas on a more material plane without limiting what we want to say B- Desire ? & trust ? A- to say that everything is material is really depressing D- Some object could have a symbolic sens, m grand mother neckless is a material object but it can be a way to have a spiritual relation with her, even a sort of communication. You can give a symbolic power to a thing beyond the materiality. Lucky charm / belief / superstition A- well there’s an economic materialism then there is materialism where things stand for themselves rather than something else. A- Blind Trust B- Sometimes you have the feeling of a blind trust with someone you’ve just met. It’s a feeling very strong, that makes this relationship very special. D- Blind trust appears when you are confronted to someone who belongs to the same «world», group or community, someone you share commun things with. For exemple, you meet someone who comes from the same village, but you are in a big city where you know nobody, there is a direct link between you. You already share something so you can easily trust him and became friends. A- even if you don’t understand what I am saying there is something … B- It doesn’t matter if you misunderstand what I say with my french-english, or if I do not understand what you say, because we trust each other. Wa can feel free to make or to say mistakes. C- When ideas result of misunderstood it can be something really great! Think different! A - You feel like other people are there thinking the same thing A - That can be projection and it can be desire as well
We put ourselves in a position to realize that it is ourselves and not reality that is responsible for what we know. (Stephen Shapin and Simon Schaffer)
I don’t know how to move forward, don’t know what to do with this legacy, I know that I’m supposed to be a part of this but I don’t know in what way, and I don’t want to accidentaly trampoline or contradict, the past is better than me, and I don’t know whether to move forward
Matthew: “It’s true, I shouldn’t blame it all on my mother. That’s unfair. But you know, this reminds me of another good one. Have you heard the one about the salmon and they mayonnaise? Vivian: [chuckles] I think Nicolas has heard it before, but... M: Ah, okay. Well, I should say that this comes from Freud’s book Jokes and the Unconscious, where he was trying to link how jokes function to the operations of the unconscious and so on. Strangely enough, Freud was a collector of jokes, and he liked Jewish humor in particular; he had this huge collection of Jewish jokes that he incorporated in to this book. So in any case, there’s this joke, it’s an extremely poor joke, but it has a rich friend. One day the joke goes to its rich friend and asks ‘My friend, can you please give me some money. I desperately need it to feed my starving family.’ The friend thinks about this for a minute and he’s not sure... should he really give this joke his money? But in the end he says, ‘My friend, for you to feed your family, of course I will give you this money.’ Later on that day, the rich friend sees the joke in a restaurant with an enormous plate of salmon and mayonnaise in front of him.” V: “The joke is eating salmon?” M: “And mayonnaise, yes. Salmon and mayonnaise is an extravagant dish.” V: “How much?”
Pornography, the Theory: What Utilitarianism Did to Action For pornography, in this view, commits itself less, to affect (the production of further responses and consequences) than to effect (the manifestation of the visible consequences of what one has already done).- Frances Ferguson so I guess the models of ACW and SWA relate to the pornographic in the sense that, between us and the audience, we already know what we have done, there is no new knowledge, but what we are looking at and for is to see what and how we have hidden and obscured our thoughts and actionsfrom ourselves and each other. This search is to be undertaken together, collectively, rather than focussing on the delivery and consumption of knowledge products we look at the strategies and uses for ignorance. acw it seems , particularly what Clemence, Matthew and Vivian were doing yesterday at Blois ( maybe Yann too, we don’t know Nothing yet) begins to make this shared desire for ignorance material?
M: “The biggest plate you can imagine! So anyway, he goes in to the restaurant to confront the joke: ‘What is this? I gave you money to feed your starving family and you’re here in this restaurant eating salmon!’ Is this what you’ve used the money for?’ To which the joke replies, ‘Look, if I don’t have money, I can’t eat the salmon. And if I do have the money, I shouldn’t eat the salmon. So, when am I going to eat the salmon?’ To which the friend replies, ‘Ah, you rotten bastard! Alex Cecchetti told me this joke last night. I know what you’re up to.’” V: [laughs] M: “No, really. That’s the punchline.” V: “I don’t get it.” M: “The joke is so poor, it can’t really defend its actions; it has to flip the entire proposition.” Vivian: “Ah... I still don’t get it.”
