Jani Ruscica

To: Taneli Viljanen
Sat, Jan 14, 2023 at 11:34 AM

I begin with borrowed words, written by Lao Tzu over 2500 years ago, and more recently translated into English or perhaps rewritten entirely by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Thirty spokes
meet in the hub. Where the wheel isn’t is where it’s useful.

Hollowed out,
clay makes pot. Where the pot’s not is where it’s useful.

Cut doors and windows to make room. Where the room isn’t, there’s room for you.

So the profit in what is
is in the use of what isn’t.

Taneli Viljanen

To: Jani Ruscica
Tue, Jan 17, 2023 at 10:33 AM

It comes to mind to proceed with another quote. Jack Spicer:

The log in the fire Asks a lot
When it is lighted Or knot

Timber comes
From seas mainly Sometimes burns green -Ly

When it is lighted
The knot
Burns like a joke
With the color of smoke
Save us, with birthdays, whatever is in the fire or not in the fire, immortal We cannot be

A chimney tree
Or give grace to what’s mere- Ly fatal.

...which sets me thinking of the homonym, word play and concept not-knot: what can a not-knot tie together, seal, connect; on the other hand, could a not-knot be a juncture, where a bond can become undone, is there something potentially liberating about it?

Jani Ruscica

To: Taneli Viljanen
Sat, Jan 21, 2023 at 1:54 PM

Knots seem to be everywhere, both symbolic and concrete ones. I realize my relationship to them is rather conflicted; they are not simple by any means, although their implicit static nature seems more restraining than connecting. It probably depends on context and point of view.

Not-knot is a beautiful concept. A not-knot immediately opens up to various possibilities, and endless potential. A not-knot is probably that specific point, where connections can come undone, free themselves, move, morph and regroup. It seems to be alive.

When categories are inadequate, “nos” can open up endless possibilities, destabilize something essential. “Nos” can certainly also exclude, but paradoxically perhaps; no as prefix can also be yes, to everything else.

It can be a not-knot, all the space outside the room and freedom. Beyond the grasp of language.

Is there something essentially patriarchal about knots?
What kind of connections do weaving, braiding or crocheting create? Not-knots.

Robin Wall Kimmerer’s ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ awaits its turn in my pile of books. It might be time to read it.

Taneli Viljanen

To: Jani Ruscica
Thu, Jan 26, 2023 at 6:26 PM

A possible thought: a not-knot is that juncture in writing (one can think of the word game “not-knot” as a phenomena manifest specifically in writing, phonetically inaudible), where the patriarchal ordering and structure of the knot is subverted and opens up to multitudinous forms?

What could a not-knot be outside of writing, besides language, in other mediums and spaces? What could its relationship be to the uses of “not”, its potential? “No” unto itself feels broad and spacious, also slightly shapeless (but shapelessness always provides its own intrigue!) (How does “shapelessness” itself operate, in any context, or somewhere specific but unpredictable?)

I have to revisit later the relations between braiding, weaving, patriarchy and non-patriarchy...

Jani Ruscica

To: Taneli Viljanen
Tue, Jan 31, 2023 at 3:50 PM

I reply from Dhaka, Bangladesh, where I am currently installing new work for an exhibition at the Dhaka Art Summit.

Here I am hit by the realization that I would like my new works to operate exactly as some kinds of not-knots, junctures that open up to multitudinous forms. I’d like to think these works materialize, embody even, something somewhere beyond the reaches of patriarchal ordering. Thus shapelessness sounds particularly resonant. I have been thinking a lot about shapelessness, discontinuity, fragmentation and incoherence in relation to these and other works of mine. They strike me as powerful means to destabilize all binary relations and the prevailing order, and occupy a space that only refusals can grant us access to.

That space seems to offer a promise of something new, where binaries simply stop functioning, uncertainty creeps in and things no longer are what they appear to be, or more specifically they make the act of naming and capture so inherent to language simply impossible.

As a child I obsessively loved ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and ‘Barbapapa’, I wonder why ; )

‘Not-knot’ could actually be the perfect title for this new print work, is it ok if I name it that?

Taneli Viljanen

To: Jani Ruscica
Thu, Feb 9, 2023 at 12:53 AM

shapeless light
a cavity from which shadows
return: meet...

*

The thought of dealing with things (“things”?) indirectly. Encircling “things”, approaching them (and distancing from them) from several directions simultaneously. As a child I also loved ‘Barbapapa’; ‘Alice in Wonderland’ I only read as an adult. I liked it then. I have never been to Bangladesh. Lately I have been very excited about Indian classical music. Does everything, the embodiment of anything, always also operate partially somewhere out of reach of a patriarchal ordering? What we perceive, recognize. All of this ties in together, is interwoven. Something in the meaning of weaving together is always overdetermined.

Jani Ruscica

To: Taneli Viljanen
Fri, Feb 24, 2023 at 9:51 AM

Attached images of ‘Abakans’, works by the polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz from the 60s and 70s.

Weaves, braids intertwine (again a new name for a bond!). As you said, perhaps there is something inherently overdetermined in the meaning of weaving together. I think Abakanowicz was acutely aware of it too.

Her works were named ‘Abakans’; they had their own name, as they didn’t seem to fit any existing categories.

“I see fibre as the basic element constructing the organic world on our planet... It is from fibre that all living organisms are built, the tissue of plants, leaves and ourselves... our nerves, our genetic code, the canals of our veins, our muscles... we are fibrous structures...

I am interested in every tangle of thread and rope and every possibility of transformation”

Indian classical music, aah, sounds wonderful, I’d like to hear more about it!

I was thinking of titling my new video work ‘Polynotknot (and they bloom)’. Weaving, braiding, lacing, encircling, circumventing, approaching and distancing from several directions simultaneously.

And one more image of Barbapapas.

Taneli Viljanen

To: Jani Ruscica
Tue, Mar 7, 2023 at 11:25 AM

Lovely and new to me the ‘Abakans’! And a resonating quote.

About Indian classical music: I have been particularly enthralled by singer Ustad Abdul Karim Khan. Some of what is to follow relates perhaps to the musical style more broadly, some to Khan in particular. Fascinates: a certain staticity and hypnotism (the drone- level of the music, the way in which melodies repeatedly return to the same notes/sounds), the way in which it holds a rich, sumptuous tapestry of sounds, which strikes with its simultaneous “depth” and “ornamentality”; the logic of its melodic progressions, which I seem to grasp only partially, with some of it remaining opaque, but undeniable in their opacity; the wondrous, glimmering, microtonal, gravity-defying, fluid virtuosity of the singing, that nonetheless feels utterly natural and uninterested in showcasing any virtuosity; the androgynous nature of Khan’s voice.

‘Polynotknot (and they bloom)’: what a beautiful title!

And I’m led to wonder what it means to bring together disparate things – ties, traditions, ways of making, their knotting and not- knotting together and apart – only to form new bonds, weaves and constellations of disparate beings... what are the things that one would like to allow to have space, chances to bloom?

