Museum for the Displaced
Over a period of a year and a half now, Stefano and AWKNDAFFR have been in conversation via email, with big and small gaps in between the writing. In this call recorded on 2 July 2021, they reflect on their ongoing exchange that has from the beginning been an experiment in being together as friends across borders, elongating time and space. Having met only days before Stefano moved out of Singapore, it was the end of something but the beginning of something new. Breaking with traditional ways of thinking about trust and relations, this conversation touches on the idea of “quantum sociality” (Denise Ferreira da Silva) to recognise how friendship is everywhere around us, to question how to exercise this collective responsibility, and to think about ways of reproducing forms of care from a distance.
Meandering through various topics such as the chemical bonds between atoms in molecular structures and the feeling of home in the space of the bond; the refreshing feeling of a friendship not based on productivity; difference without “otherness”; the dangers of scaling up; and the new transversal shapes that need to be created to avoid both deceptive horizontality and hierarchical verticality; the argument is made that our being is already social. What needs to be done is finding ways to satisfy our social and incomplete selves, and to allow people to freely associate and pursue their sociality. Every moment of socialisation is a moment of potential.
TL;DR: How to listen to those who are far away?
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Out of Isolation, National Gallery Singapore
In light of the onslaught of monumental events that have occurred in the space of a year, AWKNDAFFR investigates how we might move forward from the contemporary condition of exhaustion toward a new mode of existence: pleasure. How should we recall joy, care, and pleasure in the multitude of jobs and titles and identities that we hold, amidst this crisis-laden, exhaustive condition of the present? How can pleasure be produced by labours that operate outside modes of relation in which exhaustion is the currency of exchange?