Background

“In the beginning, in principle, was the post, and I will never get over it.” Derrida, La Carte Postale (1980)

By replacing ‘the word’ with ‘the post,’ Derrida sought to make a fundamental point: that even the word of ‘God’, traversing its distance to the living, is preceded by the necessity of its postage and thus carries the ramifications of its means of travel. In Derrida’s framing of communication in the Envois section of La Carte Postale, it is the distance of post that renders any connection partial and any reading somewhat into a misreading. Of this, Derrida builds a sense of the interiority of communication, he places communication inside a kind of space that manifests its partialness: “there is no outside-text,” Derrida writes in Of Grammatology. The inside-text Derrida infers is communication manifested and defined by the incompleteness it gains as a consequence of its necessary dispatch.

It is this ambiguous space of the post, the architecture of dispatch between sender and receiver, that we wish to research and engender within this artistic research project. We take the concept of “there is no outside text” and aim instead to work with text on the inside by formulating means for positive domestic co-habitation for reading groups within the larger project of Praxis of Social Imaginaries. We seek to devise means for the research experience to be welcoming, generative, and fostered in common. We begin with the domestic, shared spaces of coffee drinking, meals, discussions, and readings, treating these as not mere ‘temporary shelters’, but as spaces that formulate shared grounds for the encounters of travelers and mediate the transmission of ideas.

The results of our artistic research will be an art book published by MER Paper Kunsthalle.

About the forthcoming artistic research publication

Invited for publication with MER Paper Kunstalle, the book When is a House? includes writings that work toward ways to navigate the relationships between artistry, research, and collaboration. The writings composing When is a House? are rooted in work within the project Praxis of Social Imaginaries, as well as earlier cooperative work with the young artist collectives Astrid Collectief (Ghent, Belgium), 90’x Collective (Tbilisi, Georgia), as well as the artist-run organisations CAT Cologne and croxhapox.

Each of the writings of When is a House? are conceived architecturally, as rooms within a shared house. When is a House? is thus composed of a profound diversity of ideas and ruminations: recipes, shared exhibitions, performances, banquets, theoretical debates, and educational workshops conducted on the page and related to each other through the continuing dialogue which ultimately sustains the project. Throughout the work, we question, theorize, and seek to enlighten the performative nature of architecture in relation to the architectural qualities of performance by thinking of how we live in relation to space and place, and how these come into being in relation to our action.