Jani Ruscica

To: Taneli Viljanen
Tue, Mar 7, 2023 at 4:00 PM

Such an important question, what are the things that we should allow space and possibilities to bloom? And a follow-up question, what would they actually need to bloom?

I guess it depends on the circumstances, on the substrate, the nutrients, since everything is connected, intertwined. There are histories and histories, I believe one has to carefully choose where one ties the knots and not-knots, in which continuums one situates oneself, what connections and bonds one nourishes and strengthens.

Always cherish the imagination, a rambunctious one! And most definitely try to, every now and then (if not always), tie together things that no one believed could be tied together. Could it also be that every new bond, could potentially undo an earlier one? In a multi- stranded way?

With the Barbapapas of my childhood, I was most certainly fascinated by their polymorphism; it resonated deeply.

Charles Mingus’ and Rashaan Roland Kirk’s polyrhythms have always felt good, fitting somehow. For quite some time I couldn’t listen but to jazz and electronic music; it had to be polyrhythms, from Mingus to Arca. Rhythm is a sensitive thing; for me it had to be “broken”, interrupted, layered, seemingly shapeless or quite simply as hard to make sense of as possible.

Rashaan Roland Kirk could play three saxophones simultaneously, different melodies with each. Polyphony. To be polyphonic.

‘The Inflated Tear’ (Live from Prague in 1967): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIqLJmlQQNM

Ustad Abdul Karim Khan sounds magical; what vibration, simultaneous layering.

I have always liked singing voices that can be perceived as being androgynous: Nina Simone, Nico, AHOHNI; all of them have an ineffable sensitivity, particularly in the color of their voices.

Taneli Viljanen

To: Jani Ruscica
Fri, Mar 31, 2023 at 3:33 PM

I feel an urge to reply to this email affirmatively: how you articulate various states of blooming; histories and histories and the choices embedded in relating to them; how you write about the imagination; broken and layered rhythms; polymorphism, polyrhythms and polyphony; Charles Mingus and Roland Kirk; voices perceived as androgynous (all the examples you mention!): yes!

Which brings to mind: our email conversation is titled ‘The Uses of Not’: how about ‘The Uses of Yes’? What kind of knots and not-knots tie these two together, or apart. How do they relate to one another, or how are they perceived individually?

Today I’m listening to Julius Hemphill’s, Abdul Wadud’s and Don Moye’s record ‘Raw Materials and Residuals’. The music is lovely and feels alive (it resonates also beautifully with the aforementioned themes of polymorphism, polyrhythm and polyphony!) Right now, listening to it, I also contemplate it through the simultaneity and interweaving of various “no” and “yes” gestures. It feels interesting, and how could this possibly relate to the title of the record referring to materials, its residues and traces?

Jani Ruscica

To: Taneli Viljanen
Tue, Apr 18, 2023 at 11:57 AM

Yes!
“The Uses of Yes”!

For me refusal has specifically taken shape through the space it opens up; one “no” is simultaneously many “yeses”. All the space outside the room that Lao Tzu and Ursula K. Le Guin describe. Negative space full of potential.

“Cut doors and windows to make room.
Where the room isn’t, there’s room for you”

Negative space sets me thinking of Rachel Whiteread’s and Roni Horn’s sculpture. To consider in more detail what has always bothered me about Whiteread’s sculpture, and on the contrary, what has been so fascinating about Horn’s sculpture. Both give form to something seemingly shapeless; Whiteread quite literally to negative space, more specifically to air, to the ghosts of spaces and objects. Horn, on the other hand, to water; to the most fluid and volatile of substances, slippery and mirror-like in its relations. Why do I perceive of Horn’s glass sculptures (photographs too!) as alive, unfixed, spacious and open, with endless potentiality, ushering forth a simultaneous “yes” and “no” gesture. Whiteread’s sculpture on the other hand strikes me as static, monolithic and mummified, as she has also occasionally described it. The fluidity of negative space has been denied in her sculptures, they seem *to propose only either a “yes” or “no” gesture, without the potential and freedom that their simultaneous existence seems to afford.

“What we are suffering from is an absolute despot duality that says we are able to be only one or the other”

In Gloria Anzaldúa’s words, half and halfs (mita ́y mita ́) are magical, not one without the other, and everything in between. Horn knows something about this. Whiteread’s sculptures seem to emphasize binarism and this seems to limit movement, close in space, simplify, render things one dimensional.

The question also extends to the aforementioned raw materials; their traces, residues and the implicit relationship between them. I would like to believe that a trace or residue can be equally vital and vibrant, mutable even, embodying both a “yes” and “no” gesture, and not only existing in an indexical or binary relationship to what we have named raw material after Julius Hemphill, Abdul Wadud and Don Moye.

Taneli Viljanen

To: Jani Ruscica
Mon, May 1, 2023 at 9:56 PM

Your message set off several strains of thought, yet for some reason they seem to have been difficult to fully articulate. Since my reply to your message has already taken way too long, here are some unfinished chains of thought, on a train from Turku to Helsinki:

As a writer I have often thought (from slightly different points of view) of language as material: but language never is “raw material”, as it always carries numerous kinds of traces, residues, potentials and excesses; something other than “itself”. At times I find this very characteristic annoying, and at others, it is precisely this trait that makes working with language so fascinating. Does the same principle apply to everything we can perceive as “material”?

I’d like to think that there is no linguistic gesture that is either a yes or a no, it is always both, in different ratios; but stating this doesn’t conclude much. In what kinds of contexts, webs of relations, different yes- and no-gestures become active, have agency, do something?

It was very interesting to read about your thoughts concerning Rachel Whiteread’s and Roni Horn’s sculptures, their ways of being; I am not that familiar with either of their practices, and therefore I wouldn’t feel comfortable commenting further, but I do recognize and am inclined to accept a lot of what you say. (I can certainly say, that out of the images you sent, one in particular resonated – Roni Horn’s ‘Opposites of White’ – it seems fascinating and most definitely alive, in a state of perpetual motion and becoming.)

I have never made any sculpture, but I have often thought that if I didn’t do what I do, what I would like to be the most would be a sculptor, something in it, in the way sculptures inhabit this world feels important and resonant. For some reason, something in our dialogue makes me contemplate the differences between linguistic (or “poetic”) and sculptural gestures; it feels like I am about to grasp something about their relation I have been incapable of previously grasping (but not quite!)

What is the nature of any artistic gesture? What kind of act is it in the world?

Jani Ruscica

To: Taneli Viljanen
Mon, May 8, 2023 at 5:10 PM

This time my message is two-piece. Your last set of questions and the focus of our whole conversation so far around no-gestures and forms of refusal urges me to write about Lee Lozano, an endlessly fascinating artist active in the context of New York City in the 60s and 70s. But more about her and her radical acts and their effects as artistic gestures in the world in part two.

