junteadjuntas - Tumblr blog

junteadjuntas · 9 years ago

Text

Synching through Dance

The beginning of love is nauseating, so are the windy roads of Adjuntas.

- I’m going to Puerto Rico. - Oh that’s great, for fun? - Well, I am going with a group of artist friends to work on a project. - What’s the project?

A question that drives the conversation to a sharp curve, turning small talk to big talk, not without anxiety, and nausea. What’s the project?

My answer at the time came in the form of a shortcut: A friend bought a piece of land on the mountainside of a town called Adjuntas, and we are going there to start something. We will be building a structure and setting up codes and principles for future groups to build upon and develop the project.

The difficulty in defining the project stems partly from not really knowing what it is, and partly from postponing such knowledge, particularly because we have been meeting in New York about a project in a rain forest on a slope on the sides of a mountain top in Adjuntas, Puerto Rico. We wanted to wait until we were on the land, in the town, as friends to one another, and others to the town’s community. We aspired for guidance by our immediate surroundings and all the possible forms of encounter these yield. Baris’s initial invitation to be part of the project was frustratingly generous in leaving the “what” open, peppering it with possible plot lines such as “an informal residency, a school of sorts, an open space for artistic pursuit and social interaction, a place for positive change.”

In the “Loneliness of the Project,” critic and theorist Boris Groys elaborates on how the formulation of projects has become a common contemporary preoccupation. Any undertaking in the economic, political, or cultural field must first be formulated as a fitting project, as an application awaiting official approval or funding from public authorities, private institutions, or other bodies of varying degrees of officialdom. The intense amount of labor required to conceive of and present the project to committees of assessors—who will grant stamps of approval or rejection—in addition to the elaborate schemes, details, and designs used to package and make the project more fitting, allows us to consider the project as an art form in itself. Groys in fact pushes towards the reading of the project as an art form, deeming regrettable the failure to do so because it is a missed opportunity from comprehending the worlds that these projects posit, with aspirations and visions of the future “which might offer greater insight into our society than anything else.”[1]

A group of 7 people lingered over exchanges via e-mail and in person. We met, scrolled, brainstormed, debated, and finally booked the tickets. We temporarily suspended our lives as we have grown into them and shaped them around us. There was an implicit pursuit to alter rhythms, rehash routines, de-familiarize relationships, and put work on hold. We took an exit and arrived to Adjuntas.

A project, Groys posits, is an announcement of a future to come once the project has been executed. Fulfilling such posterity necessitates a leave or absence that transforms the project’s author into a heterogeneous time. He writes: “This other time frame, in turn, is undocked from time as experienced by society: it is de-synchronized. Society’s life carries on regardless thereof; the usual run of things remains un-impinged. But unnoticed somewhere beyond this general flow of time, somebody has begun working on another project.”[2]

At La Finca de Madre Isla—where we were staying, where time flows differently, slowly, where cell reception and internet access are suspended—we unrolled white paper, burdening the rickety walls with colorful marker sketches, timetables, mind maps, notes, and a funny bomba. We were working on a project, undocked from the usual run of things.

But such desynchronization is short-lived, because, in agreement with Groys, the hope is that the project will alter the general run of things, bestowing on mankind a different future that the project anticipated all along, only through resynchronization. In other words, to instill change, desynchronized project time—this undocking from time as we experience it societally—is only a time off after which a resynchronization is bound to happen. A successful project is one that re-synchs and manages to direct the flow of things in a desired direction, while a failed project is one where nothing happens after the resynchronization. What both success and failure have in common is that they terminate the project, they re-synch it back into main time, thus terminating parallel time and its realm of possibilities. Success or failure is inconsequential compared to the disturbing fact of losing existence in this parallel time, of "the abandonment of a life beyond the general run of things.”[3]

We have been living in the project from some time now. We have been relishing in its parallel time and feeling anxious in it as well because we sense its phantom of provisionality. The latter comes with an understanding that we will re-enter the general flow of time sooner or later expected to communicate, present, and define, urged to respond to that daunting question posed during the small talk and internalized within the group. But such question, “the what is it,” is understandably arduous. Groys writes:

If one is involved in a project—or more precisely, is living in a project—one always is already in the future. One is working on something that cannot yet be shown to others, that remains concealed and incommunicable. The project transports one from the present into a virtual future, causing a temporal rupture between oneself and those who still wait for the future to happen. The author of the project already knows what the future will look like, since the project is nothing other than a description of it.[4]

Groys then locates the difficulty of defining the project in the fact that it inhabits future time, temporally breaking off its authors from everyone else who are yet to enter the project’s posterity. This gap between the future of the project and the present must be maintained because it is the project’s inherent purpose: maintaining a vantage point to comprehend the present from the future in order to challenge, change, or overthrow it. Losing the ineffability of the project obliterates a crucial critical distance between the authors and the rest of the society (which they just left and will return to sooner or later), folding the future unto the present and losing that vantage point. Groys states that the project’s authors already know what the future looks like since their project is nothing but a description of that future. I would interject by loosening the assertion of such knowledge of the future, allowing ambiguity and partial delineation of what it might look like. In fact it is precisely such expectation of detailed description that is repulsive and frail, because it strikes at the heart of the project’s appeal, eliminating the future as surprise and consequently the future as possibility different from the now. He continues:

