[...]pitom studies for performing ecotone
desfpe

artistic research center for material epitom studies
arcfmes
(art)mes

eccentric center of/for material and performance studies
(eco)maps

dionysian epitom for material and performance studies
demaps

eccentric center of/for epitomized material studies
ecfem

cologne center for social research
ccsr

ecotone
epitom

parc
performance and research center

cream
center for research in epistemology and matter

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***sharjah project***

[general approach of the project:]

this proposal gathers literary forces from the speculative insights of Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh (on ‘radical modes of resistance’) and Edouard Glissant (on ‘modest modes of resistance’) in order to perform a ‘slider’ between hostile and relaxed patterns of “contact” and “nothingness” that has been rotating throughout the past century in the Middle East. the performance of a knowledge-zoom in the hypnotic effects, nondialogue, nonnarrative, and radical exile spaces that have emerged in eastern postmodernism to reverse and supersede the question of modernity.

by traversing the domains of revolutionary ideology, avant-garde literature, new-wave cinema, extremist thought, and protests from the limitless imaginative reservoir of their political, poetic, spiritual, and aesthetic predecessors--this projects examines a Middle Eastern navigation of identity (via the concept of the ‘mask’) and its particular modest/hostile modes of resistance (via the concept of the ‘text’). visiting sites such as: subversive epitomes of charismatic authority undertaking a poetic articulation, when chaotic imagination makes contact with nothingness, the will to chaos, and inscription of fatality in literature-as-moral-transaction.


[pressure points:]

mobile within a speculative/suggestive milieu, this project is interested in examining literary sites such as Kelile-o Demne's communal forms of fragile human cohabitation (11th century political/bestial fable), Rumi's simulation of nonexistence (13th century production of schizo-darvish), Hafez's engineering metaphor-factory (14th century imaginal faculty of extreme presence), Hedayat's Buf Koor the Shelley's Frankenstein's monster favorate book (20th century forms of renunciation), Amir Naderi and Forough Farrokhzad films (20th century strategies of withdrawal), Jala Al Ahmad and Ali Shariati writings (20th century fatal concepts of the outside), [list to be modified]


[background:]

this form of half-digestive omnivorous work is situated in a larger trajectory of creative investigations, which i have been busy with under “storytelling,” are dealing with the questions of conditions in which non-antagonistic critical encounters between ordered conventions of knowing and chaotic textuality/imagination is possible. to take the mind where it does not belong. to the rogue arsenals of middle eastern reservoir of imagination and its locatable mimicries. to its repetitive scaffoldings, fugitive trajectories, its performances of fatal experience of the text. to unload its corrosive textualities and let them run their acids across one another. this project is interested in both the unleashing and the pleasure of watching the text die.

part of the disposition of this proposal is also the suggestion that the two collaborators of this project, Jassem and Foad, are invested in those notions in their practice. Foad Farahani's poem “farar” enacting contemporary artistic formations and past-compound-mask, and Jassem Hindi transnational poetic agency, are both artists with acute appetite for chaotic imagination. Their instinct for the fusion of nothingness and excess, appearance and disappearance, creation and destruction, is at once carved and unpacked in the literary-poetic mosaics of their work: Foad's use of middle-persian mystic sensibilities and Jassem's combination of intensive encounter with the poetics of apocalypse and acid textuality.

My work has been about: learning/training in the crafts of noticing little traps of semiotic and material trans-species cohabiting, mutual coproduction of economics, ecology, affect-studies, metaphysical household studies, and understanding of the orders of the natural and human world, in the particular history/story of the East. in my projects i take history as the overlapping tracks and traces and many tranjectories of world-making, human and nonhuman. the textual performance of this project is in the effects of my research and practice with the questions of globalism and inheritance: difficult translational spaces, communicative nonunderstanding, relational aesthetics, and the differential sites of reading. and i use performative lectures: a material practice, hybrid in digital manual tactile operations of speaking.

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“Four Masks of an Eastern Postmodernism”

insurgent, poet, mystic, sectarian
    |       |       |        |
chaos, violence, illusion, silence

•(sectarianism) apocalyptic writing
•(poetic) will to chaos
•(mystic) exile space
•(insurgent's) otherless subjectivity


یاغی
شاعر
نوچه
زاهد


[performative methodology]
for the collaborative part of sharjah project, i like to propose four “masks” (or “rotational avatars”) of subjective anarchy, that are few among many existential prototypes and subjectivity constellations of eastern postmodernism, as collaborative sites of encounter with four (or less and not necessarily individual) artists/participants.

