(in praise of vertigo, faults and darkness)
Exhibition text for Giuditta Vendrame
Produced by Onomatopee in occasion of Tectonic Passages exhibition with the support of Creative Industries NL
Copy editor: Emery Gluck
Graphic design by Lisa Ladent
Photo by Peter Cox
She does not see the landscape as a setting or as the object of a future painting. She sees it as a whirlwind of temporalities, of stories, of pre-histories. As a portal. She recalls the ancient adage that states the mineral world as the mirror of the cosmos. Maybe. Yet understanding it as a living memory of the earth certainly is enough to stun and dazzle. Vertigo comes from the verb 'vertere', which means not only 'to turn', but also 'to return' and 'to reverse' and 'to change' and 'to convert' and 'to transform'. That's what it means for her. To feel vertigo is to give herself the possibility to change her point of view. To lean over an abyss and feel at the edge of the world. To experience the rumblings, the tremors. She knows the cliff will collapse. But movement does not frighten her. It is inevitable. Because the earth rotates of course, but also because the tectonic plates that underlie it, driven by gravitational forces, follow movements of divergence and convergence. But she is not scared. On the contrary, it reassures her to know that, even at a standstill, she continues to travel. Here, no matter what she decides, no matter what other trajectories she follows, she enjoys knowing that she is adrift.
*
On a random autumn morning, a random philosopher is walking on a random pebble beach. He reflects on the difficulty of writing another random book while the world is collapsing – or, rather, while his world is collapsing, as he is struggling to recover from an unexpected breakup. He dwells on each of these words - breakup, breakdown, split, rupture - and already sees himself on a stage, explaining to the public the revolutionary repercussions of a philosophy of the fault in contemporary thinking. Breakthrough: ‘The rift, you see, is an intrinsic characteristic of both the planet Earth and the human being. I'm referring to the rock formation faults, the cracking of the earth's crust itself that partly defined our continents and our daily lives. We live in the hollow of furrows. We’re born from a crack and survive fractures. And those faults in our bodies, connect to the ones in our minds. I want to speak of what we lack, of our mistakes and imperfections, of what we desire and what we have lost’.
So there he is, trying as best he can to capitalize on the breakup, playing with words like others play with ricochets, feeling pathetic, pathetic yet lucky. Lucky that he has the time to moan on this random beach. Above him, at the top of a basaltic cliff, a silhouette emerges. He would like to join it but fears that this is an illusion, a fruit of his imagination created to comfort him, because a silhouette is better than all that emptiness. Emptiness of a beach on a random autumn morning, emptiness caused by all those who have left. He would like to join them but assumes that someone at the edge of a cliff is there to be alone. He would like to join them but, as if he needed another excuse, he is afraid of heights. So he stays where he is. And, lacking human warmth, he starts petting a pebble like a lover would hold a hand, before mechanically slipping it into his pocket.
*
And so, after years of flirting with waves and sand, Pebble found itself curled up in a cozy pocket. One might be surprised to learn about its satisfaction at the thought of leaving the beach, but Pebble had always greatly appreciated darkness. Blind and out of sight. Deep seas, dark rooms, nights, shadows and cracks. These were times and spaces of great comfort, of sensory drift and infinite possibilities. Pebble loves how the dark makes one lose its sense of scale: Pebble may decide to be dust one day and a monolith the next. Pebble loves the dark for the same reasons it loves being mute: without lights or speech, ideas take their time to gestate and mutate. Pebble thinks humans overestimate establishment, transparency and immediacy – while the dark that Pebble loves implies floating, withholding and fluidity. (Nobody’s sure it is random that Pebble ended up in a philosopher’s pocket).
Pebble does not need to read Edouard Glissant to learn to celebrate confusion – but his words, ‘chaos-world’, ‘trembling-thoughts’ and his ‘right to opacity’ would please it. The ‘right to opacity’, it repeats, the right of not being fully understood, fosters the preservation of differences and multiplicities. The ‘right to opacity’, it repeats, prevents exploration and therefore exploitation. It is a means of protection. Pebble does not always opt for reason (it chose to resist the Enlightenment) and does not believe in a single truth (it has a taste for metaphysics). It ignores colonial maps and border controls and the concept of property (it calls it ‘appropriation’). Yet Pebble is not naive. It knows that the philosopher already ‘appropriated’ it. It knows that like others before, it might be turned into wall or pavement or grave. But Pebble is hopeful, it knows it will live through many other worlds.