THE MEMORY OF THE PRESENT | pedro bismarck




Pedro Levi Bismarck
The memory of the present
The imperceptible becoming of space – architecture, freedom and love



It’s the unpredictability that makes the event, but is also the unpredictability that makes the knowledge itself. Not what can be probabilistically determined but the unprobabilistic point that rips the veil of knowledge and shows something that until then we were unable to predict.
Carlos Amaral Dias


Prelude 1 - Italo Calvino, Mr. Palomar
The unquiet Mr. Palomar[1] is standing by the sea but he doesn’t observe it, instead he fixes his eye in a wave, just one. His attempt is to predict all its movements, its random dynamic. He seeks to find an order, a scheme, a mental image, which could allow him to organize all that complexity. He doesn't give up. He reduces the observation field and lists all the slightest details and variations. If accomplished, soon he will be able to predict all those movements and proceed to that ultimate stage: extend this knowledge to the whole universe. But the tide changes suddenly and Mr. Palomar ends up to lose his patience, returning home even more nervous and unquiet than before.

This small metaphor that Italo Calvino offers us about the human models of world comprehension is here as simple as splendidly exposed. In fact, man builds himself upon his desire to control the world phenomena, to name and give them a sense, a meaning. To project, to investigate, to plan, are the names of those apparatus that seek to control reality. Forms, operations of the everyday life, that trace a path to a specific human artificiality[2], where man safely dwells before the constant menace of this endless exterior, that we call the arbitrary,  the unpredictable, the uncertain, or just, the becoming.

The house-shelter is not the indomitable territory-wave, but the small observation field of the protected and predictable things. The house is build under the sign of firmitas, of durability, of a habitus able to put us safely in the world. But the question is the appearance that is made to appear. Each observation field is just a temporary station, a passage, and just like in Palomar, there is always a tide, an imminent and unpredictable disturb. All construction is provisional, contingent, that is our human essence, in death beyond death.

Prelude 2 : Mallarmé, Un coup de dés
What is irreducibly interesting in the Mallarmé poem Un Coupe de dés[3], is that chance is a metaphor that names not the poem object, but its irreparable purpose. If there is someone that precedes Duchamp in the search of a maximum amplitude and indetermination in the meaning of the work of art is precisely Mallarmé. The chance that the French poet assigns is the unpredictable openness which is unlocked in the poem own interpretation. The white space that is left between the phrases is the space of chance, of interpretation, of the meanings that each reader (op)poses[4]. This was as well the meaning of the duchampian word infra mince, that untraceable detail, that minimal event able of giving a provisional meaning to the work of art and transform it not in an aesthetical object but in a provisional content, an agency of other meanings[5]. And this is was as well John Cage’s absolute quest, not the search for a new language, but that of opening the music to the unspeakable world of chance, but opening as a way of breaking the traditional codes beyond the endless deadlock of all academic mimetologies[6].

That was also the last search of Yago Conde, this precise indetermination of the architecture meaning[7]. But an indetermination that is not the infinite search of randomness, but architecture own precariousness. Precariousness as provisionality against the automatization of the self closed discourses; precariousness as experimentation, questioning, in each moment, architecture itself and the excessively precise meanings that we forget already to interrogate. In short: precariousness as a way to be aware, against the excessively comfort of the habits. As writes Pep Quetglas in his foreword to Yago Conde’s Architecture of Indeterminacy: «Thus, two apparently distinct and complementary forms – ‘planning’ and ‘automatic’ – are nothing but names for a single, unique and destructive enterprise: that of depriving people of their activity and their present – to deprive us of our lives – and to convert us into mirrors and spectators of that which does not exist, that which moves without us for and by itself, to make us into heralds of the future, that’s to say, of nothing».

