12th discursion

“Only seeing the event itself, finding its landscape laid out before me would move me”
Fernando Pessoa
The Book of Disquiet

Pessoa voices a desire common to all of us at some point, the wish to see the entirety of an event fully explored, mapped and charted. To hold in the mind a final and total image of what has happened, is happening and will happen, an image that depicts all possibilities and exhausts all potential.
This desire to see an event without doubt, question or the need for any speculation, is too see an event completely and utterly resolved.
It is to see an event deprived of time.

In spite of this impossibility the desire remains and surfaces when we look, experience or witness something happening before, around or to us. It is the desire to know, to make sense, to resolve into language, to displace some-thing from the formless Real into the signs of language.
Crucial to this the act of acknowledgment, of seeing, of giving notice to that some-thing and from this moment, when an event crawls into perception, it becomes collaborative. But this is a collaboration that is not about working together. It is not about a common cause or effort to reach a mutually agreed end. It is instead a point of departure, a moment of splitting and a rupture from which difference and division multiply without boundaries.

11th discursion

Over 4 days ‘Collaborating with an Event’ will explore the persistence and mediation of an event through the practice of writing. Building upon the proposition that critical writing can perform as a textual afterlife to an event, ‘Collaborating with an Event’ will be a live process developing, demonstrating and discussing potential methodologies.