As Matter

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Fairouz El Tom | Celestial | 2020
Archival pigment print | 150 cm diameter

1. Richard A., Proctor, ‘Statement of Views respecting the Sidereal Universe’, Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 33, No. 9, 1873, p. 547.

1873: The Astronomer Richard A. Proctor drew a chart representing the stars visible to the naked eye, specifying that it ‘does not definitively indicate a new theory — rather it suggests the idea that the constitution of the sidereal universe is too complex to be at present ascertained.’¹

not definitively

too complex

to be ascertained

1572: For centuries the night sky had been seen as complete, until Tycho Brahe discovered a new star, the Nova of Brahe. Rupturing all that had been thought of as certain, as determined, new possibilities revealed themselves. Just as the universe was revealing herself to us.

1543: The Copernican revolution. The paradigm shift from the Ptolemaic model, wherein the earth stood stationary in the cosmos at the centre of the universe, to the heliocentric model, which realised the sun as the centre, the central hearth around which we rotate. Displaced, earth became just another planet among many existing in the cosmos.

This once unfathomable transformation in knowledge nourishes and sustains the whisper of the resonating claim: The centre cannot, will not, does not hold.

2. Alexis Gumbs, M Archive, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), p. xi.

1929: The redshift of stars. The doppler effect seen by astronomers, which is the increase in the wavelength of light emitted by stars, tells us that the universe is expanding. Which is to say, that the universe is more than infinite.

Once thought of as a container, the universe is in fact uncontainable, it is expanding, along with everything else, out into that which can never be known.

As the universe expands we move out from the “knowable”, the observable, into infinitum. It is at the edge of what we “comprehend” that we realise the end as a continual beginning.

3. Aimé Césaire, Return to My Native Land, trans. John Berger and Anna Bostock, (New York: Archipelago Books, 1969), p. 39.

I must begin

Begin what?

The only thing in the world that's worth beginning:

The End of the World, no less.

— Aimé Césaire, Return to My Native Land

The end as continual beginning. A continuous into the future, into forever. A refusal and a continuance. A continual coming into being. That which untethers us from The World and releases us into the worlds of possibility.

All things arranged as uncertainty.
The strange flutters behind this cosmic verse.

And maybe it is at the end that we see

4. Lucille Clifton, ‘hands,’ in how to carry water, ed. Aracelis Girmay, (Rochester: BOA Editions, 2020), p. 210.

5. Arjuna Neuman, and Denise Ferreira da Silva, ‘REDSHIFT:‘, in Soot Breath Corpus Infinitum, ed. Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva, (Glasgow: Centre for Contemporary Art, 2021), np.

This light, that glows red within, is that of the redshift of stars. The only light that enters into the human body by skin diffusion through protein crystals.⁵ Our matter, which is made of cosmic dust, glows from within, glows as the redshift of stars do. It is a pitched-down light in the pitch-black sky that reverberates within us, asking us to listen. To attune ourselves to the resonant hum of the universe. To give focus and attention. To A Tend to. In doing so, what opens up before us is the vast constellations of interstellar communion. Which is to say that there are other ways of knowing and being that are not limited by determinacy, linearity, or separability.

So,

6. N. K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season, (London: Orbit, 2015), p. 1.

Désirée Coral | detail from Concurrently | 2021 |
Archival pigment ink on cotton paper | 9 x 13 cm

7. Rizvanna Bradley, and Denise Ferreira da Silva, ‘Four These on Aesthetics,’ e-flux Journal, no. 120, 2021, p. 1, http://worker01.eflux.com/pdf/article_416146.pdf.

8. Joy Kmt, ‘Creating Worlds’, in Black Quantum Futurism: Theory & Practice, ed. Rasheedah Phillips, (The Afrofuturist Affair/House of Future Science Books, 2015), p. 50.

‘The world, as the totalising onto-epistemology that is modernity's genesis, limit, and horizon, is a thoroughly aesthetic conceit. To toil within or rail against the field of representation is already to be enmeshed in the aesthetic, for it is by way of the aesthetic that the ontological ground on which we are said to stand becomes experience.’
— Rizvana Bradley and Denise Ferreira da Silva, ‘Four Theses on Aesthetics’⁷

‘But simply because reality has been described to you as linear and you have accepted that reality doesn't make it true, it only makes it fact. A fact is an agreed upon reality. What happens when facts are accepted as true is that there is a cutting off of realities that are unknown — even if they are postulated about, they are relegated to the realm of the unknowable.’
— Joy Kmt, ‘Creating Worlds’⁸

9. Hito Steyerl, ‘In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective’, in The Wretched of the Screen, (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), p. 15.