Part 1:

Your thinking around language as material is fascinating; I concur with many of your thoughts. It is indeed intrinsic to language to never be mere “raw material”. The traces, residues and excesses are an inherent part of it. Every single word, space between them, as well as concatenation of them, is loaded with multiple meanings. It made me think of my own relationship to something that could be defined as appropriation, at least in the context of the visual arts. Integral to my artistic thinking is that, more often than not, the images I work with, “the materials”, are kind of recycled; they come with some baggage, with definitions, purposes, assigned meanings, contexts and so on, and destabilizing, causing some sort of slippage or even total refusal from these preliminary pretexts is fundamental to my practice. Do you perceive language or words to have a similar plasticity, a capacity to stretch out and reform or regroup in relation to some previous meaning or context even? Almost as if rubbing against some preconceived notions, and ushering the process of naming or generating meaning in some sort of crisis?

It is indeed fascinating to consider the differences, or similarities for that matter, of sculptural and linguistic gestures. The ways in which you use language resonates deeply, and not only in relation to the content or thematic of your work. I think you make use of language performatively, sculpturally even. Your language strikes me as being acrobatic and alive, always elastic, and certainly cherishing the aforementioned plasticity.

I think my own artistic thinking is rooted in the sculptural, but perhaps somewhat paradoxically not particularly in relation to an explicit materiality, at least not in a traditional sense. What seems important to me is a certain indexicality; a relationship to three dimensionality, spatiality, the bodily and perhaps more than material itself, its representations and manifestations.

Jani Ruscica

To: Taneli Viljanen
Wed, May 10, 2023 at 4:56 PM

Part 2.
Briefly about Lee Lozano

The no-gesture was elemental to Lozano’s way of interacting or communicating with the world. Lozano’s “no” was always absolute. Written in bold capital letters and underlined.

Her artistic gestures are always enacted through radical negation.

It feels important to stop to consider Lozano’s artistic practice for a moment. Our message thread is after all titled ‘The Uses of Not’ and Lozano, if anyone, knows something about the power of refusal, its destructive potential even.

What makes this reflection particularly interesting is the way in which Lozano’s “no” diverts so radically from the refusals we have been mapping out after Lao Tzu’s and Ursula Le Guin’s poem.

‘General Strike Piece’, ‘Dropout Piece’, ‘Boycott Women’.
These are Lozano’s last and most important conceptual, text-based works and actions. Time-based and requiring lifelong commitment; don’t participate in the art world, step outside of it, don’t ever speak to women again. What these intense actions mean is by no means so simple or black and white, as is nothing in Lozano’s oeuvre, be it her drawings, paintings or text-based works and actions. The only certainty is that Lozano actively refused all systems and categories and made in the process works that are unruly, provocative, complex, perplexing and difficult.

It seems as if Lozano is cutting all ties, her works are in a constant free fall. It is simply impossible to form a singular, clearly defined, “settled” relationship with them and this I find endlessly fascinating. I can’t help but think that the willfulness of her no-gesture, its unflinching determination and inflexibility plays an important part in this.

Taneli Viljanen

To: Jani Ruscica
Mon, Jul 3, 2023 at 3:05 PM

I am thrilled to hear how you speak of my uses of language; I feel your perceptions are joyfully precise (in that they see something I particularly wish to be visible in my texts). And I most certainly concur with your questions relating to how I wish language to behave. When thinking of my relationship to language, I wouldn’t say I am specifically interested in “language”: I don’t “examine language” per se, perhaps contrary to many writers that would be categorized as writing “experimental poetry”; I’d be more inclined to think that my aim is to merely bend and slide language into a position where “it” does something other than what language is traditionally expected to do, what comes “natural” to it. (And the act of making or doing something feels relevant here: that’s why I am particularly happy about how you describe my uses of language as being “performative”.)

I also feel that our acts of making or doing resonate, and this came to mind: could it be that our artistic activities are marked by a simultaneity of gestures that could be defined as being “linguistic”, “sculptural”, “performative” and “visual”, and while embracing them, also actively refusing them, evading and slipping, constantly reshaping or un-shaping new kinds of constellations.

Do we share a similar relationship to “materials”, or thinking (feeling, experiencing...) with or through them? (Or is it even necessary to say or think about something like this? Certainly not to define, at least!)

In relation to what you write about Lee Lozano, I’d like to ask: could you tell a bit more about the “free fall” you are referring to?

Jani Ruscica

To: Taneli Viljanen
Mon, Jul 10, 2023 at 11:50 AM

nights exist, nightshade exists
the dark side, the cloak of namelessness exists

the northern limits of consciousness exist, there where what is dreamed opens and closes its northerly crown in nastic turnings

without day and night being definitely placed, without nadir, zenith
straight below or above and without

the naos, the innermost space of the cell revealing whether the seed in an inner sky gathers the limits of consciousness into a point a flowering point where like a bit of sunshine ice ages exist, ice ages exist

where like a bit of fire the insects’ wingless Nike exists, neither victory nor
defeat, just the solace of nothing;
the solace of names, that nothing has

a name, namelessness has a name

that names exist, names like narwhal
nettle, names like carnation, tawny owl
and nightjar, names like nightingale, new moon evening primrose, naiads, and the other kind of name in which a word when named is scent

like the narwhal’s name for Arctic seas,
the nettles’ names for fever, like carnations’

names for light reflected into factory-white nights, like the tawny owl’s, the nightjar’s names for feathers, the nightingale’s names for being Old World warbler hidden in moist thickets
like the new moon’s names for Earth and Sun the evening primrose family’s names for kinship like the naiad’s names for being pondweed whispering the naiads’ names in wind

- Inger Christensen (translated by Susanna Nied)

Taneli Viljanen

To: Jani Ruscica
Tue, Jul 11, 2023 at 2:35 PM

Las raíces inhalan. Basta deslizar poco a poco los dedos sobre las rocas para saberlas lisas y despobladas. Árboles de cristal.

Y es el instante de inusitar la lancha por la quilla y deslindar el filo. Los dedos largos y finos.

Sus ojos límpidos.
Este estupor de seda que se derrama. Pero empezar aquí.

La fiesta —sombra finísima— lenta. De la cueva se desprenden sus voces como suaves racimos. Piedras jugosas. Desde el zumo del circo.

Y es el instante; pero empezar aquí. Sus ojos ávidos, insondables. En sus bordes escuetos, las voces, las aguas cambian. Peces de piel fugaz.

- Coral Bracho

Jani Ruscica

To: Taneli Viljanen
Mon, Aug 21, 2023 at 10:39 AM

Đặng Thái Sơn’s performance from 1985.
And very soon a bit more about everything else... hope the summer has been gentle to you.

Jani Ruscica

To: Taneli Viljanen
Thu, Aug 24, 2023 at 11:14 AM

Free fall
I like this pairing of words. It has the promise of something unchained, unknown and it is always fascinating, titillating. It is undefined despite movement having a clear direction; the destination, if one even exists, is always unpredictable. Improvisation is a free fall, being non-binary is a free fall.

I used this pairing of words in relationship to Lee Lozano’s work primarily because her oeuvre seems to be so loaded with contradictions. Her works pull you into so many different directions that it is impossible to form a clear-cut relationship with them. It is interesting to think of the word contradiction, it has such a negative ring. Perhaps a more accurate term could be dissonance; it immediately strikes as more multidirectional and nuanced.

