Kevin Barrett Weil

I’m interested in slipping myself into the gestational period between the birth and death of an object or event’s ultimate trajectory. It is in this liminal highway of layered histories where I interact. I’m engaging with infrastructural elements of a commodified framework so as to locate myself within the much larger system that I’m interacting with. It is through documentation of these evidential relationships that the cause and effect nature of systemic interaction can be charted.

Often performance and documentation of said performance are synonymous. There is an action, a gesture, an occurrence, which happens with the potential to shuffle perception of what is referred to as the banal. Performance in the way I’m referring to it is an occurrence animated by decisive action. Through chance intersections of interaction marked by various points in an object or events ultimate trajectory, new meaning can be ascribed with the potential to reinvigorate pre-existing conditions with room for reinterpretation.

There is an overwhelming anxiety and groundlessness that defines the present condition. Hito Steyerl refers to the totality of this groundlessness as a free-fall. The fall goes unnoticed because everything is implicated, falling simultaneously. Thusly, it is the individual’s unconscious activity and anxiety, working constantly to orient oneself among the objects and events in free-fall. Associations are constructed based on chance relations within the idea of a particular system.

I believe that the reinterpretation of space in free-fall has the potential to posit new associations of thought and activity. Groundlessness can facilitate a nebulous play within free-fall conditions that provides a heightened sense of agency between the individual and their relation to the thing. A swimming that refers to the body and that thing the body is swimming towards, away from.

The arc of an event’s occurrence is relative to the individual’s point of entrance and exit in perceiving it. There is a slippery absoluteness that is often the result of individual experience.

The entrance is not the only entrance. There is a back door, and this too functions as an entrance. I believe that the process of locating our entrances and exits is vital to our understanding of where we are, of how we came to be there, of where we can go.

It is there deep in the web of interactivity, or maybe it is right on the surface, or maybe there is no difference, there is only that which is imposed by language and systems resultant. Because things are not so linear and upright and absolute there is an infinite room for error. It is here where the wiggling can occur. Where things spill and other things absorb the spill and those things become another thing. This is the place where places claim to be.