Captivation. Statement

The critical gaze requires us to make room for contemplation, which allows us to actualize ourselves in a particular situation, and to actualize the specificity of the space we have cleared.

Through artistic and educational practices, which enable us to establish “cultural situations,” we reach a state of consciousness in which dissociation and captivated attention can coexist.

We cannot represent the present without making reference to the past, the dubious and the unattainable. The critical gaze is forcibly retrospective.

This act of referencing is made possible by repetition of what has already happened, of the past, in which a choice was, at one time, made.

There is no need to invent something new out of nothing. Everything is all around us; we are simply playing out the same script again and again. We do not want to submit blindly to a homogeneous, anonymous and ahistorical totality. We resort to radicalized contextualization. Without this starting point, any act of distinction becomes impossible, absurd. If we mechanically reproduce something, accepting it uncritically as an absolute given, then we voluntarily abstain from deliberating on it.

Intentional repetition (re)actualizes a situation and brings it within the reach of our gaze.

The act of returning is always a return to a time where something happened and a thought occurred which must be thought through again. At the same time, it is an act of returning the gaze to ourselves. We repeat, conscious that we are gazing from the viewpoint of the present moment — a moment that still needs to be clarified.

Attention to the conditions in which we find ourselves, to how our bodies are positioned, what is near them and what is between them in a specific space at a specific time presents cultural situations. When we establish or manifest cultural situations, we have the experience of being captivated in the present, despite the fact that we were always already captivated. In this space, in which we are located and which created us, we make room for the gaze. We captivate that room forcibly and temporarily. The act of captivation is contemporaneous with that of making room. It is through this manifested image of culture that we are capable of seeing ourselves. It is in this way that we imagine, clarify and establish those spaces between bodies, those places with their stories and their hidden opportunities, places containing the potential for (re)establishment.

2016

https://prostory.net.ua/en/74-captivation-statement