I. The provisional space – making (himself at) home
The uncertain as the unpredictable and indetermination as the provisional are the meanings of the word chance that interests us to emphasize, nonetheless they are also the meanings that arise from the etymological origin of this word. Casus (the Latin word for chance) meant not only an occurrence, an opportunity, but named also the very act of falling (cadentia), of what unpredictably falls, happens, and therefore perishes[8]. What becomes relevant in our digression through this word is that what we call today casa (house in Portuguese, Spanish and Italian) has precisely the same etymological origin as the word chance (acaso) [9]. To the Romans the word casa didn't mean something solid or steady, but a temporary and precarious construction, a hut, a shed. That was this word and not the word domus (the lord domains)[10] to name this distinguished and unique place of the human dwell and privacy against the exteriority reveals much about the precariousness of the name and action that the word casa (house) still today designates. If, in one hand, the domus invokes at once this triumphant action over the territory and over the nature, in other hand, the name casa brings within itself, and clearly, this precariousness and fragility not only of its construction, but of the very act/event of making oneself to dwell and to occupy a place for practicing this reside, this being-in-the world.

If, as Heidegger says, to move toward the words is to move toward the world[11], and if theory and the exercise of writing are, most of all, a tool box, as Foucault wrote, so the question that come to us should be, what can we make with those names and what can they identify and offer to our daily activity? In this case, the words remind us that even behind the appearance and stability of the name casa, it is something profoundly precarious and provisional, but simultaneously something that is made upon this provisionality. The house-project, as something absolutely predefined and finished, should be replaced as house-tactic, as something thought and designed recognizing space and time provisional nature. If chance has any meaning as an experience of the world is the awareness of a specific dimension of life and dwelling that appears always unprobabilistically, asking always for attention, answers, but mostly for invention – the ability to listen the unpredictable and to rehearse a (re)action. Because it’s precisely there, in this abrupt space of confrontation that occurs out of the habitus routine, where is produced the being creative essence in the world, where he produces/finds its own space of action and freedom. And when this happens, when this unpredictable and indeterminate space opens up, we can say that man makes himself a home (casa), or maybe, he makes himself at home.

What the word casus names is precisely this, that possibility for something to happen, and this incalculable happening that the house allows and offers is the place of the self, of the being along-the-things; never over-the-world (as in the domus), but always provisionally, indeterminate, always opening us into a new and free relation with things. The house is not just a structure for a distracted everyday event, but the practicability that allows the self a place in the world, not for him to hide from it, but to communicate with the world. That this space cannot be predefined in its form, nor predictable in its meaning, isn’t an imperfection of the house, but its gift, the ultimate possibility that allows architecture itself, leaving always something to (be)come, to (be)fall, and to take place in the world, beyond the world.

2. The space to come - agio
In the techno imposing landscape of reality any architectural discourse on the house will have to recognize that it’s mostly an open process, a provisional tactic for a conquest of a place. And, that the last stronghold of the human dwell shouldn’t, and can’t be, a submission to the bureaucratic dictates of laws, markets or images, but always a meditation-excursion in the world individual freedom construction, as much as the creation of a relation space towards the other. This is the meaning of the word agio (at ease), convoked by Giorgio Agamben, that «designates, according to its etymology, the space adjacent (ad-jacens, adjacentia), the empty place where each can move freely, in a semantic constellation - where spatial proximity borders on opportune time (ad-agio, moving at ease) and convenience borders on the correct relation»[12]. Agio is the place of the free use of the proper[13], is the space to come, of what is neither determined nor destined, and only to us is left to be accomplished and achieved. Agamben call it ethos, our ethic possibility, our second nature, but also the unique and possible place of our singularity[14]. Agio is the space of our self that is left in suspension, a space-casus and a space-casa, that remains to make and to (be)come. Is not a random place, but the adjacent space, indeterminate in its margins and unpredictable in its nature, which opens up in the limit of the being and allows him to conquer its singularity, his proper place in the world. To have agio is to make (himself a) house, it’s to conquer the world intimate fragility, but it’s moreover, the place-encounter that is made in the presence and search towards the other, in the semantic constellation and in the provisional and unique simultaneity between two times and two spaces. It's a verb more than a name, an action more than a fact, an open and indeterminate space that makes itself world between man and things[15].

