Moving Thinking

The foundation of one’s thought is the thought of another

When John Austin introduced the word performativity, he was referring to the active character of speech. He proposes that under certain conditions language creates the reality it describes. One does something with words.
Speech employs aspects of an aesthetic model of tension that is not only rhetorical but also dramatically staged between the levels of saying and showing, message and performance, in which words come to act and through this to mean. Suggesting the perception of meaning of a text not in what it says or represent, but in what it does. The real effect it brings about.
If action can be taken with words, I propose to apply the model of Austin to words that are not necessarily uttered. When something happens in the act of writing or when reading sets action in course.
Louwrien Wijers book Writing as Sculpture doesn't refer to sculptures made of words, but rather to the generative aspect of writing. What writing does. For Louwrien, Writing as Sculpture is sculpture made of the mental ability of living people. For me they don't necessarily need to be alive.
This work is a representation of the potential movement of thinking in space. The invisible yet constant movement that we are not able to see in the library. Like in a forest, it looks still but it is constantly moving, it is our eyes that cannot depict it. But what if it could? How would the movement of thoughts look like? What is the weight of thinking? How much space does it take?
It is a performance, a performance stretched in time, only if this period is compressed, we will be able to see a meaningful movement.
Everyday I searched for books that belong together and placed them next to each other, trying to create a convincing organization. A system that is not alphabetical, nor chronological, but that organizes knowledge by analogy, affinity of ideas in eventual loops that neutralizes time by turning it into memory, where before and after looses it's meaning.
In the reading room, each book on display will be connected to a thread of thought and knowledge, like a plant that lives on it’s rhizome.
The rhizome attacks the dominant models of knowledge to introduce a new construtivist image of thought via the principle of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be. It incorporates the logic of radical multiplicity. In contrast with centered, or even polycentric systems defined by hierarchical modes of communication and pre-established paths (tree model), the rhizome is an acentric, non-hierarchical, non-signifying system, without a general structuration and without an organizing memory or central automaton: it is defined solely by a circulation of states, directions in motion and connections between circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, organizations of power, social and existential struggles. An experimental flux. An absolute mutualism, boosted by multiple interactions between networks which are not vertical, nor binary, not linear like in an arborescent model, but open, transversal, planar and made by multiple entries susceptible to constant modifications.
The Stedelijk Museum Library is among the 3 largest art libraries in Europe, with around 190 thousand books stored underneath the museum. A great place to know the world.









Bibliography
Giles Deleuze and Feliz Guatari. Rhizome, 1976.
Dorothea von Hantelmann. How To Do Things With Art, 2010.
Annie Ratti. The Mushroom Project, 2013.
C. G. Jung. Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1965.