The practice of visual artist Liza Wolters (1992, NL) is like a fluid repository that is constantly growing, consisting of experiences and encounters, finds and materials that come together and grow apart again. She works with photography, video, installations, text, sound, publications and (found) objects.

two texts on my practice by 1. Margriet Kemper, 2. Roy Voragen:

_{1. Organs of Knowledge
A text by artist and writer Margriet Kemper, blog De Vos op Maandag, 18.12.2017}

We are creatures of affection. We like to surround ourselves with the things we love, we almost exist by grace of what we love. Even a misanthropist, loving as he does his own pessimism and distrust. According to Heidegger, philosophy has always studied “affects” as “objects” of knowledge, but he takes it a step further by calling them “organs of knowledge”. This line of thought perplexed me! “We are always under a disposition of some sort. […] This disposition is how we experience the boundaries of our self-determination”, Rüdiger Safranski says in ‘Heidegger Between Good and Evil’.

I recently visited a solo exhibition, for the first time in a while. The artist graduated in Breda not long ago. I’m fond of her, so the affective element is already present. I wander through the large spaces, spotting works near me or from afar again and again. Every time I change my position, the constellation of images changes along with me. Unlike wandering around a city, I’m walking through a composed space here. All parts have been picked and placed with great care. There are photographs, video works, objects, and works that are somewhere in between. This ambiguity also applies to the subject matter, without exception. There doesn’t seem to be a thing unworthy of her attention, nothing is too insignificant, too used up, too useless. But things aren’t that simple, of course.

Walking around there made me think of the times I travelled alone. Your eyes and ears grow as the time spent alone in a strange environment goes by. It’s not just your senses that open up, it’s as if you yourself lurch outward, and then contract again. You become a sort of … breathing jellyfish with its tentacles splayed wide open. But in her exhibition, you’re not a jellyfish in a natural environment, but in an expressly urban one. Floating around becomes a purely mental thing. Her pictures beckon, order you to stay put, give you nothing but a finger, laugh at you, keep icily silent, make a bit of a fool out of you, hinder you, seduce you.

And suddenly, it occurred to me that I, the viewer, was her material! I’ve been reduced to putty, made soft with heat, pushed in, folded flat and pulled apart, shoved in a corner, wiped in a slit. Nothing but a lump of putty, but at least one that knows it’s a lump of putty. An affect as an organ of knowledge.

,

_{cartography of chairs and other contingent catastrophes

by curator and writer Roy Voragen}

The hands of the wall clock show the time: 8:41 (and 28 seconds). However, it is unclear whether this is 8:41 in the a.m. or 8:41 in the p.m.; but what is clear, though, is that at that exact moment – coincidence? – someone googled the definition – connotation? – of the word ´everything´, i.e.:

everything

/ˈɛvrɪθɪŋ/

pronoun

1.
– all things
"they did everything together"
all
   the whole shebang
   the full monty
the whole nine yards
– all things of importance
"I lost everything in the crash"
– the most important thing or aspect
"money isn't everything"

   2.
the current situation; life in general
"how's everything?"
   antonym: nothing

Now, what would an archive of everything look like? Or, as a subset, because we don't have all ff-ing day, an archive of all chairs? The whole shebang!

All chairs ever imagined.
All chairs ever drawn & designed.
All chairs ever made.
All chairs ever gossiped about.
All chairs ever bumped into.
All chairs ever photographed.
All chairs ever entered dictionaries.
All chairs ever narrated and theorized.
   All chairs ever affected bodies and things.
All chairs ever taken up residence in our heads.

An all-encompassing archive of everything chair-related requires the invention of a new field of cartography and, also, librarians who leave copious notes and other imprints in margins. Such as:

Homes. Ephemeral homes. The solid melts. Liquefies. Chances. Coincidences. Coincidences composed. Coincidences remade. Orchestrating contingencies. Bodies. Bodies moved. Bodies moved to another zip code. Homes without organs. Homes that require legwork. Where is home? Who is home? Can homes swap? Can we shift continents? Rumah isn't thuis. Fragility. Finitude. Geography of empathy. Hugs. How to make it home? When does home become a burden? Homes shattered. Bodies slammed into tilted things. Foreign objects. Aliens. Shared idiosyncrasies. Lingering Bodies. Lust. Longing. Transferable loneliness. Naked vulnerability. Negated spaces. Negative space. In-between spaces. Isolation. Things not as ding an sich. Archipelago. Ambiguity. Frail failure. Words words words. Ghosts too. And etcetera and etcetera.

The directory of such an archive has probably as many pages as the largest known prime number has digits, in short: when the catalogue becomes this immeasurable the thing being catalogued must be out of this world.

So let’s

   burn
chairs;

   burn
dictionary entries of chairs;

(don't burn
   chairs residing in our heads);

and, perhaps, keep
some photographic evidence.

And, in other words, move from an all encompassing archive to a stuttering archive. The all encompassing archive is totalizing as it offers the delusion that complete and unified closure is possible. An all encompassing archive is an impossible answer to the wrong question: how to satisfy the desire to completely understand, once and for all, all objects by a singular, autonomous subject.

A stuttering archive, on the other hand, results from an understanding of our fluid world as continuous processes in continual transformation. In this view of things there is no separation between knowing subjects and known objects; we are affected by things, and things are affected by us. Affects are in our encounters in and with the world of things. Brian Massumi writes: ¨To affect and to be affected is to be open to the world, to be active in it and to be patient for its return activity. This openness is also taken as primary.¨ And Sara Ahmed adds: ¨We are moved by things. And in being moved, we make things.¨

Stuttering, stammering, murmuring – to speak with Gilles Deleuze – is to have faith in an archive as a collection of wobbly encounters, i.e. relational. Or: a territory of the not-yet.

In the meantime, artificial light touches a stretch of abandoned pavement. And we – we see but don't see all that can be seen, not because we are visually impaired perse or because the light doesn't illuminate much but because our bodies are oriented in certain ways, directed towards certain things, so that certain things will come into focus over other things (and, obviously, this has ethico-political causes & consequences, so much so that there can – should – be a need to dis-orient/re-orient ourselves).

Stuttering, stammering, murmuring – we make things, things make us, we make archives, archives make us and any cartography crumbles under the un/bearable lightness of contingency…

_{Roy Voragen is a Maastricht-based writer and curator, and this essay was written in response to the work & practice of Rotterdam-based artist Liza Wolters}

AKV | St. Joost, Breda

LIZA WOLTERS

self together sorted encounters

info

Orchestrating Coincidence

Orchestrating Coincidence

Website of Orchestrating Coincidence, to see the edition as a whole and which ones are still available.

For more info about and documentation of the project, please see these pages: the exhibition, opening & accompanied catalog.