ECH Blog 2020

‘The ordinary is instant,’ are the first words Joan Didion put down in her notebook after her husband’s sudden death in 2003. ‘Confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell,’ she writes, later, in The Year of Magical Thinking (2006). Didion reaches toward a somewhat terrifying fact: we are so infinitely capable of normalising violence; of processing the inexplicable. 2020 seems to ask this of us everyday. It also shows us how the single moment of crisis cannot be plucked from the continuum in which crisis otherwise exists. This seems to predate the disasters of our immediate political and cultural moment: somewhere in the last decade, perhaps even in decades previous, crisis became the everyday.

‘I have to also acknowledge that I am sitting in a moment of perpetual grief,’ said Naomi Beckwith as an introductory note to her presentation at the Experimenter Curators’ Hub 2020. How, Beckwith asks, can this state of perpetual mourning function as an ontological proposition? It’s a theoretical flip, a testament to the discursive power of grief: in the aftermath of everyday violence, can our response to it be a generative, maybe even inventive, exercise?

As part of the Yokohama Triennale 2020 – which was almost entirely opened and run during the first wave of the pandemic – Artistic Directors Raqs Media Collective gathered a kind of ensemble around ideas of ‘Discursive Justice’ comprised of artists Michelle Wong, Lantian Xin and Kabelo Malatsie. The three artists wrote, as a kind of argument, ‘Millions march down roads in Hong Kong. Thousands in South Africa discuss consent on twitter. Women run households via smartphones from makeshift protest-tents.’ Discursive Justice, a kind of niche arm of legal theory, provides a framework by which to look at the daily existential as an opportunity rather than an end. Despite our critique of the law, and perhaps, because of our critique, it is necessary to look at it in new and imaginative ways.

Jeebesh Bagchi explained how Discursive Justice is a process not of formalising the informal manners and everyday realities by which people actually make and engage with discourse, and how it plays out in the everyday – but indeed of informalising the structures and systems by which the law exists within this discourse. It does not make a false binary between what is abstract, and what is lived. ‘The street makes itself a theatre of speech acts,’ continues the note written by the three artists, ‘They are intangible courts of poetic appeals, of argumentation through myths, stories, and care, and are not daunted by the Law; law is but one dialect.’

Beckwith spent a moment showing the work of LaToya Ruby Frazier, an artist from the “Rust Belt” of the United States, an area still reeling from the loss of industry and jobs. In images that form part of the Home Body Series (2010) Frazier gestures and performs in empty and abandoned previously working-class homes, wearing the clothes and bed linens of her deceased grandfather, whose own body bore the brunt of industrial work, ageing prematurely. Frazier enacts a kind of ghostly ritual, a moment of communion; a keeping of continuity with the dead. She is the ‘invocation of spirits that still may reside in these homes’ said Beckwith.

‘What do we wish to be custodians of, and for?’ Natasha Ginwala asked – and perhaps it is this: custodians of the past, certainly, but also of our own imaginative capacities of what we are able to divine from the past. Further, still, the responsibility of turning the paranoid, defeated readings into something else – something bursting with regenerative potential.

‘Pour yourself a cocktail or some weird probiotic drink and pass this book around,’ begins performance artist Morgan Bassichis’s introduction to the fantastical political treatise (of a kind) The Faggots and Their Friends Between, ‘Bottoms up!’

The book takes us to the dystopian empire of Ramrod, where state officials despair and yet still try to enforce a strict heteropatriarchal system. But the kingdom is crumbling, its cracks are irreparable, too visible. In the midst of this dust – and fascism – the fairies, queens, faggots, sissies and dykes imagine and create a different world. Ramrod is, suffice to say, not dissimilar to our present day. It has a very particular and special radical potential: as Bassichis explains, ‘Friendship is understood as a means to an end amidst unceasing violence – the bridge and the destination.’ Reading this now is to remind ourselves that we need to reimagine the family, friendship, and kinship. The future may have collapsed, but we have each other.

It is thus fitting that we began the second day of ECH 2020 with a presentation by Dr. Léuli Eshrāghi. ‘The present and future of indigenous time and space will not be defined by cis Caucasian men,’ they began, ‘Our worlds will be realised by us – multigendered, sensual, spiritual beings committed to renaissance.’ It is an aesthetic renaissance, yes, but also ideological. It is one that exists in relation to ‘habitat, land and sky’ they explained, as well as our capacity as plural beings to live and love. Eshrāghi, in a poem dedicated to their late artist grandmother, also asked, ‘What does it mean to gather together at the foot of giant Banyans and ancestral hillocks and mountains where soft lands spread – dislocated, dispossessed?’