3. The instant space - the memory of the present
But isn’t the agio also this indetermination in the objects limit that Yago Conde was searching, the white spaces between the Mallarmé’s phrases, the unsounded  silence in John Cage’s music or the duchampian infra mince? This untraceable and unpredictable moment that makes the encounter between the work of art and the spectator a fully individual and inter-subjective event, beyond any universal meaning. The work of art opens up to chance, to the interpretation adventure, and it’s the interpreter-creator that gives its ultimate meaning, possessing it, destroying it, remaking it. And when this unique instant is to make casus and casa, happens precisely what we can call the aesthetical momentum.
Baudelaire wrote that is the immediate passage from experience to memory that makes precisely the aesthetical momentum – what he called the memory of the present[16]. But isn’t this momentum also that unique instant where the experience is simultaneously already the memory, i.e., where the present is already the absent, where what I see is simultaneously what I remember? The absolute and unpredictable synchronization of two times, the untraceable paradox that allows something to escape darkness and be, at last beauty – not by its form or proportion, but for setting us face to face to this human impossibility: to remember what I still can touch and to touch that which I know I will remember, I want to remember. That this unexpected momentum, this slightest instant, can occur and take place, disturbing the limits of our language and interrogating our everyday life, opening a space – an agio – of closeness and encounter towards the world, is this the ultimate meaning and aim of the architectonic work. That this can occur unpredictably, indeterminately, and even on the most untraceable and slightest detail, only reinforces our confidence in the architecture ability and worth.

4. The imperceptible space – unveiling the real
All artistic production requires from us attention and wake; there is always something to un-veil, to dis-cover. But the revelation truly content isn’t what in itself is to be revealed, but what in its silence is still left to be said. In other words, not what in itself is inexpugnable, but what is left to me to be said. The same is to happen in the architecture work: if nothing has been left to be said, and to (be)come, so it means, that nothing was in fact said. As Agamben writes, «the only content of revelation is what is closed in itself, what is veiled - the light is just darkness arriving in itself»[17]. It is as it would always be necessary some sort of interlude, a space left, but not exactly a void or a silence, rather a threshold that one can be able to conquer and disclose, reclaiming as yours, intimately yours. As the impending closeness of a revelation that never comes to be said.
In the excursion-in-voyage over Álvaro Siza’s architectonic spaces there is always something that remains to be said, there is always an indeterminate meaning, an unpredictable gesture asking for another meaning. Siza’s fundamental lesson isn’t in the drawing or in the method, in what we immediately can see, but in what remains to be seen. For Siza, architecture is mostly a critical and ironic apparatus on the exercise of the everyday life. Each building is in itself a meditation on its condition; each building subverts its own essence and interrogates the nature of our relation with space, with the programs, with everyday life. In the distracted landscape of our daily routine, Siza makes of the architectonic space an experience to (be)come, interrogating and provoking us, subverting the most slightest detail and requiring from us all concentration and will, but mostly, all the ease agio. The black trace around the Carlos Ramos Pavilion; the stairs-path accessing the Boa Nova Tea House; the red-colored cube walls in the entrance of the Architecture Faculty of Porto, but also the accelerated perspective in its main corridor, and in Berlin, the Bonjour Tristesse imperceptible eye; they all keep this precise indetermination of architecture, that ability to provoke the imponderable, to interrogate, of opening a space in the memory of the present, ripping the veil of knowledge and bringing always something new, impossible and beauty.

The Provencal poets (whose songs first introduce the term into Romance languages in the form aizi, aizimen) make ease [agio] a terminus technicus in their poetics, designating the very place of love. Or better, it designates not so much the place of love, but rather love as the experience of taking-place in a whatever singularity.
Giorgio Agamben, The coming community

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Image
Nine memories-notes (Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye, Álvaro Siza, Faup e Bonjour Tristesse, Mies, Pavilhão de Barcelona e Neue Nationalgalerie, Steven Holl, Kiasma.