Lozano’s work also includes the kinds of simultaneities that we have been mapping out; Lozano can be raw and sophisticated, emotional and rational, sensuous and analytical, harsh and sensitive, crude and subtle. Thus the free fall is something that I primarily relate to the encounter with her work, to the relationship one negotiates with her work.

About us.
Different gestures, acts
shaping, sliding, bending, leaking, smudging, rolling
It’s a joy to hear you also say our artistic gestures resonate. I think this focus on the act of “making”, its particularities, might be key. We seem to have similar objectives for our actions and ways of using “materials”, precisely somewhat performatively. I also feel both of us are particularly interested in form, a hybridized one.

Which writers, poets, artists do you feel make use of language in ways that resonate with your own methods? What is the performative use of language like that interests you? Do you have important bonds in this respect; where do you tie your knots and not-knots and what continuums do you cherish?

Taneli Viljanen

To: Jani Ruscica
Mon, Sep 11, 2023 at 4:11 PM

Fascinating and eye opening how you write about Lozano, I will let it settle!

About writers, resonances and continuums: there are obviously several writers, I could indeed answer your question in multiple ways, but today I would like to reflect on my writing practice in relation to two different (probably highly imaginary and shaped by my own perceptions) traditions and ways of using language (but I will try to be more explicit by referencing a few specific books and writers).

-Latin American “queer neobaroque” literature, something about its linguistic abundance and its way of creating (and deconstructing and recreating and redeconstructing) worlds with language, its multitudinousness (its abundant imagination and plurality of forms) feels particularly fruitful and inspiring. I would like to mention particularly Severo Sarduy (their novels ‘Cobra’ and ‘Maitreya’, which were published in English as a joint volume, are my favorites, but I do also like their poetry (in English in the collection ‘Footwork’) and their essays) and José Lezama Lima (their novel ‘Paradiso’ is one of my favorite books; I love how the “excessively” metaphorical language keeps opening up new spaces and layers in the novel; their poetry is also great). (Also the previously quoted Coral Bracho is linked (at least in my mind) in some ways to this continuum and these very coordinates).

-a certain kind of “feminist genre hybrid” literature that often mixes personal, theoretical, fictional, poetic, political etc. elements that also, fundamentally, (at least in my experience and in the books dearest to me) has a troubled relationship to language, that constantly seems to force it to reinvent itself; the most important writers in this vein are often the kinds that write in (for example) English, but whose relationship to the language is bilingual or multilingual and from a minoritarian position, thus not without its problems and frictions. Two books that I would like to mention: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s ‘Dictee’ and (the previously mentioned!) Gloria Anzaldúa’s ‘Borderlands/La Frontera’.

A plurality of form and language, unfixity and hybridity probably characterize these aforementioned points of reference, as does some kind of shared gesture of re-imagining?

You also mention the hybridity of form (poignantly, needless to say), and I would like to hear more about it. What does hybrid form mean to you and how does it inform your practice?

Jani Ruscica

To: Taneli Viljanen
Sat, Nov 18, 2023 at 2:21 PM

How fascinating to read about the writers that are meaningful to you, the continuums you tie your knots and not-knots to. Some already familiar to me, while others, I will now have a chance to get acquainted with, thanks to you.

For myself the hybridity of form implies in itself some sort of tension. Even at the risk of being labeled a formalist, I’d be inclined to claim that there is no content without form. Or at least, that form is one with or indistinguishable from content, or that content should always take shape, actualize, materialize primarily through form. And when there is an indifference to form, or when form seems somewhat arbitrary or separate in relation to content, the work (regardless of the art form) is often in crisis. Or it is also highly possible that it is me that is in crisis in relation to the work ; )

I think that some form of hybridity is innate to me, inbuilt, almost like a feature, that just is. It has always informed my very being, thinking, relations, just about everything, so it has naturally also influenced my art making. It is surely rooted in very straightforward and personal experiences, like my multicultural background and perhaps even more firmly, in my experience of gender, which has never been frictionless or clear-cut. Since the very beginnings, at its core, it has been undeniably trans. Always shifting, never willing to settle, or always oddly dislodged, out of place, whatever that means! Later on, as vocabularies diversified, I started to call it being non-binary.

All in all, perhaps, it is exactly hybridity that within my own practice at least, seems to enable the challenging of form. Hybridity also seems to facilitate a slippage from set formats (or at least creates the potential to do so, and by no means am I claiming it is easy or that I succeed in doing so). Perhaps it is hybridity that allows for that space outside of the room, that space I seem to refer and return to repeatedly. It is also a rather concrete quality that simply ushers processes of naming into crisis. It is the smudging, the leaking, the slipping, it embodies everything that creates uncertainty, and thus possibilities, potential and a space for the re-imagining that you mention as well.

In addition to the Barbabapas, the platypus was an important creature in my childhood. Naturally back then I didn’t really understand its significance, it simply seemed to represent something that I instinctually had an affinity with. Only as a young adult did I start to comprehend its semiotic implications, partially guided by the writing of Umberto Eco, but also through other contexts and associations. I barely have any recollection of Eco’s thoughts now.

“Postmodern texts quote other texts; the platypus quotes other animals. Borges said that the platypus is an animal made up of the pieces of other animals, but since the platypus appeared very early in evolution, there are probably other animals made with pieces of platypus.”

- Umberto Eco

Hybrid creatures (why not also human) made of parts bring to mind a film I saw recently, Yorgos Lanthimos’ ‘Poor Things’, vaguely, a reinterpretation of Frankenstein. I liked it a lot, it was anarchic and rambunctious, exhilarating and terrifying all at once. I recommend it, perhaps more about this film later.

I’d love to hear more about your current work. How is ‘Glitterneste’ coming along, finding its hybrid form?

Attached some image propositions for sonic objects.

Hybrid forms and speculative materialities that I have sketched using AI, language to image prompts. Even if my relationship to AI models is a fraught one, there is something undeniably interesting in the collaged, pastiched nature these images/objects propose; melted welds, messy, unruly seams, leaking materials. Perhaps these could embody and materialize various futurities, gestures of re-imagining, the simultaneity of past, present and future, an alternative way to approach the idea of the archive, I don’t know... While producing these images I alluded to a world-building rooted in sci-fi utopianism, from Octavia Butler to Ursula K. Le Guin and from Anna Kavan to Samuel R. Delany and many others.

My intention is to start producing actual objects based on these images, and thus really allow materials to create some friction, to push against my ability to control them. And instead of mastery, possibly start to produce something clumsy, unwavering, stubborn and unpredictable, something most likely very different from these images. In any case, I am hoping for the process to facilitate the making of something uncontrolled, unnameable and fluid, that even later on, when subjected to performativity and sound, retains its unfixity.

Jani Ruscica

to: Taneli Viljanen
Fri, Dec 1, 2023 at 2:21 PM

this... I stopped breathing for seventeen minutes and seven seconds. Nina Simone in Montreux in 1976

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mf_5l1yTKNY some light into the darkness

Taneli Viljanen

to: Jani Ruscica
Tue, Dec 12, 2023 at 11:10 PM

Interesting thoughts on hybridity and everything related to it! A lot there that resonates, perhaps also some things I will want to return to later.

