[...]. pick a charismatic building/statue/object on your built environment, and draw a form of it, inviting to identify details of the object that reveal aspects of its history or use today
2. compare drawings and use the drawings to tell stories about the object and its use or importance to life in that environment
3. invite to reflect on the ways that drawing infrastructure can reveal processes at multiple temporal and spatial scales

discussion questions/writing response questions:
•Which features of the structure stood out, and what do these suggest about the processes of its creation and use?
•How has its infrastructure changed over time, and how are these changes evidenced in the built form itself?
•How does your structure relate to others in its immediate vicinity, and in what ways do relationships between structures help reveal social relations?
•What traces of past events are embedded in infrastructure or its memories, and how can we render these traces present?

drawings has to do with the incompleteness of knowing and representing
indeterminacy at ‘the same time’

(?in which locations you can get a good) human response to:
•slow processes (soil, geology, plant form)
•fast processes (plant seasonal behavior, weather, human responses to all of these things)

*drawing as structured wondering/wandering*

use of the *dramatic* as method --> to entertain multiple worldviews
to maintain irreducible complexity and to recenter historical processes as central to understanding contemporary politics
(history and drama)
-facts as enacted and performed before audiences (--> tradition in science and technology)

**knowledge is always performed, staged, and enacted** <== my work on ajayeb

how to tell the dramatic stories

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

notes from Sofia's seminar on documentation

the questions i brought home with Kobe:

the ontological relationships between law and art, who protects who? what protects protection? --> which material discursive practices make the ontological boundaries of “protection”? (specially today investigating this term is more urgent in a world saturated with toxic vocabularies of security.) the figure of protection transforms the subjects of knowledge and knowability --> look at how the judge was talking about art

(question of) the production of subjectivity (of the judge himself as an active knowing agent and the dead-master as the phantasmatic place-holder of meaning)
this is related to: (question of) responsibility and individuality --> influences and efforts of the work. two interesting moments of genesis occurred:
1- in the court “his work” (Beuys) was mysteriously created
2- also when Olga got a phone call from the ministry of culture, “her work” was mysteriously created
--> both the court and the phone call are mystic producers of the subjectivity of the artist dead or alive [#this needs more investigation]

(question of) the production of significance and difference
look at the speech-acts of the judge in the case of Beuys. which nuances of difference are generated, estated, established, and propagated? we can study every syllable of the judge's speech-act. the judge goes from one fable to another: fables of significance, fables of influence, fables of impression, etc.

boundary-making practices in our shared struggling world
the idea that art “starts” and “stops” somewhere
zeroing the artworks ecosystem

when is the moment (or how the moment can be marked) that the judge becomes able to say “OK, I don't know.” or “I am opinionated about this art. Let's bring an expert.”
and beyond that, I am wondering, like that judge, when myself standing in front of an artwork (or any work) how i am able to say “I have an opinion, or, I don't know”, “i need expertise in order to look at this”?

questions of: essence (in art), subjectivity production, protection,



with Vincent

(?what was the) notion of “everything is kept here” in his work

(?why and how) his storytelling was all about design --> his stories of responsibility and factuality
how and why in our artistic practices, production of responsibility and factuality is hold in the terms and services of design and designer that is busy with building enhanced and efficient communication networks historically rooted in the geometries of modernist project?

(?what is the artist's) busy-ness with design --> related to the fathers of correction (?) and proper address

who (and why) wants to look at which past with lenses and geometries of the violent grids of the forefathers of modernist design?
--> ontology of document: an artifact with a specific layout and design

design has to do with the proper address (?) which is (always) about the proper witness (?)
(in the case of Vincent) do you agree with the amerindian know-how that “a good designer is a dead designer”?

(?what was the) proper affect of history (that his work was creating)
through the aesthetic of old and antique video projectors his colonialism belonged properly to the past --> (question of) the production of the proper witness

the architecture and flag of BOZAR plus his notion of design, are they interesting and necessary ways of forming kinship and properly distanced history?

Vincent “knew” his distance to the past (--> do you smell a problem?)
in which clock he is looking at time? which time machine he is handed to or placed in? who/what is making his time model?
also, which segment of your practice is temporalized? this means also which part of your practice stands out of time?



with Olga

regards of the question “what are an artwork's boundaries?” and it's intersections with documents, lists, and reports

for Olga:
document = evidence
research = mourning
(mourning as the passionate and demonstrative activity of expressing the state of loss or deprivation of a certain object for a certain subject, and demand for its revival or memorialization)

what is the feeling of the document?

*document is a story that (usually) silences other stories*
where our powers to provoke care (could/should) come from (if not from document/evidence)?
is document (in its form and feeling) the best way we have at our disposal to provoke the care of the generations? ...to mark each other with the mark of the care?

putting the narrative into proper sleep
casting the names

-artist has turned herself into a mnemonic device --> suggesting “amnesia” as her context
-artist has become a reminder and (therefore) her audiences have become memorizers

(question of) memory and remembering --> the idea of ‘literal remembrance’ in her performance, re-membering, literally bringing back the “members” of the Kurt Jooss company into the present of her audiences
-the problem with her remembrance is that “there is something that is important to remember” regardless of the person/subject who remembers

indisputability of the Green Table for Olga
the artist has chosen to protect The Green Table's meaning and message (due to her political and ethical commitments [for world peace?]) in a sense her subject of research remains unresearched, her values unevaluated, her moral settlements settled

how can she become interested in decomposing her research-bodies of The Green Table?
can we remain critically ethically responsible in thinking about the “meaning and message” of our subject of study and still be able to decompose it in interesting serious ways? (yes yes)

questions of: thinking, reminding, remaining,



Sofia's documentation
she asks “what is document today?”
-what was document yesterday (that is not anymore today)?
-how the agency and meaning of docu is (or is not) mutating in time?*
-what is beyond the question of documentation and preservation? --> *durational aesthetics*
-is document a limited way of asking questions about what we do and our relationship with time and duration? [you never know what the present brings into the future.]

what art cannot say that document can? “truth”?
when truth was invented where was document standing?

is document today a mere effect of technologies of inscribing?

why we are not talking ab[...]