Work Text

Station 1

Marika and Anton are walking along the marshes. Part one.

— We’re recording. — I am afraid that if we now try to reconstruct for the recording everything we discussed and arrived at in conversation, it will feel artificial. The thought will slip away. — It will not. We will follow the traces of our previous conversations. — But when we were talking before switching on the recorder, we were thinking in the course of the conversation, reflecting. We entered the process of thinking and developed the subject. — Almost all our conversations are recorded in exactly this way. First we think, then we speak. That is how we work: we record what we have thought. — All right, then let us try.

— We began by asking ourselves: how should we work, what kind of work of art should we create, what kind of work of art could represent us as artists? — We considered different possibilities for a long time. None quite satisfied us. And we began to think. — And then we found that something already existed, something connected with our life and directly produced from it as a work of art. Something we could no longer pass by. However we might construct our strategies, they would always remain, first, within the field of our conversation and, second, be organised around our position.

— Yes. Then it should all begin like this: “We are in Wedel, a suburb of Hamburg. We have rented a room here through Airbnb. We have been looking for a proper flat for three months, and it still seems very difficult, given our semi-legal status here. We had to leave our large two-storey flat in the Czech mountains, where we had lived for the last two years, because we could no longer afford it. We are emigrants. We left Moscow before the war, when it became clear to us where everything was heading. Our paintings, books, musical instruments and belongings remained there.”

— But perhaps it would not be right to say that we felt at home there, in the Czech Republic. Even in Moscow we did not feel at home. In fact, we have never felt at home anywhere. — But to feel at home—or, in other words, to feel that one belongs somewhere, in a particular place, in one’s own neighbourhood, in one’s own country—and to have one’s own home are not the same thing. — Yes, we need a home, like other people do. Especially now that Leo has been born.

Work Text

Station 2

An uninhabited, deserted peninsula. Marika and Anton have been living alone on the rocks for two months, evading the Covid quarantine.

— The places in which we have ever lived always have something in common. And what they have in common is our world. This world makes the different places in which we live resemble one another. Somehow, their topology is the same. — When we woke up in our tent today, we had another flashback. Once again, it seemed that we were in the very same flat. As always. — And everything is arranged in roughly the same way as in our flat on Rabochaya Street in Moscow. — Yes, but now our flat has unfolded across five kilometres. And there are more rooms here. — Up there, between the hills, is our bedroom. The bed is in the tent. To go and wash in the morning, you have to walk five hundred metres from there, past large rocks and almond trees, go around the hill, and then descend along the bed of a dried-up river to the sea. — And that is where our bathroom is. — A large one. With a jacuzzi. — You can swim there wearing a mask; it is really great. Then you have to go two hundred metres to the left along the beach to reach the living room. — Not walk, but jump from rock to rock. It is quite strenuous physical exercise. — That is where we drink coffee in the mornings. — We are sitting here now. — There is a sofa here—the pebble beach. — Further on is the laundry, in the sea between the rocks. We wash the dishes and our clothes there. And if you climb the mountain, cross the field and reach the lighthouse, that is where our office is, because only at the lighthouse is there a mobile signal. — And here lies an enormous rock, about fifteen metres high. It fell here straight from the mountain. — It serves as the balcony of our flat. You can sit beneath it. We placed a board across the rocks there, and it became a bench. You can sit there in any rain and quietly read a book. So we also have a balcony here. More than one, in fact: there is also a gigantic fossilised coral reef at the edge of the beach. — It remains warm after all the rocks on the beach have already cooled. The sun has set, but the coral stays warm for a long time. Everywhere we find our place, resembling one and the same flat, even in a landscape as strange as this one. Everything here looks exactly like Mars. — But it all already seems perfectly ordinary to us.

— Today was a drill day for us.

— A spider bit me. It looked like a karakurt.

— What do you do if a karakurt bites you? We really freaked out.

— You have to cauterise the bite with a match. It is fine, it does not hurt very much. Bearable.

— Squeeze out the venom. Something was actually coming out.