•collaborators’ masks: chaos, violence, illusion, silence / (yaghi یاغی, sha'er شاعر, noche نوچه, zahed زاهد)--each endeavoring to discern the ontological possibilities and aesthetic imaginations of four theoretically-worked dispositions that Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh puts forward: insurgent, poetic, mystical, sectarian modes of consciousness, operating within multiple terrains of human and inhuman experiences of the middle east.
--> masks (the above mentioned four masks are accompanied by four “performative epitomes”): the exile, the animal, the shadow, the machine, (the monster, the thing, the contagion, the mirror image)

...................................

installation:
speculative objects (~/= anthropological objects) --to--> quasi objects
between research, social critique, speculative theory, and artistic production --> politics of representation

...................................

[*]insurgent:
resistance to modernism, and revolutionary agency
<== exhaustive disintegration of belief-structures in modernity
otherless individuation
eternal war
killer's freedom
(affective) overreaction


[*]poet:
will to chaos (--a type of consciousness that perceive the catastrophic-apocalyptic hint at each turn)
<== cataclysmic time of modernism (<-- great social disorder: prison, exile, censorship, etc. [==> Hedayat, Shamlu, Forough, Nima's tone of aggression --> a proto-sectarian space: secret societies, iconoclastic trajectories, *the compartmentalized and esoteric iranian avant-garde with aesthetic devices of: unity, isolation, subversion])
fugitive postmodern map of escape from the grasp of the experience of the modernist phenomenon
|
responses to historical events of atrocity and transition
mystical, criminal, mercenary, revolutionary edifice
amorphous, obscure, versatile (thinker/writers)
conceptual axes/archetypes of: power, hostility, banishment, solitude, desire, sacrifice


[*]mystic:
sunken tranquility, relaxed self-annihilation, ascetic renunciation of material (=/= postmodernism's obsession with speed, with narcissistic technologies, hyper-materialism)
neomystial trajectories of new-wave iranian cinema filmic style --> hypnotic effect =/= audition, dialogue, narrative
& exile space


[*]sectarian:
will to extremity
(apocalyptic writing)
breakaway modality
نوچه پروری noche-parvary's effective radars and tactics of attunement, detection, narration
(annihilatic temptation to) convert the text into a closed circle
(sect's threats of) forbidden power, moral ambiguity, collective density(/destiny)

...................................

[this project works with:]

[]
contributions/responses of:
•radical leaders (Jala Al Ahmad, Ali Shariati, Khomeini) --> ideological suspicion towards models of machinism and cosmopolitanism in the modern age
•intellectual forerunners (--> sectarian)
•literary icons (textual innovations of Hedayat, Shamlu, Akhavan, Baraheni) --> *poetic violence* and its apocalyptic tendencies --> that the declared east is plunged into a catastrophic epoch ==freed==> a “will to chaos”
•artistic visionaries (Naderi, Forough, iranian new-wave cinema neomystical) --> strategies of withdrawal, aims of disappearance, situated in obscure elsewheres of auditory and visual landscape
}--> #ideology #literature #mysticism #sectarianism
(from the middle eastern front) to (the issues of):
◦post-historical instant
◦catastrophic resistance
◦creative imagination
 }--> issues of:
◾technology
◾representation
◾globalization
◾colonialism
  +}--> drastic reinterpretations of:
◽time and being
◽death
◽pain
◽transcendence
◽victory
◽blood

~~(modernity is an extremist epoch)==> mithridatic approaches
anticultural visionaries
extreme --> resistance-fighter/ideological dictator, artistic forerunner/experimental thinker, different constellations of desire
***mithridatism مهردارو mehr-daru: *internalization of toxicity* (the gradual ingestion of lethal substances so as to gain immunity) --> an archaic protective tactic, an ancient model of defense, (subterranean practice of pirates, alchemists, cult leaders, shamans, guerrilla columns, spies, paranoid kings's *logic of encounter*)
(poetic extremism -->) mithridatic: dispensing fragmented verses, aphorisms, and engravings of the atrocity; invitation and unleashing of the malevolence itself, to seduce obliteration;
-affliction, existence thriving in the wound
(assumptions of) inevitability + anticipation + projection ==> mithridatic remedy (in ideological & literary apparatuses): “swallowing partial glances of the extinction of society, actuality, and being itself” (Mohaghegh) [a form of training? for continuation?]--> the poet asking us to fasten our reeling gazes to the objects of damage and derangement (@Ali ) ==> (extremist:) thought and expression have taken the shape of a *meteorological device*, forecasting seasons of pestilence and mutilation [<-- my whole work has been against that]

fanatical responses to the evolving storm [=/= the fool (the one whose cognitive defend-system is down), the joker (figure of the always problematic, with its speculative sense for potent tie between meaning and bodies), the cheerleader (porpoising socially deviant, corrupting forerunner), the sleep-walker (moving in anachronistic temporality, in non-explicit non-intentional acting), the eros (weaker than the problem it tries to solve), the queer (optically dense and less elegant kind of corporality in our encounters), the rabbit-chaser (detouring off the ontological anxiety of humanity's enigmatic destination)]