10. Ibid, p. 18.

11. Ibid, p. 19.

12. Ibid, p. 19.

10. Ibid, p. 18.

11. Ibid, p. 19.

12. Ibid, p. 19.

The grid. From the cartographical to the digital, to the archival, to the constructional, the grid is the injunctive structure, the very architecture of our sociality. It is an organising principle, a way to comprehend, to categorise and to containerise “knowledge”. The Grid, made out of a horizontal line and a vertical line, is a dichotomous form. An enclosing linearity. An aesthetic conceit.

Our traditional sense of orientation, which gave rise to our modern conception of time and space, started with the fabrication of a stable line: the horizon line. The horizon line which enabled colonialism and the spread of a global capitalist market was also vital to the ‘construction of the optical paradigms that came to define modernity,’⁹ foremost amongst these being the linear perspective.

The linear perspective is founded on a series of negations and asserts a one-eyed immobile spectator as its norm. Thus linear perspective does not actually correspond to any real subjective perception, but rather subjects the individual viewer to supposedly objective laws of representation. As Hito Steyerl notes, the linear perspective ‘computes a mathematical, flattened, infinite, continuous, and homogenous space, and declares it to be a reality.’¹⁰ Space, defined by the linear perspective, becomes like the horizon; calculable, navigable and predictable — it becomes managed. Transformed by the linear perspective, the resultant conception of space introduces the notion of linear time. Time, under linearity allows for mathematical predication and thus we arrive at the notion of linear progress. The subject, space, and time are all reinvented by and through the linear perspective. As Steyerl surmises, ‘this reinvention … was an additional tool kit for enabling Western dominance, and the dominance of its concepts — as well for redefining standards of representation, time and space.’¹¹

Perspective. The word perspective comes from the Latin perspectiva, “to see through”. Taken under temporal consideration, the definition of perspective is “a view onto a calculable future.”¹²

13. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing, (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2010), p. 189.

14. Bradley and Ferreira da Silva, ‘Four Theses on Aesthetics’ p. 3.

15. Ibid, p. 3.

In Poetics of Relation, Édouard Glissant observed that ‘if we examine the process of “understanding” people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is this requirement for transparency.’¹³ To be transparent, is to be legible under particular standards and conditions of comprehension. This desire for, and hyper-fixation on transparency is just one of the ugly heads of post-Enlightenment thought that permeates and dictates the present moment. That determines the field of representation, forecloses realities that are “unknown”, and brings to form the aesthetic ground on which we come into being.

To come into being in the World is to always already be enmeshed in the aesthetic grid, trapped within the organising principles of post-Enlightenment thought, namely: linearity, determinacy and separability. Integrated within post-Enlightenment thought, the linear perspective, or linearity, lays the foundation for the construction of the register of the sovereign and transparent “I”. This “I” is both the knowledge structure and the “ontological figure” consolidated in post-Enlightenment thought.¹⁴ The axis of which rotates around the presupposed capacity of determination in the universal subject — read: white Man. It is this “I”, this ontological figure that announces and articulates the tautology of “I think”, “therefore I am”. Two lines that converge and enclose, that determine and that separate. For all that can be known and accounted for, or rather given form, through this tautology is that which can be “comprehended”, or rather that which is taken to be “common” to this so-called “universality”. All that falls out-with the spatiotemporal border of this figure of Man is reduced to the conquered, the commodity, the Other.¹⁵

16. Ferreira da Silva, Denise, ‘In the Raw’, e-flux Journal, No. 93, 2018, p. 1, http://worker01.e-flux.com/pdf/article_215795.pdf.

17. Bradley and Ferreira da Silva, ‘Four Theses on Aesthetics’, p. 3.

18. Ferreira da Silva, ‘In the Raw’, p. 8.

19. Bradley and Ferreira da Silva, ‘Four Theses on Aesthetics’, p. 3.

20. Steyerl, ‘In Free Fall’, p. 13.

21. Ibid, p. 28.

To transform the grounds on which we stand, that is to unthink the world towards its end — decolonisation (“the return of the total value expropriated from conquered lands and enslaved bodies”¹⁶) — we must undertake a radical rethinking of aesthetics. That is, a departure from the World into the worlds of possibility, a return of existence into the expanse, the wreckage of normative spacetime. As a means to unthink the world a poethical descriptor of existence disrupts the organising principles of post-Enlightenment thought, understanding that the effort to ‘reduce, discipline, and contain the unwieldy materiality of the world is always already an exercise in futility.’¹⁷ To think poethically then, to think with/in/through a Black feminist poethics is to understand existence as an expression of infinite re/de/composition, which is to say that to come into being is to understand that existence is ‘always already a recomposition and a decomposition of prior and posterior positions.’¹⁸ To think poethically, is to bend away from, to dwell in a generative deviation, to circumnavigate determinacy and to attend to the right to opacity. It is to release both imagination and existence from the onto-epistemological pillars of universal reason and modern thought. It is to understand existence as the ‘art of life in departure’.¹⁹

