all things want to run
Esther Arribas & Anthony Nestel
When a word tries to pin a thing down, the text knows that something has been lost in the transaction. «There is a cube made of aluminium and a certain amount of human collaboration». The question about the power of the text to describe, is also the question about the self-assurance and aggressiveness of language: how can one escape the assertiveness of language? It seems that when words are written the work is done. «You are reading a description of a performance». But what if I tell you I am writing this text as you read it. What if every time one reads these words, some force in the matter of language makes it a new one? There is a similar phenomenon in physics that once was called “passion at a distance”, and it refers to how things in different locations affect each other. It claims there is causality between things that seem impossible to correlate. Like the fact that I write this text as you read it.
No matter how, neither language, physics, aluminium-made structures or passions at a distance, will tell you a thing, but do and undo multiple things. They come from the desire to persist on experimenting with the movement of quirky stuff of the world, or the chain of changes of imperceptible actions. All of them are busy with a continuous process of problem posing, rather than pinning a thing down. «What thing? I am still writing this text as a description of a performance». The process of speculation, like writing or loving in the distance, is only played by surrendering to the choreography of matter, – human or non-human. And as things tilt and collide in repetitive noises, we might slip in the movement of continuous doing in the distance like following _ all things want to run _
Text by Helena Grande