This is why he or she sees no need to justify the project to the present, but it is rather the present that should justify itself to the future that has been proclaimed in the project. It is precisely this precious opportunity to view the present from the future that makes the life lived in the project so enticing to its author—and that ultimately makes the project's completion so upsetting. Hence, in the eyes of any author, the most agreeable projects are those that, from their very inception, are never intended to be completed, since these maintain the gap between the future and the present. These projects are never carried out, never generate an end result, never bring about a final product. But this is by no means to say that such unfinished, impossible to realize projects are utterly excluded from social representation, even if they do not resynchronize with the general run of things through some specific result, successful or not. These projects can, after all, still be documented.[5]

Instead of the cherished meticulous description of the future, the project is existing in that future. In place of a fund-pending description of a projected then, of a final product and sealed narrative, the exciting projects are those that are incomplete, perpetually in the process of becoming. The processual nature of these projects is not lamentable nor should it be defined as the absence of a product. Such processual quality shifts the attention from conclusion and approval of the project towards striving and figuring out the project, towards establishing subjectivities and negotiating them, in short, towards living.

It was not just the beginning of love, nor just those road curves of Adjuntas that were nausea-inducing. It was equally this demand to close the time gap between the project as a possibility to be lived and between the project as a realization to be presented. While Groys’s account delineates the difficulty and unpleasantness of detailing the project, its future, and what it brings about, it should not be taken as excuse for resigning from and grappling with the significance, relevance, and meaning of the project. Similarly, documentation as a form of living in the project should be complicated, precisely because of the rise of documentation in recent years and the ease with which a document can come to stand for and in many times (formally) displace the content and meaning of living in a project.

As his essay title suggests, Groys characterizes the project as a strive to acquire a socially sanctioned loneliness in a world that constantly compels us to be in communication. He argues “individuals who are not prepared to enter into communication at any moment with their fellow people rate as difficult, antisocial and unfriendly, and are subject to social censure.”[6] But this situation takes a U-turn when someone presents a socially sanctioned project that they need to work on, which excuses their self-isolation and discommunication (even excommunication), without being censured or deemed as antisocial, bad, or weirdos. However, such an argument becomes more complicated when the project is site-specific, entailing a particular group of people and a community in which it unravels, to whom it aims to connect, and where it seeks to grow. Such isolation thus need not be solitary, and Groys talks about the need for a collective effort for these projects, where isolation becomes shared isolation. It is here that we can begin to define what our project is.

From what preceded, we can locate a project between two points occurring consecutively. The first marks an uncoupling from the fray of social communication, an undocking from main time and an entry into a parallel heterogeneous time. The second is a resynchronization with the general run of things, a return to communicability, legibility, recounting, and presentation of documentation. Between the two is where the project and its authors live. But they live in shared isolation, not only shared between the 7 of us, but collectively with the people of Adjuntas. What I want to suggest here is the contextuality of desynchronization, which opens up the possibility of synchronization within the de-synchronization of the project. Desynchronizing for us means de-synching from the run of things in New York, Richmond, Mexico City, Beirut, Istanbul, and El Salvador, and re-synching is the return to the flow of things in these cities. But in the meantime, the time of the project, we are in Adjuntas, attempting to start a project, in fact attempting to synchronize with our surroundings. Thus, between the desynchronization and resynchronization, or during desynchronization, our project attempts a practice of synchronization.

This practice of synchronization required a clearing, both mental and physical. The land at hand was a jungle, much like our heads, sprouting with competing but undecidable “what” scenarios, cluttered with greenness. We needed a machete and bulldozer to allow for a breathing space, a space to think and imagine, to establish longevity without the lure of the result-oriented, but with the indispensability of synchronization. So we set out to create a dance platform.

A set of inquiries circulated to guide the conception of the dance platform. As the first iteration for our endeavor at synchronization, at a long-term connection with the community in Adjuntas, we gravitated towards a corporal manifestation: synchronization through dance. On an island floating on a rich history of dance and music, it felt pertinent to acquire the rhythm. Dance becomes a language that creates unison, not prescribed from without, but that emerges from within while preserving the peculiarities and eccentricities of the dancers. Dance as synchronization occupies a wide-ranging field of moving together: from the sameness of movements in line dancing to their complementarity in partner dancing and further yet to their correspondence, contrast, and even conflict in free-styling. What holds this field of moving together is the dance platform as a place of gathering. Synchronization is not mimicking a pace but pacing accordingly, it is not achieving undifferentiated actions and mitigated antagonisms, but holding different actions and antagonisms at critical distance, in-sync.

[1] Boris Groys, “The Loneliness of the Project,” in Going Public (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011), 71.

[2] Ibid., 75.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., 75-76

[5] Ibid., 76.

[6] Ibid., 72.

0 notes