The art of life in departure is akin to Steyerl's theorising of “free fall”, which is the philosophical assumption that we have no stable ground on which to base and assert our foundational metaphysical claims or political myths.²⁰ To fall, according to Steyerl means ‘ruin and demise as well as love and abandon, passion and surrender, decline and catastrophe.’²¹ Which is to say that it is a departure, that is defined as much by presence as it is by absence, it is ongoing praxis of care and destruction. To be in free fall then is a trajectory towards the future unknown, but the future as it will have had to be. A future that is not stable, but one that promises a shifting formation.

Fairouz El Tom | Waves I | 2019 |
Archival pigment print | 87 x 130 cm

Listen as the water moves, resonates and reverberates. Water: the baseline and
a bassline for our existence. Our foundation, our undercurrent, our backbeat.

Aracelis Girmay,
“foreword”, in how to carry water, p. xxi.

Aracelis Girmay asks “So then what is water? What can it be?”

Knowing and

unknowing

Our singular

And plural

And going on

going on...

To be singular, to be plural, all and at once — to be in a state of going on, or rather an ongoingness of coming into being — is to be leaky. To be leaky is to leak into opacity. For leakiness is the porous boundaries between bodies. Bodies and bodies of water. Bodies of text. It is the porous boundaries between modes of communication that spill out across time, space, matter, language, systems, the human, and the more-than-human. Leakiness is perennial immanence, a liberatory technology. It is a fluidity, it is to wander and to wade, to be uncontained, to spill out, to rupture the purity of form. To be leaky then, is to exceed the perimeters and the parameters of determinacy.

22. See Karen Barad, ‘Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come,’ Derrida Today, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2010, pp. 240-268.

23. White, Simone, ‘bound together by this matter,’ e-flux Journal, No. 105, np,https://www.e-flux.com/journal/105/303739/bound-together-by-this-matter.

24. Christopher Wink's translation of Glissant from Fred Moten, Black and Blur, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), p.xv.

Simone White claims that ‘each thing contains the possibility of being another’.²³ Thus to be leaky is to become as matter. It is the utterance of Glissant's refrain ‘consent à n'être plus en seul’ (consent not to be a single being).²⁴ It is to defy a narrative arc or neat categorisation. It is a return of existence and being into the expanse, into the plenum — an all space, every part of which is full of matter.

Désirée Coral | detail from Concurrently | 2021 |
Archival pigment ink on cotton paper | 9 x 13 cm

25. Venessa Watts, ‘Indigenous place-thought & agency amongst humans and non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European world tour!)’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2013, p. 21.

26. This notion of life comes from the mayan word winaq, and Ajb'ee Jiménez and Héctor Aj Xol Ch'ok's use of phrase winaquisation, quoted in María Iñigo Clavo, ‘Traces, Signs, and Symptoms of the Untranslatable,’ e-flux Journal, No. 108, 2020, p. 10 http://worker01.e-flux.com/pdf/article_325859.pdf.

SpaceTime Coordinates: Ispirami da, Cochasquí, Ecuador, 1964 — 1965 through the anthropological gaze of the Man of Science, diffracted through the porousness of the earth, diffracted through museum displays and cases full of clay vases, diffracted through missing and stolen objects, diffracted through Vasija de Barro [a song written in the 1950s by prominent Ecuadorian poets, musicians and artists], diffracted through Place-Thought [‘the non-distinctive space where place and thought were never separated because they never could or can be separated. … The premise that land is alive and thinking and that humans and non-humans derive agency through the extensions of these thoughts.’²⁵], diffracted through present, future and past, threaded through one another.

Land, our earthenware vessel, cut in half, mirrored and imaged before you. A narrative of halves that attempt to make up a whole in the drive towards knowledge, as if knowledge is something that you can just take, claim as our own. As if knowledge is singular or can be removed or reduced. To give form to something that is still coming into being is to delimit and enclose, to disrupt communication.

Land, divided into grids through the geographical imagination in order to be surveyed, plundered, assumed. Soil removed from territory as flesh is taken from the body. And then what happens? What happens after? After resources are excavated, extracted, objects found, removed/taken/stolen? Land is not relict, but alive, living, breathing, thinking, full of thought, still coming into being. Land as that which gives life in parallel, that transforms life, makes life, forms connections.²⁶

In what ways do we (re)turn to the land?