[1] Italo Calvino, Mr. Palomar.
[2] Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres.
[3] Stéphane Mallarmé, A roll of the dice will never abolish chance, 1897.
[4] «In coup de dés Mallarmé inaugurates a poetic form which contains a plurality of readings – something altogether distinct from ambiguity or plurality of meanings». Yago Conde, The architecture of the indeterminacy, pp.63.
[5] Mallarmé had a decisively influence in Duchamp, as it writes Octávio Paz, «The direct antecedent of Duchamp is not to be found in painting but in poetry: Mallarmé». Yago Conde, pp.64.
[6] Mimetology is a Jacques Derrida term, where he «expresses his opposition, not to mimesis per se, but to a determinate interpretation of mimesis». Yago Conde, pp.67.
[7] Yago Conde, The architecture of the indeterminacy.
[8] According to the etymological dictionaries and to San Isidoro de Sevilla (Etymologies), the origin of the word chance (acaso in Portuguese) is in the Latin casus (chance, opportunity, accident) that is etymological linked to the verb cadere, that means, to fall, to decline, to perish. The origin of the word chance has different roots in the European languages. If in Portuguese acaso is directly linked to the Latin casus as in the English and Italian. In Spanish, azar, takes the Arabic form, az zahr, that means literally the dice, evoking the traditional Arabian game. In French, hasard, has exactly the same origin. In German, the word zufall, also expresses the idea of something that falls.
[9] This essay, originally written and thought in Portuguese, follows the root of the name casa into the Latin casus, cadere, uncovering a relation between casa e acaso.  In roman times, the word casa identified the roman army tents and expressed a temporary and fragile constructionThe English word house is linked to another etymological origin: hiding, concealing (huis). The fact that the word casa has no place in the English language, also shows something about the different cultural relations between man and his dwelling. In the same way, the French maison also takes another root, linked, to the Latin mansionem, that is, a staying, a remaining.
[10] Domus is the Latin word that named the lord’s house and domains (dominium).
[11] For Heidegger, understanding/ thinking the names behind the words is to understand/think the immemorial relation between man and world. CF. Heidegger, Das ding.
[12] Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, pp. 24.
[13] Giorgio Agamben, pp. 24.
[14] Giorgio Agamben, pp. 30.
[15] The expression feeling at home, expresses that decisive verbal form that makes the concretization of the home/house and amplifies its provisional meaning as something that takes place, happens, through the momentary production of a space to be in, an agio. A home is not a house. The building itself doesn’t make necessarily an architectonic experience.
[16] Charles Baudelaire, Critique d’art suivi de critique musicale. The memory of the present reveals, in Baudelaire, the ephemeral meaning of the present, but retains also the importance of the present experience as construction of a singular memory, an ability to be present in the present, to be aware of the world instant dérive. As it writes Baudelaire: the one that «…perd la mémoire du présent; il abdique la valeur et les privilèges fournis par la circonstance, car presque toute notre originalité vient de l’estampille que le temps imprime à nos sensations».
[17] Giorgio Agamben, The idea of prose. pp. 117.


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Pedro Levi Bismarck (Porto, 1983)
Architect graduated in Porto Faculty of Architecture. Studied and worked in Berlin. Is developing his PhD research. Lives in Porto



Other Articles in the same issue:
GODOFREDO PEREIRA
MIGUEL LEAL
ATELIER DA BOUÇA


FA(I)LLING | miguel leal



Miguel Leal
FA(I)LLING

Try again. Fail again. Better Again. Or better worse. Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good. Throw up for good. Go for good. Where neither for good. Good and all.
Samuel Beckett


In the morning of the 18th of April of 1976, while sailing 100 miles south of the Irish cost, a Galician fishing boat spotted the semi-submerged hull of a small sail-boat that didn't reach to 4 meters long. Adrift in the open sea and with no signs of recent occupation, the boat was found at vertical position, with the bow underwater and the stern out of water. In the interior, amongst many other objects, a passport in the name of Baastian Johan Christiaan Ader was found. It was indeed the Ocean Wave, the boat in which, in July 9th of 1975, the Dutch origin artist Bas Jan Ader had left from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, having has final destination the port of Falmouth in Great-Britain. It wasn't the first time that Ader crossed the Atlantic in a sail boat. Back in 1963, being 20 years old, after travelling by hitch-hiking through France and Spain, he embarked in a sail-boat in Morocco that would take him in a long and troubled 11-month journey to San Diego, California, with passages in Martinique and the Panama Canal. Established since then in Los Angeles, to Bas Jan Ader the Ocean Wave journey was a sort of more or less romantic return to the place from where he first took off, years before. Yet, when he planned to face by himself the Atlantic Ocean in a risky adventure – and never tried before under such circumstances –, Ader had the objective of concluding his project In Search of the Miraculous and we can say, by that, that is constituted above all a radical aesthetic experiment. Although there were some adaptations, the chosen boat, a Guppy 13 Pocket Cruiser, a small pleasure sail-boat very popular at the time in California, didn't seemed the most appropriate for the trip.