— So it is entirely possible that we saved someone’s life today. Mine.

— I’ll be right back.

Work Text

Station 3

Marika and Anton are talking on a train.

— What were we talking about before this? — We were talking about Socrates. There is an interesting moment connected with the fact that, at one point in the Timaeus, Socrates says: as a person, I do not belong to any groups at all; I have no place. At the same time, everyone knows that this is not true. He belongs to the polis. He is simply making a strange move in the conversation. — And here it seemed interesting to us to begin this work about place with an emigrant’s complaint. Conversation as a surrogate space of home. A conversation in the course of which the possibility of having this home opens up within the conversation itself. And now we are sitting here during a war, trying to reflect on what place is. Place in general and our place in particular. — We will shape all the nuances of our conversation into an artistic and academic work at the same time. — This can be used as a beginning, when, you know, people are simply talking about all kinds of nonsense.

— In all these conversations, their own common form always emerges—or, better, a topology. At the end, we always arrive at the same thing we said at the beginning. And our conversations repeat this form: it is as if we forget what we were talking about and begin again from the very beginning. — Here is something else that is very interesting: Plato’s Timaeus is also constructed according to the principle of continual beginning. Everything there begins again several times. It returns to the beginning and tries to find the foundation. And it is the foundation that has been at issue from the very beginning. When they met, four of them were supposed to come, besides Socrates himself. And Socrates says to them: there are only three of you; this one, this one and this one are present, and one more—not naming him—“the one who is not with us today.” It is never said who this fourth person is. — That is, he is present through his absence. And how does the whole chapter begin? — It begins with “one, two, three.” — Good. They laugh. Everything most interesting and crazy is bound up with three.

***

— Do you remember saying that the second part of Plato’s Parmenides resembles a labyrinth? — All philosophy resembles a labyrinth to me. — A labyrinth is a trap. — But a labyrinth is not only a trap. A labyrinth is a path to freedom. A labyrinth is, in essence, a path out of oneself. The philosopher leads himself out of the labyrinth of doxa, using the instruments of knowledge itself. But for this, he must have experience of something other. If the philosophical labyrinth consists of knowledge, then what is other to it is Nonknowledge. Nonknowledge is a position from which philosophising can begin: an unbound, free milieu in which philosophising is possible at all.

— What does this give us for understanding artistic practice?

Work Text

Station 4

Marika and Anton are sitting in the kitchen in Děčín.

— One, two, three. Okay, we’re recording.

— We are sitting here in the kitchen, trying to think and talk about everything as a whole, as we do quite often.

— Before, the two of us used to talk; now there are already three of us.

— The third is our son.

— Leo is still small and will probably remain silent for now. I hope. Can you remind me what we arrived at then?

— We were talking about Nonknowledge in Plato. We arrived at the idea that Nonknowledge proves to be a place which the philosopher uses as a space of indeterminacy. He steps out into it in order to look at himself from an external position. — So we were talking about Nonknowledge as a place? — Exactly. — If the philosopher steps out into this place to look at himself from outside, then the artist lives there, in that hole, all the time. — Yes. We are those people who live in that hole. We have been living in Nonknowledge for nine years now. — Do you remember the motif in the Symposium of a place in which birth must occur? Diotima tells Socrates that love is the striving to give birth and bring forth in the beautiful. So we considered this place suitable enough to give birth to our son here. We consider this place our home. It follows that Chaos is our home.

— The kettle has boiled.

— In the Timaeus, the theme of indeterminacy as a place of birth is indicated very clearly. It even describes several manifestations of indeterminacy. One is the indeterminacy of the many, distinct from the determinacy of the One. And there is also a place, a field of contingency, in which the differences of the many from the One are imprinted. A contingency that operates as necessity, without which no world could exist. The world is created while God calculates; if the calculation were correct, the world would not exist.

— Right. Here comes Deleuze. Time to make the tea.

— I’ll turn off the recording for now.

Pause.

— One, two, three. Our conversation leaps across pauses as if across chasms. Let’s leap on.

