‘Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them. For it always happened that when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt to discover where I was, everything would be moving round me through the darkness: things, places, years.’ Marcel Proust
‘A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia’ is an ongoing series of books, each of which devoted to a single and singular object in the world, varying from artwork to artifact; from curiosity to everyday objects. With this publication series, we propose to expand on the distant pages of that ‘certain Chinese Encyclopedia’ that appeared in Borges’ writing, and to generate an alternative form of knowledge production, departing from the potential of the object and the object as actor.
ENCYCLOPEDIA: [Greek] enkyklopaidía — a misreading of enkýklios paideía; circular (i.e., well-rounded) education.
Each object contains within its contours and beneath its surface, the infinity of what constitutes its own singularity. The effort of Uqbar’s ‘Certain Chinese Encyclopedia’, is one of unmistakable failure: a naive attempt to circumnavigate the object, in order to arrive at the point where we, and others before us, once began, and from where we, and others after us, will forever depart, again and again.
We believe that it is not impossible to reinvigorate Proust’s drowsy confusion, so that the things around us can float, rather then being fixed, as the sleepwalkers of our consciousness, in the mental space we have assigned them to. This project attempts to grasp knowledge about the material world that arises each day, in the early morning, when daylight sets in and before things begin to dawn upon us.
The zero edition of ‘A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia’ will be edited by Moosje Goosen and is devoted to the phantom limb: a ‘ground zero’ for the object, and apparition of human matter that can only begin to behave like an object when it is no longer there. This volume tries to understand when dead and disappearing matter manifests itself as a persistent, animate ‘thing.’
Zeno Reminder
Cabinet Magazine Space / Performa 09
Date: November 13 to 27, 2009. Location: Cabinet, 300 Nevins Street, Brooklyn, NY
Gallery hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 12 to 6 pm, and by appointment (closed on November 26)
Co-presented by Performa and Cabinet. FREE; no RSVP necessary.
Opening reception: Friday, November 13, 6 to 8 pm. Screening of "Nobody Was Tomorrow":
Friday, November 13, 7 pm
Reading of "Summer Maneuvers": Friday, November 20, 7 pm