(At this point it occurs to me that I’ve probably said a couple of times that I’d return to something and then not done that... but that’s probably fine, after all this dialogue is going to go on for an indeterminate period of time and is also going to build uncontrollable extra parts in the minds of future readers; at some point someone is going to return to these!)

On Glitterneste, on writing: by chance, these past few weeks I’ve felt a bit stuck with my work (I’m sure it’s not serious in any way, it is just part of the process), which may influence this answer... my general idea is that I want the book to be multitudinous, multiplying, something that opens itself into multiple directions (more of an “opening” than a totally successful and controlled work?): I’m trying, almost, to write in as many ways and in as many styles as I can, and at the same time weave these different styles into different bundles and combinations, and the whole work into one larger construction (or perhaps a garden, or something...? there’s something interesting about the idea of the work being a designed and built whole in which there’s also some growth, decay and life going on that is independent from me... but that’s obviously just a metaphor here, I’m not sure it’s something I want to use). I want the book to include myriad usages of language, different genres, different relations between language and reality, different voices and sounds and tones; as well as literally different languages and

in a few parts visual elements that, probably, aren’t language, and language that refuses language’s ways of being and doing to such a degree that its status as language is called into question (in this I’m also interested in the borderline between language and non- language, its fluidity...). As can perhaps be imagined, at times this all feels too much, uncontrollable and unfocused! And at times it feels that I’m constantly running into my own limitations as a writer (but in a way this is wholly positive, finding those and fighting against them is something I want from this project). And more, at times (perhaps my problems lately are specifically related to this) it feels difficult to handle the book’s thematic and topical content, that I do also have clear thoughts on: it feels that I don’t always know how to write about the issues I want to write about, and that the book’s formal side interferes with it, leading the whole into directions that don’t feel wholly right... I don’t know! (It might also be that what I want to write about has changed lately, and I’m not sure if my initial plan has the right kind of relationship to this?) But I am confident that the work will find its own way of being and be done, at some point! (There is already quite a lot of text for it, and I do have a pretty clear idea about its overall form (which does have a couple of big gaps still...))

Very interesting, also, these images and the plans related to them! On those:

I’d be interested in asking something related to materialities and otherness: on the materiality of artificial intelligence, on the thinking of materials. One might think that both the artificial intelligence and the materiality of the works as objects is something foreign that you are working with, that you have a dialogue with, and that has its own role in the process of making the works, a role that doesn’t revert
to your choices or your consciousness. How do you think about the artificial intelligence on the one hand, the physical materiality of

the works on the other, as “conversation partners”? What kinds of differences and sameness do they (maybe) have? What kinds of “subjects” are they? (Are they subjects of any kind?) Who and what do you feel you are working with?

(& true, wonderful and magical, that Nina Simone video!)

Jani Ruscica

to: Taneli Viljanen
Wed, Apr 24, 2024 at 6:40 PM

At times words seem to escape me and become utterly irretrievable. I apologize for my silence, I have been patiently waiting for them to return.
It feels as if letters simply refuse to become language... bunnies perhaps

/) /)

( . .)

C(")(")

or owls

,___,

(0,0)

/)__)

""
or anything else but words.

Nevertheless, I will try to find some words... because I have missed our dialogue and my reply has already taken unreasonably long. Moreover, something has begun to take shape, exactly in that space out of reach from words, something that I sense is intrinsically tied to our dialogue and its potential future manifestations, forms and directions.

Lately, I have been particularly interested in portraiture as a form of dialogue. I suppose, as something inherently reciprocal and mirroring, that can potentially dissolve boundaries between self and other, but also, on the other hand, as a point of contact, where the very same boundaries can diverge, only to recede further apart. This multi-directional and fluctuating movement seems to interest me. My inquiries seem to be intrinsically tied to specific material questions, as well as to methodologies deeply rooted in the making of moving images. How to destabilize a set of binaries so innate to portraiture? These ostensible divisions between subject and object, self and other, maker and subject, portraitist and sitter, or the gaze and its object. Can the camera also be approached dialogically? And how? So that it becomes a tool of exchange, that only heightens the unfixity of its subjects; allows images to be porous, elastic, uncontrolled, and thus, endlessly fluid. Could a camera, or lens-based media in general, not freeze or capture? Or relinquish trying to find “a soul”, “a core”, “an essence” or “truth” about its subject, but rather acknowledge something else entirely, and not even function on the axis of empowerment/exploitation.

Even if I think my interest lies in the portrait in general, I find myself mostly looking at self-portraits made by other artists. I might be inclined to actually think all portraits are always also self-portraits of sorts. What is your relationship to the self-portrait, or perhaps more aptly, in literary terms the autobiographical or even different forms of autofiction? I think these forms are highly present in your work. Also many of the literary “favorites” you have mentioned earlier; like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s ‘Dictee’, José Lezama Lima’s ‘Paradiso’ and Gloria Andalzúa’s ‘La Frontera’ could be described as autobiographical works, or perhaps just like your own work, works that challenge notions of autobiography in crossing and muddying various categories; for instance in relation to genre, language, form and even content.

The other day, when we met over coffee, I asked whether you would be willing to collaborate with me on a suite of video portraits, and to my pleasure I was given a positive answer : )

Personally it feels like an important branching out of our ongoing artistic dialogue. I’m excited by the prospect of thinking and fleshing out together the implications of this video dialogue also in our email conversations. This feels like a good place to continue this exchange, but also to start something new... attached images of works by two of my all-time favorites, Maria Lassnig and Joan Jonas. Their works have been particularly influential lately, specifically in relation to my aforementioned reflections on portraiture and the self- portrait. Surely more about their works later.

“When in my painting, I became tired of analytically depicting nature,
I searched for a reality that was more fully in my possession than the exterior world, and I found it waiting for me in the body house in which
I dwell, the realest and clearest reality,...”
- Maria Lassnig

PS. Glitterneste sounds so unconditional and alive, elastic and slippery, formally fluid and just as hybrid and category bending as we have been sketching out in our conversations. I can’t wait to read it!

PPS. I am still working on the objects and will possibly return to them in our conversation at a later time.

to Jani Ruscica
Wed, Jun 19, 2024 at 2:33 PM

Some thoughts on the self, on the personal, on self-portraits;

who knows what a “self” is, who one, oneself, is? And how strange and perhaps for that reason important it is that no one knows!

If we are anywhere, we are in a necessary way entangled with some self, its places in the world, whatever they may be; if we want to start from somewhere, move towards something, it may be important to locate the self, the starting point, and at the same time problematize it; perhaps the precise and specific handling of any difficult issues demands and requires this?

Writing the self, depicting the self, thinking about the self, being inside a self: these are never the same: perhaps they can deepen and layer each other, make each other more possible?

Everything here is perhaps even more true and more important if the “self” and its “identity” are something whose being-in-the-world feels socially and politically problematic, non-obvious, controversial. But perhaps these selves can open up something special about all selves? It would seem that any self-portrait, any piece of autobiographical writing and any self are dialogical, parts of a dialogue: what kind, with whom, how? What can be opened up by these questions?