“Research is not the privileged domain of those who know. On the contrary, it is the domain of those who do not know. Turning your mind, paying attention to anything you fail to understand is research.� Robert Filliou, from Research at the Stedelijk, 1971
La paper room définit un espace de parole, un lieu depuis lequel on peut parler (chanter, danser, ou rester silencieux). Elle ne crée pas de position hiérarchique, on peut y être à plusieurs, ce n’est pas une estrade ou un podium ; on peut y faire, dire, ou laisser quelque chose – ou rien. Elle est construite avec des images et des textes issus de réflexions communes ou individuelles, de discussions, de projets à différents endroits, venant de personnes qui ne se connaissent pas toujours entre elles ; et chaque élément participe à la construction de cet espace commun du ce-que-l’onpeut-dire, et de ce que l’on veut se dire les uns aux autres. Dans la paper room, nous pouvons avoir une voix commune faite de fragments d’autres voix. Ainsi, à la fois elle garde et montre ce qui a déjà été dit, et elle rend possible le discours présent. Elle est pliable, transportable et réutilisable. En français, on pourrait traduire paper room par la pièce en papier, l’espace en papier, la chambre de papier. C’est un dispositif, qui invite à être dedans ou dehors, face ou à coté, contre ou avec ; on ne peut pas l’ignorer, elle nous oblige à nous disposer par rapport à elle. Y entrer ou ne pas y entrer / parler ou ne rien dire, c’est commettre un acte volontaire. Il n’y a pas d’attente d’un discours spécifique qui y serait produit, ou ne peut pas y dire quelque chose d’intelligent ou de stupide, de réussi ou de raté. Tout ce qui est dit ou fait dans la paper room est accepté comme partie intégrante du discours commun qu’elle supporte.
La paper room est pour moi un repère. Comme les autres participants de Speech and What Archive?, je la retrouve de temps en temps, la vois dans des vidéos ou des photographies. J’aime penser à toutes les personnes qui, comme moi, y ont pris la parole, pour lire, parler, chanter, réciter, danser ou rester silencieux, à Melbourne, Nice, Paris ou Londres. Elle voyage, s’enrichit, se transforme au fil des utilisations. Je découvre à chaque rencontre de nouvelles traces d’interventions. On l’a, par exemple, percée de trous à Belleville pour éviter que le vent l’emporte pendant la performance ; on y attache des affiches, bâches, papiers, notes, selon les besoins. Finalement elle vit une expérience de SWA parallèle à la mienne.
Une structure de papier, précaire, on se demande à quoi elle sert. Elle définit un espace et devient lieu. Lieu de présentation et de représentation. Constituée à partir des recherches du groupe Speech & What Archive, cette zone de papier garde la trace d’une mémoire qui n’attend qu’à être complétée. Le discours y a pris, sur ses parois, la forme d’archives. Celles d’un groupe qui interroge les formes même du discours... du que dire et du que garder. Trace donc, mais de la trace nait un nouvel espace. Celui de l’expérience des recherches en cour auquel s’ajoute la fonction de praticable. La paper room fonctionne alors à la manière d’une scène. C’est un nouveau théâtre où le groupe, l’individu, le dire, le faire, la rigueur et l’absurde sont invités à se côtoyer pour produire de nouvelles formes et donner du sens. C’est un espace vivant où la mémoire se crée au rythme des interventions qui s’y déroulent. Un espace de documentation du réel où l’être ensemble, le groupe, le quoi dire et le que faire sont devenu sujet.
