Exhibition text for 'Touchdown' at 101 Project Space, Berlin, 2024
Artists: Anči Jovanović, Asia Skupinska, Aura Roig, Helena Keskküla, Julia Lok.
Commissioned by Asia Skupinska, supported by Berlin Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa.
Lately you’ve been getting this feeling, walking up the stairs to your apartment at night, that you’re in the wrong building. The feeling has become a routine, it is exactly the same each time. The door crunches shut behind you, your arm swings into the dark, your fingertips reach the dim orange glow of the hall light button, and there – a soft throb of alarm. Without pausing or looking back to check, you begin to climb the stairs. Your mind pulls focus to the metallic fact of the keys in your hand, the steady rhythm of your shoes on the carpet. You tell yourself you wouldn't have got through the street door if it wasn’t your building. Of course it is yours.
Still, the feeling lingers up the second and third flights of stairs. You half-listen to the string of thoughts that come skipping in to pick through the possibilities. Perhaps you could have wandered to the wrong entrance, the wrong street even, since they all look so similar here. Perhaps by some fluke your key has worked in the wrong door. Perhaps you are trespassing, an intruder, unwittingly! Bursts of soundless violence zip through this image. A splintered door frame, a forced latch, a faceless, breathless altercation. You count the doormats, three on each floor, as they turn clockwise through the spiralling of your vision.
...
Bodies do not dwell in spaces that are exterior but rather are shaped by their dwellings and take shape by dwelling*. You wonder why your body doesn't learn to trust these surroundings; the familiar textures and sounds of the building. We might reach out and feel a wall so that we know how a wall feels, or even what it does (that it marks, as it were, the edge of the room) … We might walk slowly, touching the wall following it, until we reach a door. We know then what to do and which way to turn*. Touch is the kind of feedback a self can learn its edges by. But perhaps your body is quite attached to that soft alarm in the threshold of your building. A short-lived rush of strangeness, of being a stranger in a strange house. Is touching not by its very nature always already an involution, invitation, invisitation, wanted or unwanted, of the stranger within?***
...
You’ve been writing this from within the fug of a difficult decision. Stay in this city, or leave for another. The familiar or the unknown. Your two options balance themselves expertly, like one of those specially weighted toys that will wobble theatrically but always right itself. Whenever you think you’ve managed to land – finally, securely – on one side, the certainty lurches suddenly away. You question what in fact is familiar to you, what it is that you know, and what it is you really want with that knowledge.
I want it to feel like the first time every time, I don’t want to fall into patterns, that would maybe award me with proficiency. But I don’t want that. Fresh seems better than proficient somehow.**
...
‘Desire is deferral’: You don’t remember where you first picked up this Lacanian concept but it’s clung to you ever since. To sustain the desire, you have to defer the consequence. Pleasure lies not in obtaining the object of desire, but in repeatedly failing to do so, because possessing the object shatters the lack – and lack is the necessary condition for desirability.
You defer your difficult decision over and over again. What makes it so impossible to know whether to stay in this city or run to a new one is that your desires for both futures will no longer be desires when they come to be. The pleasure of the desire is the not-quite-yet-ness of its dangling consequences, the endless rehearsal of its completion. For as long as you defer the decision, both possibilities throb with soft alarm.
Someone else’s desire for oneself and someone else’s self. The desire to be with someone else and through that someone else, with them and part of them.***
...
By the time you reach the last flight of stairs, the alarm feeling has usually been displaced by some other sleepy train of thought. A marshy summary of the day’s exchanges, half-remembered, half-invented, loose fantasies trailing off. But then, as you turn the key in the front door of your apartment, there it is again. The thing I’m doing for the nth time, the first time every time.** This time a little weaker, a little softer around the edges. But despite the affirmative click of the lock, the familiar crack and yawn of the door’s hinges, there is in your body one last flash of this isn’t my front door. A flash of I am entering the wrong dark kitchen, I am reaching now for the light switch of a stranger.
* Sarah Ahmed
** Notes from the artists' conversation about the exhibition's themes
*** Karen Barad