What happens when we witness the land, learn from it, listen to it?

Fairouz El Tom | D for Darfur — II | 2021 |
Archival pigment print | 160 x 300 cm

27. Audre Lorde, “Coal”, in The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company: 2000), p. 6.

Is the total black, being spoken

From the earth's inside.

There are many kinds of open.

How a diamond come into a knot of flame

How a sound comes into a word, coloured

By who pays for what speaking

— From Audre Lorde's Coal (1968)

28. See: Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).

29. Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), p. 4.

A kaleidoscope of burnt orange, earthen brown and light catching gold tones seemingly leaks out, reaches out into an expanse of blackness. Or is it the other way round? Textures and tones of skin are imperceptibly merged with that of the earth, indicating the very weave of life, the history of property and properties the lexicon and grammar of geology that takes possession of bodies and bodies of land, a history (past, present, future) of insurrection and fugitive relationships with the land and the secrets it holds.²⁸ There is a fluidity, a kineticism and a connectivity, a movement which refuses legibility, that asserts the right to opacity. Through its illegibility, through its leakiness, there is refusal to be reduced to the register of the conquered, the commodity, that which will be extracted from. There is also a stillness, and a quiet. Quiet, as Tina Campt notes: ‘is not an absence of articulation or utterance. Quiet is a modality that surrounds and infuses sound with impact and affect, which creates the possibility for it to register as meaningful.’²⁹ To a tend to, to listen to this quiet, is to hear the resonant hum of the earth, to be attuned to the frequency and the valency of Audre Lorde's words; who pays for what speaking? It is an opening and a suspension, a departure from, a movement towards.

Désirée Coral | Real Value | 2018 |
Jewellery box, light, and soil in filing cabinet
drawer | 39.4 x 20 cm

30. Jessica Lynne quoted in Kameelah Janan Rasheed, No New Theories, (New York: Printed Matter Inc., 2019), np.

In a space of shine a single light reflects onto and then off of a piece of Ecuadorian soil. The minerals of the earth glitter-imaging all that is desired, all that can be extracted, demarcating the land's total value through grids of signification. All that glitters is gold. But places of shine illuminate that which must necessarily be obscured, that which must be shed in darkness, in order to justify lazy equations of value.

Mine, yours, ours, the possessive pronouns that announce property and properties. Pronouns which articulate the drive for all things to be possessed, known, comprehended, commodified. Property and properties, the spatial dispossession of both land and persons for the purposes of extraction. Mine, (noun) an excavation of the earth for mineral extraction. Mine, (verb) to obtain from a mine. Mine, yours, ours, the geologic grammar that ties bodies to bodies of earth for total extraction, flesh taking flesh. It is a grammar that is always already operating under a process of abstraction and obscurity.

What is value in our modern dialect if not that which is equated to total worth, monetary worth, fungibility, usefulness, that which can be commodified? What is value if not something that we infuse onto or into something/someone, that which is thought to be intrinsic under “universal” standards of reason and comprehension. What is value if not a notion that is sedimented in the very architecture of our lives? What is value, if not that which is threaded through our modern ethical scene — the assignation of who and what comes to, or gets to matter?

To speak of real value then, is to speak of justice. To speak of justice, is to enter into a dialogue that has no full stop, for justice is not singular, it cannot be achieved once and for all. Justice-to-Come. To speak of justice is to question how to keep the possibility of justice alive in a world that thrives on death, extraction and dispossession. To speak of justice is to resist “elementary commodification or understanding”.³⁰

What is real value anyway?

Désirée Coral | Woven Text | 2021

Fairouz El Tom | Lips | 2019 |
Archival pigment print | 87 x 130 cm

31. Audre Lorde, ‘Coal’, in The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company: 2000), p. 6.

Language is a space of struggle.

Who pays for what speaking?³¹

Yet it is words, both spoken and written, thought, uttered and announced, that are our recourse when addressing the total justified violence of modernity and its defining logic of obliteration.

Language, despite its structures, rules, grammar, etymology is not fixed. It is leaky, porous, fluid. That which can build the shape of the container but cannot be contained. How much meaning can a word hold? How do words carry and labour beyond their capacity? How do we stretch words and our language past what was thought previously imaginable?

How do we bridge that gap between that which is imagined, felt, thought, uttered and

thatwhichismadepossible?

HOW TO CREATE SPACE TO BREATHE?

a chance to escape...

How do we activate the disruptive force of language and shake the ground on which we come into being? How do we set the stars aflame?