Jani Ruscica

to Taneli Viljanen
Wed, Aug 14, 2024 at 6:56 PM

"We all have body parts, emotions, and perceptions that Nagasena listed - but Nagasena's point is that they do not add up to a cohesive, inherent me. Therefore it's possible to function as the mere I, as one devoid of misconceptions about the self and liberated from erroneous views – especially from the misunderstanding that the compilation
of parts adds up to something real and independent in its own right, not contingent on narratives and circumstances. We are all self- inflicted victims of mistaken identity. When we confuse the pieces for an essential immutable me, we surrender to ego"

- Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

The other day I received a message from Dineo with this excerpt from Yongey Mingyur Ripoche’s ‘In love with the world’. The passage reminded her of my work. I, on the other hand was instantly reminded of our dialogue and the new suite of videos we are currently working on together. This is how thoughts and ideas flow and circulate from one dialogue to another. I like that : )

To wrap language around notions of ‘self’ strikes me as challenging. Words and sentences still seem to struggle to cohere, and I guess this is precisely why I tend to address these and other questions predominantly through visual languages!!

Nevertheless, it feels important to at least attempt to unravel some thoughts and intuitions also linguistically, especially in this way, dialogically.

The words of others do resonate, and in my reading I can clearly decipher things that deeply chime with the new works. Perhaps I am also afraid of the dogmatism of words, their specificity in the face of something so delicate, yet “grand and eternal”, as a subject. As you put it, delicate and difficult issues require precise and intentional handling, and in this context, through language, I don’t feel capable of doing that.

So... I revert to loaned words again, this time from Roland Barthes, whom I hadn’t read for over twenty years... until in the early summer I encountered his last lectures on ‘The Neutral’. I found these texts to really resonate with our earlier conversations on the significance of “yes” and “no” gestures, but also with our thoughts on how language could or should be tricked to sidetrack somewhere beyond the reach of binary “power structures”. Basically, ideas that very much align with how you have spoken of language as “material” and your aspirations to bend or slide language in ways that challenge its modes of being and behaving and thus “creating realities”.
What I found intriguing in these texts was also Barthes’ somewhat convoluted way of articulating something that essentially is also beyond the reach of the laws that govern language and its behavior.

"If there is a universal model for the very idea of paradigm (let's recall that the subject of our course, the Neutral, is what baffles the paradigm: the paradigm is the law against which the Neutral rebels), it is the yes/no (+/-) model. The paradox, the "limping" (="the scandal") = the yes (the affirmation) is implicitly inscribed in all of language, while the no requires a special mark at each occurrence."

"In order to withdraw, to preserve the discourse from affirmation, in order to nuance it (toward negation, doubt, interrogation, suspension), one must ceaselessly fight against speech, raw material, "law" of discourse. This leads to permanent, insistent consequences for us who speak and who, by and in language, have to assume responsibility for our imago in front of others (language: the problem is not to make oneself understood but to make oneself recognized).”

The Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche excerpt that Dineo sent me, also seems to insightfully resonate with your thoughts on the relativity of any conceptions of a “self”, also with the dialogical and mirroring nature of autobiographical writing or self-portraiture in general. Thoughts relating to visibility, but also to opacity strike me as an important facet of this conversation and these new works, particularly when the “self” and its “identity”, as you say, are contentious or not self-evident.

Language is alive and ever evolving, luckily, it too isn’t constant. Different languages also allow for different degrees of leeway in relation to a number of things. That which was unnamed is eventually named and “exists” within the matrices of language, image, sound and other forms, and that is truly empowering. This also always entails a contradiction, that we seem to have repeatedly touched upon both in our conversations and in our making: every act of naming excludes others, delineates, withholds simultaneity, and creates categories. Does the act of naming ever allow for a degree of movement, shifts, plurality and nuance? And how does representation and the image relate to these manifold questions.

I think we have once again reached what we have established to be some of the shared core questions of our artistic pursuits; we are once again faced with a number of not-knots.

Lastly Arca’s ‘Elektra Rex’, one of my favorites of the past few years, as far as music videos are concerned. I like the lyrics as well. They seem to embody something that reverberates rather interestingly with a lot of the aforementioned, Barthes in particular ; )

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-qzs7ePt1o

Electra Rex complex
Dismember flexed on deck
Tech-tech-techtonic atónita girl flex
Are you wildin' while we warp the text?
Are you wildin' while we warp the text? (Tech-tech)

Didn't we mention that we would?
Didn't we mention that we would fuck it up best? (Best) Didn't we mention that we would?
Didn't we mention that we would fuck it up best?

Let your hips go, let your, let your
Let your hips go, let your, go
Let your your hips go wild while we handle the rest
While we find a friend or foe to clap your sex against
Find a friend or foe, foe, foe to clap, clap, clap your sex against Find a friend or foe
To the beat, let your hips go
To the beat, let your hips go

Electra Rex knife sex
Wet and hot and heavy while we smash the test I'm drowning in flores, girl
Forgetting to breathe, I seethe and teethe
On the back of my throat
You're pressing my clit and my petals are heavy You're ready to blow, should I blow?

Should I blow? Should I blow? Should I? Should I? Should I? Should I blow? Should I? Should I blow? Should I blow? Should I blow? Should I? Should I? Should I? Should I blow? Should I Should I blow? Should I blow? Should I blow? Should I? Should I? Should I? Should I blow? Should I? Should I blow? Should I blow? Should I blow? Should I? Should I Should I? Should I blow? Should I? Should I?

Jani Ruscica

to Taneli Viljanen
Fri, Aug 16, 2024 at 9:33 AM

These sentences, read this morning, literally demand to be included in our dialogue.
From Anne Carson’s ‘Wrong Norma’:

"... I made myself available to analysis. I gave them to believe that I, the clouds, could be reduced to a typology.

It was hard work. I had to replace the shapeless caprice of my atmospheres with 4 basic cloud types. I had to edit the indecipherably fluid filigree of my language into a dry-as-dust classificatory system replete with Latin terminology. And beyond that, I had to be flirtatious. If you bring a concept or category close enough to the human mind to be very very attractive and then whisk it away so it stays out of reach, it becomes erotic. Flirting is not in my nature but who would be bothered doing science if it weren't erotic.

The 4 basic cloud types, as defined by amateur nephologist Mr. Luke Howard in a lecture at Plough Court in London on 10th December 1802, are: cirrus, cumulus, stratus and nimbus. Cirrus, from Latin for "lock of hair," means a tendril or fibrous shape; cumulus from the Latin for "heap" or "pile" means a heap or pile; stratus from the Latin for "layer" means a horizontal band; and nimbus, Latin "cloud", is a rainy combination of the 3 previous types. It was, let me repeat, hard work to dash about the universe impersonating these 4 cloud formations, not to mention the ceaseless transitions between them with their seductive lacy gaps..."