Reem Fadda began her presentation by remarking upon how useful it has been to reflect on the social justice movements that have swept through 2020. ‘We need to reframe our languages of reason,’ Fadda remarked, drawing from Achile Mbebe, ‘because they offer themselves as doorways to access multiple audiences.’ Fadda stressed that these logics of reason need to be further rooted in land knowledge and in indigeneity.

Fadda then made connections between the UAE, Morocco, Palestine and Cuba, echoing a sentiment Eshrāghi set up with their poem, ‘We have come together from different parts of the forest, bringing our ancestors with us.’

In speaking of his experience working with regional museums and collections in India Naman Ahuja stressed the important of a decolonial approach not only in the West, but here in the post-colonial state too. What does it mean, under this aegis then, to actually be “decolonial” – especially in a way that may interrupt ‘the smooth narrative of globalisation’ (to borrow from Natasha Ginwala)? First, it is a question of access, as also posited by Fadda.

How can we, especially in the subcontinent, fully share and swap our collective histories, face our own complicity in the violence of the everyday, build solidarities that are both political, and radical, and cultural, without first addressing the deep and vicious codes of caste, class and nation state that segregate us before the revolution is even able to occur?

To paraphrase Eshrāghi, European cartographic fantasies of separation and nation simply never account for deep time relationships, or those of care and reciprocation. They recollected how their grandmother would often remind the cousins, ‘Remember me, visit often, don’t take too long – I don’t want to be buried already when you do.’ This clear request holds the exquisite enormity of a rallying cry, a call to action, and an ideological resurrection: we must, first, look to our immediate networks to do the necessary radical work.

— Skye Arundhati Thomas is a writer based in Goa. She is editor of The White Review.

Artist Yang Fudong’s Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest (2003–2007) reimagines a Chinese fable: a group of people withdraw from corrupt urban society and retreat into a forest to live together in a reimagined community. Their home, nestled in the eponymous bamboo forest, turns somewhat utopian – shaped by nourishing conversations, intimate moments of sharing, the reciting of poetry, singing together and drinking. They are disenchanted city-dwellers, tired of having to negotiate China’s contradictory communist/capitalist economy. An image of the work – a five-hour long film shown at the 2007 Venice Biennale – was presented by curator Doryun Chong on the third day of the Experimenter Curator’s Hub.

The film, part of the collection at Hong Kong’s M+ Museum, where Chong is director, resonates deeply with Chong’s presentation. One powerful parallel being over the site of the museum itself – built on reclaimed land as a space for knowledge, exchange and community, much like the bamboo forest in which the young protagonists of the film find refuge. Indeed, the film also reminds us of Hong Kong’s own fight for democracy and self-determination, an effort that has only intensified in the last year, sparking off protest movements that inspired the world. Uniquely, and in the interest of safeguarding community, the works acquired or donated to M+ are managed by a ‘trust for and by the people of Hong Kong’ to protect its integrity in an increasingly unstable geo-political moment in East Asia, especially mobilised by Mainland China.

Capitalism was later, on the fourth day of the hub, complicated and entangled with narratives of love by curator Gitanjali Dang, who spoke of her show Love in the Times of Choleric Capital (0000-0000?). Dang runs the nomadic curatorial lab Khanabadosh (meaning: those who carry their homes with/upon themselves). Love in the Times of Choleric Capital introduced visitors and the audience alike to Faizul Hasan Qadri. A retired postmaster, Qadri had spent his life savings towards building his own version of the Taj Mahal in memory of his deceased wife, Tajamulli Begum. Tajamulli believed that no one would visit her grave because she had no kin, and so, Qadri built this monument in defiance, and undoing, of her anxiety – one so especially tied to the rigours of family.

A sense of loss was also carried in the presentation by Alessandro Vincentelli, of the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead. Vincentelli reminded us of the funeral hosted by Iceland for the first glacier they lost to Climate Change. Attended by hundreds, the event included the placing of a bronze plaque on a bare rock that once was the Okjökull glacier in Western Iceland. Vincentelli uses this unique ceremony as a point of departure for the upcoming ECO 8 Triennial for Art and Environment. ‘Humour and profound loss are brought together,’ he said, speaking toward a particularly generative juxtaposition of profoundly connected opposites.

