Our first day in Greece began at four in the morning as a nightmare that grew worse with every minute. We met the evening one hundred and twenty kilometres from Athens, in a place where, as we later learned, the legendary contest between Homer and Hesiod had taken place. With great difficulty we found a strip of land between the dirty sea and the road where we could spread a blanket for the night. Our work today is to spend the night in this strange place and see what happens tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and so on, until we reach the destination. The road from here to Port25 in Mannheim, which we somehow have to cover in ten days, will become the tool that creates the work; the strange things that often happen in situations like ours will become its content.

At the beginning of March 2020 we were in Moscow. Borders were closing and stricter quarantine measures were approaching; under these conditions Anton, as a foreigner, would find himself outside the law in Russia. This directly threatened both our shared life and our artistic work, so we decided to slip out of control. Before the complete lockdown we managed to escape into uncontrolled territory, where we could live through the difficult period while continuing to live and work together.

Art is woven into history; conditions and meanings are reflected in it and leave lasting imprints. One might decide that the fabric of culture gives birth to art, but the artist knows that its source lies outside. For more than four months we hid together on an uninhabited peninsula, understanding our action as a performative practice whose substance was the founding of Zones of Nonknowledge — lacunae and bypass tunnels — accepting insecurity and groundlessness as performative conditions, and circumstances as the material through which the practice unfolds.

To turn such a hidden, unproductive practice into an instrument of art, and to make the artist with their work-in-itself visible, a space of publicity has to be opened. This requires a particular figure: an outside observer who carries out a practice of materialization in which the groundless and aimless process is rendered. Through this materialization, the artist’s unproductive practices acquire the qualities of a percept that, at a certain moment, can be synchronized with the viewer’s perception and made into an object of storage and transmission.

Like fish of the Labridae family, which can change sex under extreme conditions, we separated such an observer out of ourselves. This other, curatorial mode of action allows us to combine unproductive practices such as Zones of Nonknowledge with materialization, communication and presentation. Material produced by recording such unproductive artistic work — documentary video and photography, audio recordings, notebooks, lists of things, maps, and the things themselves — serves as an ersatz object for the materialization and rematerialization of artworks without special artistic production.

Since we work together we have to talk everything through. Our work arises in the moment of dialogue, and words leave consequences. We fix the order of psychological movements in our conversations as a ritual of self-recollection. We build a position and collect imprints of connections and relationships in the form of rules, which exist to be used as instructions, but like leges naturales they open up in the process. Over the years, these rules have taken shape in a model of an institution into which we enter like an empty house in order to look at ourselves through the window. We called that psychological phenomenon the Absent Institution and use it for artistic purposes as a facade for unproductive practice.