Challenging the Atlantic alone in a nutshell was to Ader just another way to rehearse the hard crossing between tragedy and farce, ultimate attempt to push to the limit the confrontation with the ideas of risk, fall, fail or disappearance that seem to dominate is work.

In Search of the Miraculous was then the radical gesture demanded to an artist that experimented in a very particular way the so claimed fusion between life and work that marked the 60's and 70's decades. Actually, Ader integrated the first generation of conceptual artists from the East Cost but since early on his work showed a poetic dimension that approached him to the long tradition of Romanticism. There is, even though, an absurd and tragic-comic side that also allows to establish a relation his work with the specific burlesque mechanics. Let us see, for instance, how Ader faces gravity in two 1970 short films – Fall I and Fall II.

In the first, we see him seated on a chair at the top of a roof from where he finally falls down, suddenly and helpless; in the second, he's cycling along a canal and then suddenly falls into water. With no evident explanation, the two falls are absurd and are maybe closer to the Buster Keaton's slapstick comedy than to the great romantic tragedy. For that same reason, tha way Ader combine that tragic-comic dimension with the melancholy present in his lonely figure, in movies like I'm Too Sad to Tell You, 1971, in which he cries compulsively in front of the camera, or in Broken Fall (Organic), same year, in which he pathetically swings from a tall tree until he leaves himself fall into the water, transform his work in a singular variant of conceptual art and, at the same time, has someone claimed, in an uncommon synthesis between Europe and America.
The first part of the project In Search of the Miraculous was presented at Los Angeles few time before from the Ocean Wave departure and its second moment should have resulted from the solitary Ader's trip, to which he was planning, already, amongst others, an exhibition at the Groningen Museum in Holland. Well, Ader ended to disappear somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, in a weirdly topographic way to define the idea of interruption e maybe the only one that could in good will complete a project that intended taking to the limit the central ideas of his work. When the Ocean's Wave stern was found, 10 months after departure, is was already covered with algae and molluscs and therefore, it was estimated that it was adrift for several months. It is just known that radio contact was lost three weeks after Ader left and it seems that something happened after already had passed Azores. The signs found at the boat were not sufficient to reconstitute what happened. The Ocean Wave was brought by the Galician Fishing Boat to La Coruña port but it would mysteriously disappear a second time, not long time after, and now for good. From the Ocean Wave it remained not much more than some pictures, helping to intensify the mystery in turn of the Bas Jan Ader last trip.