Curator Zasha Colah’s opening slides listed the words ‘Community, Minority, Public Action, Counter-Monumentality’, and immediately clarified how she has learnt to let go of these classifications. She indicated how they were not useful terms by which to think of terrains, or to situate ourselves in space or geography. Colah spoke about how exhibitions evolve in the process of their making, leading those behind the scenes to something entirely new by the time the curtains fall. These transitions and transformations also influence her work with artists – long-term relationships kept intimate despite sporadic intervals and fresh meetings. Like the forest dwelling retreat, in hopes of a utopia that sings together, the last day ended with thoughts on how chance upon change in order to rebuild our lives.

— Skye Arundhati Thomas is a writer based in Goa. She is editor of The White Review.

Skye Arundhati Thomas: In this time of impossible-to-imagine-futures I would love to know what generative forms of world-building and future-making have been inspiring you, or perhaps introducing you to hopeful or even critical alternatives to present day normativity. (Or perhaps there are none, and that is of course understandable, too! 2020 has been such a time of deep mourning.) I ask because I keep thinking about what artist Alok Vaid Menon wrote in a recent issue of Marg, ‘At this time, we are tasked with the edict not just to create differently, but to live differently.’

Gitanjali Dang: For any future building to happen we should begin by acknowledging that the crisis is not of this time, i.e. 2020. It is ongoing, as is the resistance to it. Resisting how things are can only be possible if we explore, as a first step, how things came to be so historically.

Skye Arundhati Thomas: Has 2020 changed your relationship to the systems and infrastructure that make contemporary art exist and sustain itself across the world? At the risk of exceptionalising the non-stop state of emergency that has been 2020 – especially considering how disproportionately any crisis affects people or nation states – I am curious to know if this particular year of continuous crisis, and thus requiring a radical reimagining, has changed your relationship to this strange cocoon of abstraction and commerce that we in part occupy, i.e. the so-called “international art world”?

Gitanjali Dang: No

Skye Arundhati Thomas: I did appreciate and enjoy the ‘Invisible Light’ series of pieces you curated for First Post. I think it was interesting that you put different practices in direct conversation with each other. In this contemporary moment of intense alienation, and also difficulty of negotiating ways in which to come together with a critical inflection, I wonder if you could speak more about the generative potential for creating spaces in which artists can be in deep, nuanced and critical dialogue with each other – and not only be, say, tied to a representational project.

Gitanjali Dang: Thank you with regards to First Post.

Artists hanging out together is overrated because the world could do with less cliques. And artists could do well with mingling with whomever . . . you know, be more spontaneous, promiscuous, stupendous, ridiculous, facetious, courageous, enormous, curious, be more various. Resist echo chambers. I'm often faced with this problem when I'm on a residency for instance, everyone wants you to just meet artists and everything is geared in one direction.

I joined a reading circle just before the lockdown, and it made the lockdown – for me, personally – endurable and timely. It was nice to be reading and thinking alongside all these people, almost all of who were unknown to me. But mostly it felt like a relief that there were no strings attached, the specific kind of strings that always come with creating art spaces, be it physical or notional. If Khanbadosh has thus far made do without a physical address then it is in part to dodge these strings, but mostly because it has a name to live up to.

Skye Arundhati Thomas: Has 2020 changed your relationship to the systems and infrastructure that make contemporary art exist and sustain itself across the world? At the risk of exceptionalising the non-stop state of emergency that has been 2020 – especially considering how disproportionately any crisis affects people or nation states – I am curious to know if this particular year of continuous crisis, and thus requiring a radical reimagining, has changed your relationship to this strange cocoon of abstraction and commerce that we in part occupy, i.e. the so-called “international art world”?

Zasha Colah: This mass living through a state of exception brings us closer to the life of many populations and communities, and many individuals, making us more attuned to what the stakes of the curatorial have always, to me, been: how to conduit, let something escape, steal in or out. In this sense, the artistic voice of the present is not a new position, but, potentially a very seasoned one that had little circulation within the global art system, but was very connected to its historic moment and immediate terrain.

