(ALERT) Ghosts

“A Guest + A Host = A Ghost”: Marcel Duchamp’s pun (originally inscribed on a candy wrapper) is by now an all-time favorite rhyme, a poetic aphorism. where the rituals of “coming together.” odd kinships, symbiotic relationships, and unexpected encounters are gathered under the amalgamated word “ghost”.

This notebook acknowledges the high wisdom of its low-form wit, the infinite field of joy that the interrelationship of disparate wor(l)ds gives.

This notebook includes such “ghosts” as contributions that twist and turn the question of ceremonies.

Vanessa Theodoropoulou enters with “Le Sentiment de la Nature aux Buttes Chaumont”. An inquiry into the state of affects in the beginning of the 21st century — a sharp experimental hybrid (poetic-visual) meditation on both the experience of life-in-Covid19 and Vanessa’s life-long study of Situationist art and theory.

Kostas Stasinopoulos enters with “Tectonic and Tentacular”, anticeremonial states of being — a reflection on, and experience of, certain curatorial and artistic practices that imagine into existence the “worlding with,” which maybe the most important ceremony. Ever.

AVENIR INSTITUTE enters with “Against the Future”, by Denis Maksimov and Timo Tuominen — a pre-pandemic-made publication (2017), part of their installation “Temples of Futures Thinking,” conceived in order to critically question the roots of futurist nostalgia, through a recourse to mind-maps and Greek mythology as well as a call to the unpredictability of multiple voices. The Institute’s “Avenir Manifesto” is recited here, and master of invention Jacques Derrida paves the way:

“In general, I try and distinguish between what one calls the Future and ‘l’avenir’ [the ‘to come’]. The future is that which — tomorrow, later, next century — will be. There is a future which is predictable, programmed, scheduled, foreseeable. But there is a future, l’avenir (to come) which refers to someone who comes whose arrival is totally unexpected. For me, that is the real future. That which is totally unpredictable. The Other who comes without my being able to anticipate their arrival. So if there is a real future, beyond the other known future, it is l’avenir in that it is the coming of the Other when I am completely unable to foresee their arrival.”