Taneli Viljanen

to Jani Ruscica
Mon, Aug 26, 2024 at 9:50 PM

I’ll also start with a quote, on opacity, and also on weavings and knots and materials, subjects already entangled with our dialogue, in a way, from a thinker that I’m generally happy to bring along to this dialogue (one who has felt very important to me lately), Édouard Glissant:

“Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics. To understand these truly one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components. For the time being, perhaps, give up this old obsession with discovering what lies at the bottom of natures. - - - This here is the weave, and it weaves no boundaries. The right to opacity would not establish autism; it would be the real foundation of Relation, in freedoms.”

There’s something opaque in any name, any naming: a name brings forth something new into the world, something different from what it names, whatever it is (is it something before being named?); the abundance, multiplicity, and growth of names can bring to the world new kinds of weavings of opacities and transparencies, networks of knots and not-knots, by and through which things (what are “things”?) can be thought and experienced differently.

I am thus, maybe, today, in favor of new, multiple, multiplying and contingent namings.

But now I’m thinking, and I’d maybe like to ask you (if it feels fun to answer, one can also always do something else with a question): what is the relationship between naming and depicting? How about between a name and an image?

Jani Ruscica

to Taneli Viljanen
Thu, Dec 5, 2024 at 12:29 PM

What is the difference between naming and portraying?
That strikes me as a fundamental and important, necessary question, that I will return to very soon...

Before that some words by Mirkka Rekola from 1974 'Ottavat aikansa kiinni vastakohdista

ja se on taantumusta.

Täsmällisimmät jotka nousivat siitä välistä mihin he nousivat

käyvät yli ymmärryksen.’

Jani Ruscica

to Taneli Viljanen
Fri, Jan 10, 2025 at 1:06 PM

Glissant feels like an important thinker to bring into the conversation, into our weave. Glissant’s thoughts on opacity and the rhizomatic have been particularly important for me.

Perhaps, as you state, processes of naming don’t always have to be so binding and static. Maybe the fact that I perceive them as being so says more about my relationship to language, than about the attributes of language itself. For me language clearly isn’t as pliable and elastic, or as material and plastic as it is for you. I do see how language and acts of naming entail multifarious relativities, rhizomes, variations, mutations, simultaneous opacities and transparencies, that at their best facilitate the opening up of new things, their very existence, but also their growth and development. These also connect rather interestingly to Glissant’s ideas on creolization.

I have always been interested in etymology, surely, first and foremost, because etymology so clearly and thrillingly renders visible the rhizomatic and relational structures of language. I also like all kinds of prefixes and suffixes and of course compound words, since with their parasitic nature they all seem to enable a certain volatility for language. I like how combinations of words can shift meaning multidirectionally and contain contradictions, the push and pull.

I have noticed that in your writing there are a lot of compound words. What do they mean to you? What do they enable?

In your latest essay on the queerneobaroque you mention some of the following: alabasterihöyheniin, kelopuukoruihin, lentoratausvaan, mustetahrasiipiin, liejusuhteisiin, aikahengitykseen ja kuuraterälehtiin. Do these kinds of chains of words allow for new acts of naming?
Or other simultaneities to exist? Or even the gestures of re-imaging that we have been previously charting in our conversation?

What is the relationship of naming to portraying? Or, of the image, the representation, to a name?
I’m interested in processes of naming specifically in relation to the pictorial, to representation. It is after all one of the core concerns of my artistic practice. I always try to activate processes of naming in relation to the encounter with the work, and perhaps there’s also something fundamentally politicized within that, that is in the act of troubling that naming, so that things aren’t so easily nameable, or that their “names” can suddenly change depending on the point of view or other factors. There is something here that could even be perceived as being a fundamental quality of the visual arts in general, namely its friction with language, or at least its fraught, indeterminate and imprecise relationship to language. I like that, and it is important for me.

Maybe plasticity has something to do with this as well; my propensity to unfix and destabilize meaning, or my incessant attempts to escape binaries and all kinds of categories. José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of disidentification feels increasingly central to my practice and methodologies. What seems important to me is that things are almost like something, but never categorically either this or that. There is something that rings as inherently true to me in that ethos, something I understand on a cellular level. And images seem to have the ability to accommodate this kind of ambiguity or leeway, even tough images, undoubtedly, just like language, are governed by an array of complex questions relating to control and power, and all of them undeniably interesting too! Questions that are always politicized and residual; intrinsically folded (to use neobaroque inspired verbs) into the weave of the form and materiality of any given work.

I presume that even my performatively or sculpturally oriented practice is rooted in thinking with and about images. I guess that is also why it feels natural here to talk solely of images, and relate processes of naming exclusively to images, to the pictorial and acts of portrayal or representation. Even tough, needless to say, they expand to include spatiality, materiality, bodily and other sensory experience.

All my making is anchored in an enquiry of the exhibition, both as site and as context. As well as a patio-temporal experience, that is always contingent to an encounter with an artwork/works.

Taneli Viljanen

to Jani Ruscica
Thu, Jan 10, 2025 at 5:36 PM

We have perhaps, interestingly, ended up at the core (one of the cores) of both of our artistic processes: for what you write about my relationship to language seems to refer to one of the most important aims of my work: I don’t necessarily think that language is elastic, mendable or plastic as such, but I think that one of my main aims is to make it more so, to give it more possibilities to move into unpredictable directions, to imagine more space for the previously mentioned new, multiple, multiplying and contingent namings. I want to make language do something other than what it usually does; and, perhaps, occasionally, make the performatives of naming function differently, in ways that are more nonnormative, gliding, free...? (Naming is, I believe, one of the classic examples of performative speech acts already for J.L. Austin!)

What you write concerning your own work in relation to depicting and naming is really interesting, and very interestingly in one part perfectly relatable, in another slightly less, as far as I can gather precisely because our primary mediums are different: I’m going to keep thinking about everything this maybe relates to, I think
I will want to return to the relationships between depicting and naming still!

On compound words: you are for sure right that I use them a lot, and also and in particular compoundneologisms (in relation to this I started to think that if someone were to want to write a parody of my writing style, one clear feature it would probably have would be abundant compound words... in addition, the text might feature thoughts that start to doubt themselves or turn to contradict themselves in the middle of a sentence, or in alternating sentences... and body-related imagery that combines with something totally other...this is as far as I got!). I think that compound words are a kind of micro level distillation of certain important features of my poetics: they are about elements foreign to each other that are brought together and made to clash, a poetic spark created by this; about words turning “foreign to themselves”, creature-like; possibly also about weaving together of elements of thought or feeling or sensing that would seem to be (but might not be) contrary to each other...

All this is (probably) related to everything I write above on bending and pushing-to-movement of language’s ways of being and doing; and yes, I feel that this is also related to the gestures of re-imagining that I feel are important in art generally. (As such the compound words are linked to all the other artistic devices and gestures that I use, and in the process of writing usually quite intuitively. In general compoundneologisms are for me charming also on some intuitive level of “taste”, and I like and have for a long time liked many other poets in whose texts they are important (for example Paul Celan, or Aase Berg (especially her book ‘Forsla Fett/Transfer Fat’), that I, incidentally, wrote an essay on a few years back: https://noesis.fi/ rasvakudosta-sirpalekielta/ )).