Skye Arundhati Thomas: Has 2020 changed your relationship to the systems and infrastructure that make contemporary art exist and sustain itself across the world? At the risk of exceptionalising the non-stop state of emergency that has been 2020 – especially considering how disproportionately any crisis affects people or nation states – I am curious to know if this particular year of continuous crisis, and thus requiring a radical reimagining, has changed your relationship to this strange cocoon of abstraction and commerce that we in part occupy, i.e. the so-called “international art world”?

Naomi Beckwith: One of, at least for me, the most interesting things about 2020 has been how the language of transformative justice has leaked into the everyday: discourses of empathy, care and radically reimagining political structures (even, abolishing). I wonder what you make of this, especially in the context of the incredible racial divide and tension in the US. Black liberation movements from the US, in many ways, inform the conversation around transformative justice in other parts of the world. I wonder: are there generative ways for the arts to adopt transformative justice strategies that could actually work, be feasible, and thus be somewhat radical in what they propose?

Skye Arundhati Thomas: Has 2020 changed your relationship to the systems and infrastructure that make contemporary art exist and sustain itself across the world? At the risk of exceptionalising the non-stop state of emergency that has been 2020 – especially considering how disproportionately any crisis affects people or nation states – I am curious to know if this particular year of continuous crisis, and thus requiring a radical reimagining, has changed your relationship to this strange cocoon of abstraction and commerce that we in part occupy, i.e. the so-called “international art world”?

Alessandro Vincentelli: This is a great question that goes to the heart of how there should indeed be a reckoning, a consciousness raising moment of deep reflection and adaptation. A kind of deep listening. Wrestling with the pause of postponed and cancelled projects comes a time of new responsibilities. As we close 2020 and move into 2021, this should be time of “deep listening” and deep-adaptation. Institutions have phenomenal challenges to maintain their programmmes.

It arises from a far better conception of our place alongside other species, beings and a full recognition of how our accelerated pace leads us to the precipice. The climate crisis is telling us something. I do believe that within five years we will see citizen assemblies and legal frameworks in many countries to enforce ecocide as a crime that can be prosecuted at The Hague, International Court of Justice. So, lobbying transnational agencies to think actively about A Green New Deal and other strategies of pivoting resources to address a looming crisis, are both necessary and urgent. One of the ongoing research areas for me is technology and democracy. For the last twelve to eighteen months it has been around algorithmic governance, and the hidden, and what artists have been doing as part of this conversation. All of us need to be better at scrutinising the encoded biases in these systems, and the insidious ways large tech firms can benefit from our negligence. Observers, writers and critics such as Arundhati Roy and Naomi Klein are crucial to better equipping us to address this. I do believe artists can have a role here, together with legal, often non-institutional structures, and perhaps citizen assemblies, it is all about creating spaces of imagination.

Skye Arundhati Thomas: I would love to know what generative forms of world-building and future-making have been inspiring you, or perhaps introducing you to hopeful or even critical alternatives to present day normativity. (Or perhaps there are none, and that is of course understandable, too! 2020 has been such a time of deep mourning.)

Alessandro Vincentelli: I am much taken by William Gibson’s words, ‘The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed’. This was from 2003! Justice, righting the wrongs of slavery, colonialism, and active reparation programmes, are going to be essential. Future curating, wrestling with what is placed in a space, a gallery, or museum, comes with responsibilities. It will matter little if some of the concerns brought out by this “pause” or time of re-set aren’t addressed. Inequitable distribution of rights, resources and wealth is at the root of everything.

‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice’. This quote from Martin Luther King Jr. has been rightly much used in the last two weeks. In the UK, we would like to look at in relation to divisionary politics soewn by characters such as Dominic Cummings (now departed) and in the US, the unmasking of Trump and the dismantling of Trumpism, which is clearly just the beginning! Change takes a long time, but it does happen.

This idea of “world building” is where one looks for sustenance and new directions. One profound book for me this year for me has been On Time and Water (2020) by the Icelandic activist, filmmaker and writer, Andri Snær Magnason. The book came out in August, with Serpents Tail in the UK. It is an urgent, human tale of place and. Of an account of the melting glaciers, combining family and memory, and how the forces of geology and human time are coming together in ways they just should not be. His point; changes that previously took a hundred thousand years now happen in one hundred.

I have also been drawn to the writings of the late Mark Fisher, a thinker and writer whose observations on the symptoms of late capitalism and technology are deeply relevant to our present, as well as the kind of articles published by Arundhati Roy and Naomi Klein.

