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how do we institute spaces, and how do we make space in institutions?
collective notes from the lab, dec 2008, paf
VOCABULABORATORIES is a book publication with some 27 entries by different contributors, to be distributed for free at the labs and available via mail order. This takes the form of a vocabulary-book, the entries of which are linked by a series of diagrams.
The corridor is in deep silence. The lights just went out suddenly. It is sleeping time for everybody alike. Each boy is in his own room. Some are still reading with a pocket torch under the blankets. The educator is walking back and forth through the corridor. He listens out for every suspect sound. He is a fool whose attention is easily diverted. It is a time when the young boy exercises an intense activity on himself, uncontrollable and frenetic. Every evening a lot of warm liquid is launched into infinity, poured as a flood of nothingness.
Alternately it is also a time of kneelings and joined hands. In the dark. At the foot of this metallic bed, in a natural impulsion he pronounces words like
‘truth’,
‘perfection’
or
‘achievement’.
He closes his eyes and whispers soundlessly
‘ineffable’.
He lets the words resonate for a long time in the dark. Just to go on with
‘redemption’,
‘excellence’ or
‘infinity’.
Everything falls into silence again.
And then again he pierces the night with
‘salvation’
or ‘immutable’
‘deliverance’.
He is not waiting for an answer. Pronouncing those words is giving meaning to them. Pronouncing them is believing in them. Pronouncing them is making them exist.
entry
Non-specialisation
(and friendship)
Lisa says:
In the voice of Lisa: Individual subjects usually refer to me as a collective. Or as: organization, group of friends, even group of groups. (In the worst case people call me stichting or production house – although I much prefer that to being called ‘football club’, for instance.) I feel really at stake when I am “ a movement”.
Conventional signs of my identity are rather difficult to pinpoint and understand. I am not exactly sure about my gender (although my name and also the biggest part of me is female, something like 83,3 %). I have seven different passports and five different nationalities… they are all legal! I reside in at least four cities at the same time, except about four times a year, when I manage to concentrate myself in one place, in order not to become completely disconnected and permanently schizoid. Nevertheless I am not fictional. I am real. (I have 2785 friends in My Space.) I have a bank account, even an office. I have birthday parties, an address book and I even sometimes make dinners for my friends…The good thing is that I pay taxes only in one country. When I do that I am not called by the simple name LISA, but I get an additional title: Association LISA! In fact, almost every time I appear in public I am addressed by that title. It sounds almost like ‘baroness LISA’ or ‘professor LISA’. When I meet people I don’t immediately tell them that I am an association. More often than not they find out very quickly and then they start speaking to me in a slightly different way.
In fact, only an intimate circle of friends calls me LISA.
I am a collective subject, so usually I do not talk myself – I rather give room and space for other people’s voices … and there is so many of these voices that I often do not manage to fulfil all of the points on the agenda. Although I have no voice myself, at least not an individual one, I have given myself the freedom to communicate my-self this time. Ironic that I say “my-self”… “my own self”… I cannot say that I own myself – it is the others that own me: my friends, my allies, my enemies and their singular relationships to each other and the world. However, as a collective subject, I still think of myself as singular. You know – I have my tendencies, my obsessions and my fascinations, too…
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