At the 2005 Biennale di Venezia Joachim Koester presented Message from Andrée, a play in which we can find signs of his ghost hunter vocation. The starting point for Koester was the failed trip, in 1897, of the Swedish explorers Salomon A. Andrée, Nils Strindberg and Knut Frænkel, that wanted to fly a balloon over the North Pole. The balloon, baptised with an imperial bird name – Örnen (Eagle) –, left Danskoya, near Spitsbergen, in the Arctic, at the 11th of July 1897, but, after three days, a phew hundred kilometres far from the departure point, it felt in the ice, to never rise again. Andrée, Strindberg and Frænkel roamed adrift on the implacable ice of the Arctic during several weeks until they settled, with intentions of passing the winter, in a small inhabited island – Kvitoya [White Island] –, where they ended dying in uncertain day of the month of October. The heroic disappearance of the expedition stood evolved in mystery during over thirty years, until, in 1930, it was found, almost intact, the tented camp in Kvitoya. There were the bodies of three man, their logbooks and the photographic films in which Strindberg, the photographer, methodically saved the group shenanigans. At that time, this unlikely discover had furor in and outside Sweden, having the expedition adventures reconstitution helped to feed the imaginary of many readers. Joachim Koester was not, therefore, the first to interest about the fatality and contingencies of the fate of the expedition on a balloon over the North Pole, but he did it in a very particular way. Koester's work is filled with dark matters and awkward figures, moving itself ambiguously between documentary and fiction; yet, the core of the instalation in Venezia was not so much the history of the three adventurers but a 16mm format video, a silent and almost abstract film. Of the recovered films specially prepared by Kodak to the expedition, 5 were recovered in 1930, already exposed, one of them still inside the camera. Surprisingly, after all that time, it was immediately possible to unveil almost a hundred images. Some of the films, covered by risks and stains, had stay almost illegible, but it were precisely those physical marks of its fate that retained Koester's attention. To Message from Andrée, the artist filmed, frame by frame, the inopportune stains that filled the one day immaculate white of the landscapes pictured in Nils Strindberg photos. The final result is paradoxical, silent and abstract, something that can be described like the noise that certain sound or visual spectrum are able to produce. Koester chose to concentrate in the plastic qualities of the images, in the precise sense of a plasticity that directly arises from the opening to chance and change, to accident and contingency. In the video we are confronted with that sort of plasticity autonomy of the photographic emulsion that releases the images of a documentary function and devoid of any value of indexing. So, it was more about the visionary and hallucinatory potential of those stains than the reference of the photos to a tragic past, which attracted Koester's imagination. The adrift of the three man on the loose ice plaques, with all that has of dramatic psico-geography and a game with chance, finds in the film a visual emulating of telepathic and hallucinatory character. From the desolate landscapes of the Arctic, pictured by Nils Stindberg, remain the unshaped stains that chance produced, and it is precisely that noise, that chance music many times interpreted as a mistake or uncomfortable failure, that constitutes the substance of Koester's intervention. There's an unconscious that hides in the old and used films found at Kvitoya, an unconscious without which those images would not be what they are and in those that appear in Venezia as an abstract and silent narrative, simple homage not only to the disgraced adventure on the Arctic ice but also to the self-poetic and imaginative potential of things, in particular those stains that gained own life and re-appeared at surface as the ultimate message from Andrée. (1)

Beckett's shadow and the circularity implied of the syncopated beat of the Worstward Ho (1983) – Try again, Fail again. Better again. Or better worse. Fail worse again. Still worse again... – pursues me for several years as a possible mark of an ontology of the artistic practice. It is not something from which you can write directly about and so I recurred to a dislocation effect in which the reference to the Örnen fall and to the stains of Koester's film are like a metonymy that allows me to keep talking about suspension and the apparent failure of the Bas Jan Ader journey. With this method I hope to allow the discovery that none of the trips truly failed because what matters is try again to fail again, just fail better, once and for all still worse again...(1)

_______
This text was in part motivated by the exhibition In Search of the Miraculous: Thirty Years Later, presented between May and September of 2010, at the Galician Centre for Contemporary Art, in Santiago de Compostela. With Pedro de Llano as curator, the exhibition departed from the random link of the story of the Ocean Wave to Galicia to offer a broad reading of the rarefied work of Bas Jan Ader. Note that the Örnen adventure has had already in the 1930's the book Med Örden mot Polen, based in Andrée, Strindberg and Frænkel journals and illustrated with some recovered pictures in Kvitoya, even they are retouched, immediately published with success in other countries (check the american version destined to a juvenil audience: Andrée's Story: From the diaries and Journals of S.A.Andrée, Nils Strindberg, and K. Frænkel, found on White Island in the Summer of 1930 and edited by the Swedish Society for Antrophology and Geography, New York, Blue Ribbon Books, 1930). More details on the play by Joachim Koester at Venezia see the catalogue: Joachim Koester: Message from Andrée, Copenhagen, The Danish Art Agency, 2005. 
  

Notes
(1) In Portuguese in the original text. [TRANSLATOR NOTE]   

Images
1. Bas Jan Ader in the Ocean Wave (CGAC, 2010)
2. The remains of the Ocean Wave (CGAC, 2010)
3. The Örnen Station
4. The Örnen immediately after de forced landing at 14th of July 1897.

_______________
Miguel Leal (Porto, 1967)
Artist. Lives and works at Porto. Founding member of VIROSE, an interdisciplinary structure dedicated to media and the study of the relations between art and technology. Professor at Faculdade de Belas Artes de Universidade do Porto, where he guides atelier work and lectures art and contemporary cultures courses. http://ml.virose.pt



Other Articles in the same issue:
GODOFREDO PEREIRA
PEDRO LEVI BISMARCK
ATELIER DA BOUÇA