Notes Toward a Sympathetic Approach From the first of these principles, namely the Law of Similarity, the magician infers that he can produce any effect he desires merely by imitating it: from the second he infers that whatever he does to a material object will affect equally the person with whom the object was once in contact, whether it formed part of his body or not. [...] Both [principles] assume that things act on each other at a distance through a secret sympathy, the impulse being transmitted from one to the other by means of what we may conceive as a kind of invisible ether. -Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough Why do I find it beneficial to invoke—within the context of a group of artists, writers and curators assembled to consider issues surrounding speech acts and their documentation—a Scottish anthropologist’s theorization of magical practice dating from the early 20th century? First of all, I want to say that my intention here is not to simply replace the word “magic” with the word “art” as a kind of analog for the agency of the art object (although, when considered as a kind of materialist practice, Frazer’s notion of “sympathetic magic” preserves the agency of individual actors within a broader system of exchange). Nor do I wish to substitute the word “artist” for “magician,” thereby reproducing notions of artist-as-shaman, possessed though some inexplicable power by the secrets of the natural world. This kind of mystification would be extremely dubious, especially given the collective work of the Speech and What Archive. Instead, I want to invoke sympathetic magic as a potential way to reconsider the hierarchies that we have inherited from narratives that set the truth of reality against the falsity of its representations. Frazer’s theorization of sympathetic magic thinks a world in which images/objects do not represent the things they depict, but rather are understood to be valences of them, distributed through a spatiotemporal network of sympathy and contagion. In other words, rather than reduced to a false image or a “mere” representation, the sympathetic image/object (in its life as material and image), is thought to contain something of the thing itself. It seems to me that this is how sympathetic magic can be productive with respect to discussions of documentation. Because, although it accepts causal relations, it resists a strictly ontological understanding. That is, it does not privilege reality over its image, nor the original event over its documentation. Instead, it prefers to concern itself with processes of transmission and translation, material contexts, embodiment and affective response. It is in precisely this way that the notion of sympathetic magic can provide an alternative to the document’s evidentiary capacities and internal problematics of truth/falsity, past/present and subject/object. The same kind of operation can be described with regard to the archive’s function as a representative totality. Instead of exhibiting the anxious drive to record, represent and preserve the way something really was (whether it be a person, an event or an epoch), a sympathetic approach in fact anticipates a fundamental instability, contradiction and loss. Nothing is true, everything is real. As part of a shared space of not-knowing, it becomes a generative framework, relying on the continued articulation of a collective memory, a contagious and excited state of fragmentation and contact.
after the first few takes of “one monkey” during swa’s rehearsal session inside the grrrr jamming squeak! studio in rotterdam, geoff comes out of the booth to tell me that i’m playing the drums too well. he asks, “can you play them more... fragile?” explaining, “don’t ease up, but try taking what you know, and revise it. okay? the guitars and voices will carry us, so we don’t need a beat.” more fragile. how to accomplish this? what would my playing consist of when there’s no need to keep the beat and hold it steady? if i don’t involve myself with the technical criteria of the song, or the reproductive logic of the cover, then what can i bring to this situation? what else might the context require? a shared space of not-knowing can also be a very personal one. my fragile-playing turned into a negotiation between my desires as a drummer, and an external virtuosic imperative to demonstrate my mastery—of my body, of my instrument and finally, of the song. when and where to strike, when and where to move my arms, my legs, hands and feet were all called in to question. alternating between moments of over-excitement and deliberate restraint, i was a bit out of control. listening to the song you can certainly hear it. the drums seem to do what they do, and the beat teeters on the edge of my affects and indecision. it took me a long time to find out, but i think i’ve got it now.
We do have a future and a past, but the future takes the form of a circle expanding in all directions,the past is not surpassed but revisited, repeated, surrounded, protected, recombined,reinterpreted and reshuffled. Elements that appear remote if we follow the spiral, may turn out to be quite nearby if we compare loops
Long_disten_call. Double Unconscious The idea of a technological unconscious came from the experience of losing emails, not getting replies, going to trash or junk etc. I was thinking about what can we interpret in this situation when a computer is, at some point, behaving in a different way and emails go in the junk folder when they have never before. I was wondering how it could be considered as technical or computer lapsus, or technological amnesia which would parallel or be added to our unconscious, in a paranoiac way. Could it be assimilated to the unconscious we already try to deal with. The difference would be that it does not build itself on repressed contents even though its effects can be understood as though it does. I was wondering if there could be another unconscious, one we have no control over, with no limits or boundaries? With our own unconscious we have at least a fantasy of control, it may even be less frightening than the technological one. As Avital Ronell said technology is not added to our way of functionning, but the way we are functioning is technologiclally organized. Essentially we are technological systems. I thought about that with the song Long Distance Call, it sounds like a love song, but it’s not a ballad in a forest, it’s a paranoïd email and telephonic tango. Whether it’s a parallel or a double I have absolutely no idea, but it sounds parasitical. It pops in our mind the same way repressed contents do. Maybe like another organ with an extra capacity. When Lacan says that the unconscious is friend to no one, with friends like that you don’t need enemies. Sometimes when you want to trash your telephone and break technology, you are thinking about disconnecting with this unconscous, and maybe the other one too. But it seems we are bound to both of them. excerpt from a conversation
The soul or the unknown could be seen to have use-value in the same way as a chair or a car.