cyclopean protocols of extremity --> narrowest vision (immensified)
the cyclopean organ (of doing/thinking) ==> ‘oracle = explosive device’
|
--> wisdom + rage
--> boundless confined
--> precision + enormity
--> nature + technology
--> betrayal + devotion
|
....three brothers سه برادر
----[they were said to have primordial understanding, having monitored the building of creation itself--yet this brings no consolation تسلى, no spiritual composure ارامش, only chronic infuriation, such that they remain at once eternal and impatient]
----[they are gargantuan, immortal, and among the rarest exceptions to be released from the underworld after the great defeat of the chthonic orders, and yet brought back to the surface to dwell among/away from men and the new gods in hard labor on a faraway island, discharged from one hell only to find another imprisonment]
----[they alone can swing the hammers that form mountains, bedrock, ocean floors, tectonic plates, seisamic, yet there is such insane detail even within their most jagged strokes, a punishing symbiosis of the minuscule and the colossal]
----[they are the initial inventors of the earth's wild proportions, yet now are condemned to serve as apprentices to a lesser artisan-metallurgist god interested only in functional architecture and instrumentalized objects]
----[they are traitors to the new line of anthropomorphic gods, having fought against their false ascent, and thus still fiercely loyal to the old titanic codes, even in their captivity and forced collusion, forever scarred by the robbery perpetrated against the older deities, able to picture the drainage ditches into which the others are now outcast, such that each episode of mastication and uproar is hurled like a psychic bomb intended to free this discarded confederation]

isolationism + monumentality

(teratological formations in modernity)

inner contemplation / evacuation

attunement to the nothing
athleticism of stillness

[interiority (feels the need to?) stretch out into exteriority:] (to transfer) personal self-contained oblivion --onto--> universal plane

(Setareh's event:) one part shadow, one part mist, one part smoke and mirrors *.*.*.

...one part strategic essentialism, one part deconstructive smokescreen

part amateur, part pseudo-scholar, part civil servant, part serial killer

part vigilante, part crusader, part cult member, part thug


a site for hermeticism (recession from humans) ==> elevation



[inoperative community =/=] *excessive community*, where players must remain mesmerized, enchanted, and vigilant

sectarian <--> full charismatic authority -->? morshed (=/= “pseudo-autonomous passivity”)
مرشد --> with its own matrix of study: hypnotic exchange [it requires ecstatic projection, not scholarly detachment]

ISIS --> scaffoldings of invisible subjugations, highly performative site

***how does one make the memory [--> Hoda], the shadow [--> Ehsan], the ancestor [--> Sina] speak across generations?***


the riotous, the militant, the deranged --> they have suspicions ~=> ?

(sectarian mode of) *reading: to entertain the same mania, drunkenness, cruelty, or absurd temperament that engendered the very materialization of that text ==> apocalyptic significance (~ master-disciple relationship)--San'an--> an excursion into the otherworldly
-cryptic terminologies
-cosmic ideas
--> ‘knowing’ becomes a high-stake transaction, one's own identity, future, and self-consciousness hangs in the balance (--> i can recognize this extremism in myself)

(an issue with iranian artists:) the pursuit to become the echo of a profound legacy***(!!)

***echo becoming*** --> (Mohaghegh's tone:) in an epoch that runs entirely on hollow spectacles of meaning and simulations of depth <-- aesthetic

(since declared by Western theory itself, and i agree too?) it is obsolete to speak of “legitimate/authentic knowledges =/= mythic doctrines” }==> the question then becomes:
*which phantom-sphere is more arresting, more aesthetically philosophically attractive?* (--> phantomology, Avital) ~/?= *which archive remains on fire throughout?* (--> the concern of many of my peers in apass. why archive has become a predominant topic and practice: lack of master signifier ==> archiving as one remaining meaningful thing to do, that there is nothing meaningful to be done [<-- that is my source of disagreement with archive-discourse, because it matters that there is something to be done now])


(taking) high doses of impulse and reason

**adapting old tales to new territories of experience** (<-- we need to permanently work this, read it, and so on)


exceedingly well-versed fever-dreams of Rumi
his intellectual-bodily gesture
its innovative proportions
his typology of communication/education (in Majales-e Sab'e مجالس سبعه)
remote plane of calculation


•magnetic power of the sectarian voice (=/= “the weak cult of modern inevitability” ==> a formula of alienation, insularity انزوا, indifference)
•freedom to choose the all-engulfing one thing (--> ISIS) =/= countervailing definitions of freedom: the freedom of infinite mediocritized choices (--> consumerism)


(Elen's struggle to gauge her place in the existential game)[...]