— Then let’s begin again from the beginning. You were saying that Plato has certain regions of Indeterminacy or Nonknowledge. — For an image to be able to arise, a medium must already be provided. The Indeterminacy we have already spoken about proves to be this total, all-encompassing medium of everything—not even empty, but no kind of medium at all. — Does this medium exist in the subject, as it does in Kant, or is it a metaphor altogether? — No. It is a factor of cosmology. The Timaeus calls it Khôra. It is an incomprehensible thing that exists outside Logos and prior to Logos. Logos enters this indeterminacy, and the world is born. — But then it would seem that Plato implied the existence of empty space? — Hardly. The Timaeus speaks of the unintelligibility of Khôra. Spatiality here is meant rather in the sense of place, without any extension. Χώρα is a word that, in any case, carries the meaning of place. It is that into which the One turns itself inside out as an indeterminate multiplicity, engendering everything that can be called the world. In essence, Khôra is a development of the idea of Chaos from Hesiod’s Theogony.

— It follows, then, that the medium—or, as you say, Khôra—must possess a being more primary than the images within it, than the phenomenal world. — Personally, I think that the medium has no being of its own apart from its content. Take a television that is switched off, for example. In its inactive state it is not a medium; it is merely a heap of plastic and wires. The medium is actualised when an image appears. — But even if the being of the image derives from the original, there must be a screen, a matrix that offers a chaotic principle or white noise upon which forms can be imprinted. Whatever the source of the unity inherent in the medium, it is precisely this unity that is necessary for the birth of, for example, a conversation. A unity of time and place. — Or a unity of another kind: you and I constantly interrupt the conversation and jump back and forth, yet it is one and the same conversation. Its unity is secured by a certain frame. All these words are first laid down as digital bits in a sequence of discrete values, or as a layer of molecules on a receiving surface. It may not even form a material unity, but may instead be a collection of different scraps on which one can write. — This unity is conditional. — Mediality is thus multiplied, and one unity contains other unities within itself. In this sense, the entire world can be regarded as a construction of medialities nested within one another. Indeterminacy can be regarded as the general medium of everything.

— We have slipped back into the problematic of art. Let’s take a break. It is time for Leo to sleep. Let’s continue a little later.

Pause.

— Is he asleep?

— Yes. Do you remember how we said that we live in the hole of indeterminacy and that it is our home?

— I remember.

— But if indeterminacy is the general medium, if it encompasses all the things in the cosmos, then all things and all beings are floating in indeterminacy. — It would seem so. — Then our sense of being alien to everything, our understanding of ourselves as strangers, concerns the universal condition of all things. This is what lies behind the veil of social order, the system of concepts and customs. We find ourselves not at the periphery of an ordered cosmos, but at its very centre, which is everywhere. — This is not the periphery—it is a crumpled space. Here, estrangement proves to be universal. Time dissolves in the indeterminacy of memory; events follow one another, leaping across chasms of non-being. We leap across hills with an inconceivable chasm between them.

Work Text

Station 5

A conversation in Luang Prabang, where Marika and Anton ran out of money.

— Repeat what you just said. — The concept of poiesis is usually associated with artistic work. In this understanding, the product of poiesis is secondary to Logos: it is a material, perceptible copy of the idea in time and space. But our work is not confined to a movement between paradigm and copy. Rather, it serves as a matrix for picking up and sliding ideas—a game of interpretation.

— We understand that, in our situation, we have to act politically—because we are entirely uninscribed within any systems. — That is, if we are not inscribed within any structures, then politically we act as an independent force. — We are saying that our autonomous position gives us greater power, a kind of sovereign power. — Not exactly sovereign power, but power at the highest level. — The highest status is complete autonomy. How can this concentration on what is our own be combined with communication? — That is, how can we combine communication with not shifting our attention to external questions that have a devouring effect? — This is why it only makes sense to speak about ourselves. — Not even about ourselves, but… — About objects. — About the objects we have. And these objects have an entirely equal status for everyone participating in the conversation. — In this sense, we need to create an object that will act, that will communicate with a person on the same terms on which we communicate with that person. — And this object will somehow be autonomous from us. — Well, so that someone else can connect to it, of course. — But an idea cannot simply pass by itself from one head to another. For that to happen, a medium is needed. — This brings us to the idea that we need to create not simply objects of thought, but objects of action that will act. — And what will that be? What kind of object is it?