32. Audre Lorde, Your Silence Will Not Protect You, (London: Silver Press, 2017), p. 23.

33. Ibid, p. 28.

34. Ibid, p. 28.

35. Ibid, p. 28.

The sensuality of lips brings me to Audre Lorde's use of the word “erotic”. The erotic as power and information, the 'measure between the beginning of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.'³² The quality of light within us. The sense and feelings that illuminate. Illumination as the quest and pursuit of genuine change, the shift from living outside ourselves, to living from/to our “internal knowledge and needs.”³³ That which whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.³⁴ To “live from within outward” is to understand the sentence not as a monolith, but as an unfinished index. That which is alive to the impossibility of complete and comprehensive knowledge or being, that which with each touch is made anew. “The quality of light... within this light... illumination.”³⁵ The knowledge that,

~~the fire next time~~

the fire this time, comes from within, and sets the stars ablaze.

Désirée Coral | detail from Concurrently | 2021 |
Archival pigment ink on cotton paper | 9 x 13 cm

to shape the page into a vessel
is to understand
the textile as text.

the books that colonisation could not destroy.

unchanged
the method is
the same as it once was

the possibilities endless.

the warp crosses the weft
under tension
right angles, interlaced

thoughts traced back to the event of a thread.

Ancestor.
Universe.
continuity

to be living, to be evolving, always coming into being.

repeat
repeat
iterate

the future is not simply here now.

Fairouz El Tom | Future | 2021 |
Archival pigment print | 56 cm / 22 in diameter

36. L. Lambert, and R. W. Gilmore, ’Making Abolition Geography In California's Central Valley’, The Funambulist, 20 December 2018, np.

37. Mafundikwa, Saki, ‘Ingenuity and elegance in ancient African alphabets’, TED, 2013, https://www.ted.com/talks/saki_mafundikwa_ingenuity_and_elegance_in_ancient_african_alphabets?language=en.

38. Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), p. 107.

39. Mafundikwa, Afrikan Alphabets, p. 37.

40. Denise Ferreira da Silva, ‘Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Toward The End of The World’, The Black Scholar, Vol. 44, No.2, 2014, p. 91.

41. Campt, Listening to Images, p. 17.

42. Ibid.

Thoughts on the Future:

The Bantu symbol for future that comes into gentle focus above consists of a circle that holds within a singular horizontal line that cuts through the circle's diameter. In the Bantu symbol-language, each symbol expresses a whole word, or a complete idea.³⁷ Perhaps the tension then between the circle and the horizontal line, that is held in stasis, gestures towards the tension held in Tina M. Campt's question: ‘How do we create an alternative future by living both the future we want to see, whilst inhabiting its potential foreclosure at the same time?’³⁸ It is interesting to note then that the Bantu symbol language is to be read silently, not aloud.³⁹ A pure symbol language it has to be taught, as opposed to be intuited, asking us to consider the right to legibility — who gets to read what? If the Bantu symbol language is to be read silently, held in the mind alone, the symbol for future opens up vast constellations, endless iterations of what the future can be. Silence then is the space between what is thought and what it uttered. It is a space in which we can wander and wade. It is a space that holds tension, wherein the future that we can announce finds its form. For the future is never announced once and for all, it is always coming into being.
The light that is emitted from stars is a light that exists simultaneously in the past/present/future. The future therefore is not simply here now, or out in front of us, waiting for our arrival. The energy of past events, and those that are yet to come, create a background hum that drones on about the uncertainty of the future. To a tend to the future then, is to weave, to braid these three temporalities (past/present/future) into a constellation. So that what exists and what will be is ‘always a rendering of possibilities, which remain exposed in the horizon of becoming.’⁴⁰
The grammar of futurity — that which will have had to happen.⁴¹ An architecture of possibility, the power of imagining and envisioning the future as it must be. The imperative of living the future that you want to see now.⁴² Which is to say, it is an orientation towards a different kind of “must” that is both a tethering and a suspension. A praxis that is a generative and fugitive act of refusal, a grappling with precarity, an act of care and destruction. A radical departure from The World into the worlds of possibility.

Perhaps then all we get is glimpse of a future:

Glimpses of an image
Glimpses of an image of ourselves now, from glints of our past.

— ‘Glimpses’, Sarah Webster Fabio

Perhaps the act of a tending to our future is akin to that of holding a prism up to the world for a moment, to see the ways in which the light refracts, how it shines through in other multiple directions.

Curated by Emma-Caitlin Watson, featuring artworks by Désirée Coral and Fairouz El Tom. Design by Freddie Guthrie.