[On the next paragraph I feel a need to write a special “explanation” for this English version of the text. In it I’ll write about the Finnish word “muunsukupuolinen”, which functionally and roughly is the Finnish equivalent of the word non-binary. The literal translation of the Finnish word would be something like “other-gendered”, “muu” meaning “other”, “sukupuoli” meaning “gender”, and also “sex”, there not being a distinction between the two in Finnish. Also, “puoli” means “half” in English, giving rise to the implication of a binary nature of gender within the word itself, in its normative usage.]

I started in relation to all this to also think of the word “muunsukupuolinen”, which is also a compoundneologism of sorts... and I thought that I like how the word “muu”, other, that depicts foreignness in an open way (“other” says of itself nothing beyond it being not something, but something else...) can with its “u”-vowels uncover its own sonic echo within the word “sukupuoli”, that would usually seem to emanate binaries... all those letters u, emanating a mysterious foreignness (those phonemes of “kuu” & “sumu”, moon & fog...) have always been present within gender, only barely (only seemingly?) kept in line by the consonants s,
k and p...

If it would feel interesting to answer, I’d be interested in hearing more about how you think of the exhibition in particular as the context and the space in which your artistic gestures and their meanings and their movements happen? What kinds of things do you think the exhibition space in particular makes possible?

Jani Ruscica

to: Taneli Viljanen
Thur, Mar 27, 2025 at 11:56 AM

"Her revolution was not for the restoration of any identity. Not for their adding of ever more identities to an official list. It is a revolution to unleash the generative, generous capacity of non-identity – for anyone and everyone."

McKenzie Wark on Kathy Acker.

I also find the Finnish word for nonbinary, “muunsukupuolinen”, to be very apt and precise, truthful somehow. And perhaps through this term we return rather concretely to questions relating to being within the reach or out of reach of language and the many contradictory and concurrent effects naming as an act has. As sad as it sounds, I really do think that on some fundamental level I didn’t exist or wasn’t legible to myself prior to encountering the term nonbinary. I always thought that I simply existed outside of known/named “identities”, and I am not talking here exclusively of gender identity. So there really is no undermining how empowering the naming of gender was, and consequently/subsequently I cannot deny the importance of every act of naming. Nevertheless, I am also inclined to think that part of the empowerment came from the accommodating nature of the term nonbinary itself. It is spectral, and multidirectional, allowing for a similar kind of freedom and leeway as a so-called non- identity. Language does indeed render visible, materialize, and I was no longer a ghost.

Despite this overwhelming experience of empowerment my skepticism towards all identities has remained, surely because it is somehow embedded in my body memory, and this feeling of existing in liminal spaces, falling in between the “cracks” so to speak, has persisted and few “identities" seem to offer any true flexibility, intersectionality or plurality. Few identities are compoundneologisms (apart from some very new ones) and thus embody a sense of contradiction and multiplicity.

At the same time, I thoroughly understand the importance of claiming and reclaiming identities, especially as feminist and decolonizing acts. To practice one’s right to self-determination. History cannot be erased, but words and terms are indeed malleable; they can be reclaimed and recontextualized. And perhaps, it is right here that lies another quality that seems to be teeming with potentiality in being nonbinary; its otherness to itself, its perpetual state of becoming. As if yet to be, embodying a sense of futurity, and yet, in some ghostly manner undeniably ancient, being anchored somewhere outside of a western “order” and time frame. In our current moment it is nevertheless a hindrance to the system, but a gentle one, not aggressive or assertive. Surely the negation is strongly felt and impactful, but it also just simply is other...

About the word other... I also enjoy its vastness. It indeed doesn’t determine, it just is everything it isn’t, nonbinary in this instance. And I think, also here, we are at the very core of our dialogue, faced once again with the importance of the negation, the ‘no’-gesture and the spaces it warrants, opening up like celestial halls of mirrors to all possible directions. THE USES OF NOT!

About the exhibition as context and space in another message.
To consider and attempt to posit its significance within my practice is most definitely an interesting task, thank you for asking : )

It is very interesting what you say about compound words and compound neologisms and the poetic spark they elicit, I certainly recognize this phenomena as characteristic of your usage of language. And how wonderful your essay on Aasa Berg’s ‘Forsla Fett/Transfer Fat’, I wasn’t familiar with it, I will certainly get acquainted with it.

I would also be curious to hear about your relationship to autotheory as a literary form, if it feels at all relevant in relation to ‘Glitterneste’ or earlier work. During the past year conceptions of portraiture have been central to our dialogue and other collaborations, we have also previously sketched out its relationship to notions of autobiography. Whilst recently listening to a podcast conversation between McKenzie Wark and Lauren Fournier on autotheory as feminist practice, I started to think of the roles theoretical thinking, philosophy and critical theory have in your writing, the many forms they seem to accrue, and more specifically the ways in which they become entangled into the hybrid forms of your writing.

Taneli Viljanen

to: Jani Ruscica
Sun, Apr 20, 2025 at 12:57 PM

Probably unsurprisingly, I relate to a lot of what you write about “muunsukupuolisuus”! I particularly love this: “its perpetual state of becoming. As if yet to be, embodying a sense of futurity, and yet, in some ghostly manner undeniably ancient, being anchored somewhere outside of a western “order” and time frame. In our current moment it is nevertheless a hindrance to the system, but a gentle one, not aggressive or assertive.” And I began to think that this kind of thinking about and articulating of the term is a part of the process of naming something. And then I began to think about framing, framing and naming: a part of the process (the performative) of naming is, perhaps always, this kind of framing and contextualizing the new term. And a name is, perhaps always, a kind of frame. A new name suggests a new frame, a new contextualization. But naming and framing are not identical; they are related but not the same. They have a relation, with which
one can do different things.

Thinking about frames got me then thinking about a question I posed in this dialogue a while back: What is the nature of any artistic gesture? Because one answer to this is that an artistic gesture is a gesture of framing. I have for a while felt that a certain kind of straightforwardly conceptual art or writing that focuses strongly on framing and recontextualization is, for me, at the moment, kind of stale and boring. But there’s still something about framings that interests me, and thinking about them feels like an important part of the kind of hybridity in writing that I’m committed to. And I just came up with a name for the kind that interests me: I want slippery framings.

In an important way, having different kinds of writing exist in the space of a single work means having these different kinds of texts frame each other. But this framing should be multidirectional and unsettled. I don’t want, for example, for an essay to frame a poem, or a poem to frame an essay, but both of them to frame each other, in a slippery and fluid way.

And this brings me to autotheory. I want my writing to be, in one important part, thinking, also in a way that could be considered theoretical. But: I want writing to not be about thoughts, but to exist as a process of thinking; I don’t want “auto” to define “theory” or “theory” to define “auto”, but a constant negotiation and movement and intermingling between them.

(One of the reasons Gloria Anzaldúa’s ‘Borderlands’ feels so important and exemplary for me is precisely that it performs these multidirectional and fluid framings in such an inspiring and intense way.)

The self and the thinking should never feel settled.