— I really like what our portfolio says now: that documentation is the medium of Absent Institution. — Mm-hm. — That is, notebooks, photographs. — Yes. So everything that remains as an imprint is an art object. Everything that remains after us. — We said that we have no art objects, that they just fall out, remember? — Mm-hm. — These traces that remain after us constitute all the documentation, which becomes an art object. — What we were thinking about—how to make it into an art object—does not need to be made into an art object. It is already an art object in itself. — Any photograph is an art object. A note saying that the door is singing is an art object. — Yes, but only within the framework of Absent Institution. On its own, it is not an art object.

— We are constructing a discursive field around our work. I think there can be two opposing aims in this construction. The first is to make one’s art more intelligible to viewers and critics. — I think that never actually works. And the second? — The second is what we do: to create a protective framework of ready-made paths of meaning, within which an unreflected, raw, creative life can exist. A life that, in the extreme, may be entirely unproductive, as in our case. Discourse is thus constructed around an empty place. It frames a certain hole. — I find it more interesting to think that theories form railings or a turnstile, so that people do not fall into this abyss but can look down into it. Different philosophies do this in different styles and describe the abyss in different words, but the essence remains: structures of knowledge frame an empty place that can quite appropriately be called Nonknowledge.

— We kept thinking: how can Nonknowledge be realised in artistic practice? Perhaps through the visible absence of an object that is somehow marked, indicated through curatorial practice? — For us, the absent object existed in the form of Whatever, as an ersatz-object. In Russian, the word lyuboe usually means “any” or “it does not matter which”, yet its form is related to lyubit’, “to love”: lyubimoe, “the beloved”. This is paradoxically opposed to the meaning of whatever.

— I thought that an art object, by virtue of its conditional materiality, is much more real than ordinary objects. In ordinary things, materiality constantly deceives us. A thing may suddenly refuse to be what we expect it to be. Materiality constantly threatens to slip out from under the thing. In an art object, by contrast, materiality is subordinate to the being of the thing; it serves that being.

— Our art is neither our artworks on their own nor our discourse on its own. Our art is our artworks and our discourse together. Artworks are ersatz-objects: material objects onto which discourse is fixed. This combination is our art.

— Do you want some rice?

Work Text

Station 6

A conversation after the storm.

— We said that we use ersatz-objects as placeholders in order to make the place visible. But now it turns out that a special ersatz-object is no longer needed. It turns out that the marking of the place is realised most fully in the practice of the artist. — The artist, who does not act here at all as an artist in the sense of poiesis. — By analogy with Nicholas of Cusa’s Learned Ignorance, this could be called a practice of artistic Nonknowledge. — Yes. That is, in doing their work, the artist creates a place not for a material object, but occupies that place themself. — No, the place does exist. The artist does not. But the artist occupies it. — But why can you say that the artist does not exist, while the place does? — Because the meaning of the artist’s work lies precisely in opening this place. — But again—the artist’s work. So the artist is somehow implied at the beginning. — Exactly: the artist is implied. Implied like a phantom pain. The artist exists as the expectation of their own actualisation. — Does the artist exist as an expectation within the artist themself, or within someone else? — What do you mean? Naturally, expectation is a certain state of thought in the one who thinks. We are not speaking about some audience in general. — So this subject may specifically be the artist themself, who thinks. — We cannot do without the artist. But it may also be the other. This is the significance of art: art is communicative. The artist creates a communicative situation.

— The artist is the one who creates art, while art is what the artist creates. And between them an artistic act takes place—communication as a connection. — It is interesting that even with Whatever it happened that every viewer who looked at the object created the object. That is, at a certain point, the viewer became the artist.