John Cage had nothing to say and he was saying it and that was poetry.
Speech and What Archive Part One Edited by Anna Hess with Clemence de Montgolfier, Matthew Rana and Marie Gautier original photographs Attilio Maranzano and SWA Published by A Constructed World, Paris, June 2011, printed in an edition of 300 SWA acknowledges the support of Vision Forum and Linköping University, Sweden, le Musée de l’Objet, Blois, CNEAI Chatou / Paris, l’Ecole Supérieure des beaux arts, Angers
Thanks to Y3K Gallery Melbourne, Christelle Foucoulanche, Pelin Uran, Michele Robecchi, Steve Piccolo and Oxana Maleeva, Paola Pivi, Per Hüttner, Konstantin Economou, Sylvie Boulanger, Christian Dautel, Veronica Kent and Sean Peoples, Olivier Jacques Celestin Pesret, Joseph Del Pesco, Amy Balkan, and CCA (Social Practice) San Francisco: Ted Purves, Malak Helmy, Lynne McCabe, Ruth Robbins, Allison Rowe, Nancy Nowacek, Ann Schnake, Alex Wang and Fred Alvarado
I produced a limited edition of Vespetro bottles for A Constructed World (for A Medecin show, Biennale de Belleville, October 2010).Vespetro is an ancient drink still produced in France and Italy. Vespetro is a simple distillation of the words vesser, péter, rotter, bladder, fart, and burp. It’s a digestive drink. It was served there to the audience in small paper cups in the afternoon. It was prepared by infusing pure alcohol with zest of lime, wild fennel seeds, coriander, aniseed and a larger amount of angelica seeds. There is a paradox (for us moderns) serving Vespetro, it is simultaneously a pharmacopeia, philtre and alcohol, drug, elixir to make us inebriated. What was served was to bring vigour to the body and rigour to the mind (freedom from flatulence) yet exact the exhilaration of alcohol. This pharmakon, will both cure you and what make you numb. This Derridian supplement is where the material contraction of being joins with phantasmagoria – the necessity of bringing together, contrahere ; with what is disconnected. The same pharmakon, from Plato, is the poison (hemlock) that killed Socrates and being (doxa) : yet it is also the remedy, the cure (epimeleia, cura) that allows an unveiling (truth) and a withdrawal of being in a stupor and drunkeness. And we are able think of this in very different ways. The pharmacon could as well be a time of withdrawal of being into the immediate present (as stupor or jubilation). Withdrawal, exhibits a space of inoperativity (the withdrawal of doxa, meaning, values, morality, economy, and so on.) We should then be able to understand pharmakon as contraction or constriction, and the impossibility of keeping, or being able to solve – being, that is addictive and preemptive, an absorption of being into what is ongoing (what has already happened and what has not yet taken place. That narrow space between the two is what we call the present. Exhilaration is the experience of this infinite narrowing. The figure of Dionysos is here exemplary, in that he is not himself just the god of drunkenness, he is the god of experience and of contractions or constrictions : he is the god that is, for all humanity at every moment, dead yet already born. He is the god of anguish, which is the god of the ongoing narrowing. To compensate for this terrible dread he invents an elixir, a philtre that produces an exhilaration plunging us into stupefaction and jubilation. This philtre literally makes us lovable... This paradox is what Martin Heidegger calls the drunkenness of sobriety, in such a concentration that it maintains being into a holding pattern, an ansichhalten. This holding-oneself means that the self cannot lean toward what has taken place nor what has not yet taken place : it is near itself, dizzy, and inebriated. Fabien Vallos