Department of Dislocated Memory

We wish to realise a metabolic awareness of the metaleptic somatic state (i.e., the generally known state of virtually enhanced transportation). We are embarking on an exploration of what the relation between past and future looks like from elsewhere: most probably a creative rememberance of Algeria. Something lost, or yet to come: elsewhere. A category of time, a modality of the present, the seductive touch of productive interaction we understand as there-and-now (the vortex, Fig. 1).

We would like to underscore our ambition of challenging Future Projections on one particular point: (1) in worktop dialogues, the tracery of Algeria takes place by shifting between [future]^-1 and [past]^-1 (2) the unified position on the other — otherwise a part of our impending past or future — is from there-and-now: in embroidery, video and broken poetry. By the standards of modern vocabulary, our project would have been a passage work (Benjamin). By the standards of an atopic era — the era of impossible spaces — our project is to outline a constructive approach to non-territorial conquests: i.e., the possibility of creative rememberance of a place as a homing device for the connection of a chain of unique events through a living network in Algeria and in ICOLS. This passage from ‘impossible space’ — with the broad political signification of such a notion — to places of this kind, we suggest, is the subject matter of atopia. A possibility foreseen by sustaining the paradox that profane people have a right to refuge — from the righteous — by the same law that inspires the righteous.

The deconstruction dialogue to a point of metabolic exchange is the dynamic aspect of our itinerary to the above vortex of creative rememberance. The metaleptic state once the transportation to there-and-now is achieved embodies the structural features relevant at this juncture. Metalepsis amounts to the conjugation of the two metonymic strings ensuing from a tracery of the [past]^-1 and the [future]^-1- cursed be the axe that felled the tree from which this cradle was made, for instance, evokes the atopia of hearing the world’s calls and cries, and responding to it by the construction of a refuge. Yet, it should not be confused with the place from where the sound of this cry is part of an impending past or future: if the body is the world’s antenna, the question is where you actually can go to listen to the world.

We are in the process of constructing a site with a collaborative portal as a worktop for this project. However, we have not yet succeeded in homing a unique event in Algeria and ICOLS. The general idea is to explore the ability to respond — and, concomitantly, responsibility — at the margins of human somatic possibilities, where parts of the environment become integrated into the extended phenotype and link the productive individual with a seductive collectivity. In the latter case, the participant tracery feeds a metabolic awareness partaking of in a web with living links, connecting events with other events by the creation of a unique place for their connection.

We wish to create a situation between three elements on the web-portal of the Department: emdroidery, video and broken poetry from the archives of Mohammed Dib’s novels. Thus, we are breaking ‘text’ down into ‘texture’, ‘track’ and ‘trace’ and consider our contribution to ICOLS to be a worktop for embroidery, video and broken poetry. We intend to go about this process of creative rememberance by creating a worktop in ICOLS — i.e., when the evolving relation between form and content is transformed into work — for the social construction of an art event. For this reason, the project may be subject to changes.