Naomi Klein has recently suggested that the ‘frictionless future’ is ‘a future in which, for the privileged, almost everything is home delivered, either virtually via streaming and cloud technology, or physically via driverless vehicle or drone, then screen “shared” on a mediated platform. It’s a future that employs far fewer teachers, doctors and drivers. It accepts no cash or credit cards (under guise of virus control), and has skeletal mass transit and far less live art.’

Should we accept it? Is it what we want? How does it relate to the making of art? What is it doing to our attempts to redress equality, to humanity and to other forms of assembly? Having a vigilant, critical eye on the “frictionless future” mapped out by others for “us” seems an equally active place to be operating it in right now.

References to things mentioned here:

Andri Snær Magnason

Emergence Magazine: On Time and Water

Naomi Klein

The Guardian, How big tech plans to profit from the pandemic

Arundhati Roy, ‘Pandemic as a Portal’ her essay looked at a key essay in the FT that emerged in the last six months that helps us analyse this and look at endemic patterns of inequality.

Link

Mark Fisher, K-Punk, the Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, 2018

Link

Skye Arundhati Thomas: One of, at least for me, the most interesting things about 2020 has been how the language of transformative justice has leaked into the everyday. Discourses of empathy, care and radically reimagining political structures, especially those that do with welfare, are more present in the mainstream. What do you make of this – indeed, as someone who has been engaging with dialogues of collectivity, community, and ancestral, indigenous memory through both your practice as a curator, and as an artist?

Léuli Eshrāghi: These are radicalising times, for all the pain, suffering, privilege, injustice and rebalancing that comes from all quarters right now. I didn't think I would be a latecomer to prison/police abolition, to the extent that that decolonial antiracist thought has progressed in my own consciousness. I realise now how indelibly linked various intersecting forms of anti-Blackness and epistemic subservience to Western supposed Enlightenment universality have infected our capacity as humanity to care and tend to our fellow complex beings. But also, that many are busy restoring other forms of justice and land-based systems of governance beyond the comprehension of US imperialism.
I think many of us inherit the intergenerational trauma, the cultural memory gaps, as well as the imperative to change and enable true change. I don't know how much the visual arts can impact in radical forms of world-making that this Planet deserves from us – its wayward selfish progenitor.

I definitely recognise that I am “late” to longstanding discourses and community-building actions, such as the removal of the carceral impulse from colonial capitalist structures the world over, but also that, I, like many other queer and Indigenous-gendered artists, curators, writers, knowledge makers – from diasporas and Indigeneities that we are still recovering – am exhausted by white supremacy and colourism.

Skye Arundhati Thomas: What is especially true is that these discourses are the result of a long-term commitment, focus and sacrifice by BIPOC leaders and social justice warriors across the world. What can we learn from their legacies – those alive, present, or erased, from canons – as we take these important leaps forward into rebuilding our lives in the midst of what feels like continuous and unrelenting crisis?

Léuli Eshrāghi: We have all the accumulated knowledges and practices that generate futures of possibility and balance – that render us humble participants in Planet's systems and flows, rather than centred egos. We have the majority of humanity's love, loss, poetry, power, hxstories and aspirations to (re)learn and cherish from this moment of reckoning. I like continental philosophy enough, but really wonder when we will study Indigenous and racialised philosphers with the same fervour and rational obsession. Can we imagine Dalit and other Adivasi poets, novelists, commentators, knowledge keepers being revered as much as Brahmin and white Europeans in the visual arts and university institutions, from Kabul to Yangon? We need to care and deepen our personal and collective engagement for all of us (or any of us) to have a right to a future.

Skye Arundhati Thomas: In this time of impossible-to-imagine-futures, I am curious to know what generative forms of world-building and future-making have been inspiring you, or perhaps introducing you to hopeful or even critical alternatives to present day normativity? (Or perhaps there are none, and that is of course understandable, too! A lot about 2020 has just been about mourning.)

Léuli Eshrāghi: I have been focusing my reading on queer/feminist/Indigenous/racialised poets from Canada, United States, Australia, Indonesia and New Zealand this year. I have surrounded myself with non-fiction texts on Indigenous arts from around the world and queer bodies in hxstories of visuality and relationality. I have spent a lot of this year in mourning and feel like that is something humanity needs to honour, particularly the privileged white settler, and colonisation-derived powerful communities around the world. This pandemic, more than others in the past century, does not discriminate, but the insane gaps in healthcare, education, housing and food security really demonstrate how broken our planetary collectivity is.

