presence
one morning you wake up and, as the first of the sun's rays begin to appear on the horizon ... actually no ... wait ... it's a cloudy morning, deep dark clouds hanging low and at dawn, at first it begins to get light and then the skies darken again.
i imagine a different time, before the whatsapp, and too busy lives, and so many distractions, when people lived as nomads.
you notice he has pitched his tent in the distance. the flag is unmistakable. centuries later the design bots at apple would appropriate it as an icon for transparency mode on the airpods pro.
i am currently engaged in a highly speculative experiment with presence.
when i worked in the hospital i learned that sometimes all you can do for people is to be there, hence one of the reasons for the title of my book.
what are the different ways of 'being there' for someone? i have thought about that a lot in the nearly ten years i've been working with people directly as it were, existentially.
what constitutes a consoling presence?
what is presence?
this is not art but it is a practice, or rather a praxis — a process of practice being informed by theory and theory being informed by practice — and i would suggest, a theory and practice informed by ethics (and vice versa).
the most basic unit of ethics : respect.
a book like an action painting.
this is in part an action painting made with words and silences and ellipses and dashes, and partly a performance❊ with an audience of one — one who is not actually present in the space where the performance is taking place but nearby.
perfect for corona times. fuck one and a half metres. how about one and a half kilometres?
❊performance here in the sense of a kind of beuysian aktion but like i said, this is not art. so.