— There is such a thing as an artistic act. This act is animation. This act is the transformation of the object. — A zone of autonomy is created by this artistic act. The act singles out a piece of matter or some action from space and makes that action autonomous.

— We need to dwell on autonomy. And on nullity.[^nullity-en]

— There is a delay in the artist’s becoming or actualisation in the act. This is the meaning of the expectation we spoke about. We introduce it as a communicative field of expectation. This is what we called σχολή, idleness. A certain positive gap. — This Zone of Nonknowledge is precisely scholē. It is postponement, a pause. — A delay. It is interesting how, for us, Nonknowledge is directly connected with scholē.

— But the work has already been taking place all this time. What we put into it, what happens between us—this work is what we are doing now, as we talk about it. — But it is shown simply by our saying: we are Rabota, and that is all. — Because you and I need to understand what we are doing. So that the thing that exists has a name.

— But in order to ask ourselves about this, we need an external position from which we can look at ourselves from the outside and ask. — An observer appears in our life, turning the search for a vantage point into a performative action—one might say, a ritual.

The baby wakes in the cot and growls.

— What was the meaning of it after all? Was there no meaning?

— I will try to remember now.

— It is interesting to begin from zero. We are trying to begin to think. It is difficult to begin to think. It is interesting that, in our conversations, speech appears before thought. What is interesting is the very possibility of saying anything at all.

Marika and Anton walk along the marshes. Part Two.

— All these conversations, in fact, always take place in a situation of acute out-of-placeness, groundlessness, in an event of estrangement. We are stranded without money in Laos and talking about the art object. We are hiding among the rocks from Covid biopolitics and talking about the art object. We are going nowhere from nowhere and talking about the art object. These dialogues point to the place in which we find ourselves, where there is nothing but the unbearable repose of absence, and where we find our own presence.

— And in the next step, we discover that we arrive at this place in our work before we manage to create a work of art. Or, more precisely, on arriving at this place, it becomes clear that the work can begin only now and from this new situation.

— And then it turns out that the work has already been done. The situation of estrangement itself, which occasioned this new beginning of the work as a whole, deserves to be described as the path to this place, with all its domestic and lived details. Thus the beginning of the work coincides with its end.

[^nullity-en]: ### Translating «ничтожность»

The canonical English equivalent of «ничтожность» in this Tunnel is nullity.

The term does not function as psychological self-abasement, nor as metaphysical nothingness, which would make too strong an autonomous ontological claim. Nullity retains a juridical-ontological register: annulment or invalidity as an instituted status rather than natural non-being. It is a declared nothing that requires an act to establish it.

This meaning corresponds to the logic of the cycle: the artist is actualised in the act of naming rather than existing ontologically before it. Nullity can be institutionalised, framed and recognised; it is the empty place occupied by documentation. As with the artist and Khôra, what is at stake is not a substance but the result of a performative positing.

Nought remains a secondary alternative. It sounds more archaic and apophatic and lies closer to the register of negative theology, but it holds the institutional logic of occupying a place less precisely. The canonical English text therefore uses nullity.

### Conceptual note

Nonknowledge in this cycle is understood not transgressively but topologically — following Nicholas of Cusa, as the limit and background of knowledge rather than its rupture: structures of knowledge frame an empty place; they do not explode it. We consciously distance ourselves from the popular reading of Bataillean non-savoir as a transgression against the dictatorship of reason. Its register of excess, expenditure and rupture is foreign to the ontological logic of the present work.

At the same time, we acknowledge the structural proximity of the later, apophatically articulated Bataille — in particular his appeal to negative mysticism in L’Expérience intérieure — to the tradition of docta ignorantia from which our text also proceeds. This proximity is deliberately not developed here, because our route to Nonknowledge passes directly through the Timaeus and Nicholas of Cusa, bypassing poststructuralist mediation, including Derrida, whose Khôra reaches structurally adjacent conclusions by another path.