I watch a lot of science fiction shows to help me imagine how futures entirely unlike today are possible. Indigenous traditions are distinct to this Western Europe-induced malaise from the leftover obsessions of white supremacy, colonial capitalism, carceral containment, and extractive rapports of domination. Non-imperial Ancestors the world over – those not belonging to a white minority globally exercising power for its abuse and their gain – have survived and thrived through much worse. This is the latest of many many mass death events and pandemics, European imperialism being the most devastating for humans and our kin animals, birds, sea creatures and deities.

Skye Arundhati Thomas: You have previously made exhibitions that actively think of the queer and trans body in relation to both ancestral inheritance and possibly futurity, and this feels very prescient, especially, to this time. I'd love to hear more about what it means to create spaces in which queer and trans bodies can exist with deep history, nuance, joy, and – possibility for a future that doesn’t erase us.

Léuli Eshrāghi: My recent NIRIN 22nd Biennale of Sydney commission titled re(cul)naissance (2020) – a tongue-in-cheek French neologism for rebirth through the end/ass – comprised live performance, a golden steel water pool, many metres of screen printed fabrics arranged in a precolonial temple emulated form, neon texts from my poetry in Sāmoan and French, and a video work shot on a nude beach in Sydney. I wanted to create a literal space for contemplation and for queer/trans/Indigenous-gendered peoples to feel at home and away from the compulsory heterosexuality performance of mainstream societies in the Great Ocean, including Australia. I don't know if this is ever fully realisable in a public context as audiences bring their own ideas and projections of what they see and can't see.

But for the artists I collaborated closely with for this project, we knew we were honouring each other, moving through stages of grief, pain, joy, fulfilment, complicity and love to shared possibility, even for the space of twenty-minute performance made for each other, and or our Ancestors, rather than for Biennale audiences. Art can be the alibi for the deep cultural work we all must do to make love, and be seen, real and sustained. I also think that just because archives of various orders deny queer Ancestrality, and thus Futurity, that in no way means we can't engage with the ghosts or presences that haunt, because we've already been here and will be around forever.

Skye Arundhati Thomas: Has 2020 changed your relationship to art? At the risk of exceptionalising the non-stop state of emergency that has been 2020 – especially considering how disproportionately any crisis affects different people and nation states – I am curious to know if this continuous crisis, and thus radical reimagining, has changed your relationship to what you would like for the systems that mobilise the production and distribution of artwork to be? One of, at least for me, the most interesting things about 2020 has been how the language of transformative justice has leaked into the everyday: discourses of empathy, care and radically reimagining political structures, especially those to do with welfare, have become more present in the mainstream.

Raqs Media Collective: We all know that the pandemic and the economic distress and hardship that we are witnessing will alter our habits and assumptions of engagement. We were in the midst of two curatorial processes – the Yokohama Triennale and Five Million Incidents – when the pandemic happened. Both these processes alerted us to a critical question: of how the image of artistic creativity is governed and mobilised. This we tentatively term as the ‘governmentality of creativity’. It is what this moment has brought into crisis, and how it now reworks itself, that remains to be seen.

This governance of creativity offers an order of time and a model of authorship. It brings in a measure to time, and a measure to the authoring impulse. These had notionally been stabilised by the institutional apparatus of art and culture. Concomitantly, a formation of infrastructure had become privileged and desired. Time was neatly divided between concealment and revelation, staged within enclosures, and authorship was mobilised as an inventiveness that calls upon deep experience and unique clairvoyance.

The image of creativity that is emerging now is different – it is one of interrupted spatiality, it is mobilised in unpredictable instances, it is perennial, it perennially secretes – exudes, extrudes, excretes, emanates. Take for example the ideas of care and repair. These are going to move within art institutions in significant ways. We all know that the act of care is perennial but has fluctuations of intensity, and it draws in everyone in unaccustomed ways. We also know that it is now part of a new enterprise. And we also know that care-work, like cleaning and translation, is done through a working out of the de-authoring impulse in life.

This intersection with life that has emerged now will generate a turbulent pressure in the given image of ‘creativity’ so as to rethink life, authorship and time. And, therefore, the infrastructure of life itself. The institutions of art were well geared into a productive idea of economy, with a drive of muscularity and immortality. Now they will need to ask themselves what idea of economy they are turning towards.