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Unfolding Portents
hoyonboc & Bubu Mosiashvili

The first open studios following the 7th Circa 106 open call “Library work space co-occur” took place between 23rd and 25th of March 2022. The both Artists have engaged with the concept of the library and its ontological and epistemological predicaments. Meaning taking strategies to unsettle and disseminate the concrete form of the library and its containment. For the open studios Bubu proposed a work “Circa Library for Imagined Futures,” and hoyonboc used mapping as a counterpoint to unseal Library / book shelf, an Apparatus which designed to project narratives into the present. Besides proposed individual works and research, the artists’ working process over the residency period was seeking new forms of collaborative thinking. As one of the methods the residents imagined a wall of the Circa 106 space as a mechanism of showing the development of their collective work by putting notes, sketches, words, and thoughts on the wall. In the course of time the wall became a depiction of paths the artists followed while researching certain matters.

Circa Library for Imagined Futures
Bubu Mosiashvili

Circa Library for Imagined Futures is an easy to access, non-random collection of things and ideas. The project is an attempt to revisit and further push the notion of a library and try to initiate a new, contemporary adaptation of it. One of the main aims of the library is independence from physical spaces and places where the collection can reside, it avoids any permanent connection with physical spaces and objects and only sees them as a temporary form of co-existence. For its first configuration the library collection consisted of books, rocks, and fabric pieces. Circa Library for Imagined Futures tends to grow, change, and rearrange its collection over time.

Lawrence Liang in his essay ‘Shadow Libraries’ talks about one of the greatest fears almost every librarian and bibliophile has, seeing their books destroyed. In general books, and depending on that also libraries are extremely sensitive towards their direct environment, society, power structures. Libraries also tend to respond to natural disasters. And their response is directly proportional to the nature of its rival. The destruction of the Library of Alexandria, the destruction of Library of Nalanda in India, the accidental burning of the Duchess Anna Amalia Library in Weimar, Germany, the flood of the Arno in Florence and many other libraries that got destroyed (accidentally or on purpose) have created a base, a starting point for every new library. Meaning that the idea of destruction already exists in most of the libraries from the very first second of their existence. Circa Library for Imagined Futures tries to bypass the fear of destruction by disabling its own material existence and by choosing its permanent residence place to be consciousness and imagination of the library users.

A note for the unfolding practice
hoyonboc

The month of residency at Circa 106 with Bubu Mosiashvili, namely “Library work space co-occur” (the name of the open call by Circa 106), “Circa Library for Imagined Futures” (the title of Bubu’s statement), or “Unfolding Portents” (Open studio title suggested by Bubu and me) was the practice of unfolding systems what is black-boxed in the regime of modern science started from the scientific revolution in Europe in the appr. 16th Century and boosted by colonialism and the current information revolution.

At the open studio, which was the result of the month of residency, on the arched wall, I presented a mapping work of an article of British anthropologist Tim Ingold, Dreaming of dragons: on the imagination of real life, with which I try to unfold the article putting out the different knowledge systems that are handled in the article from the linearity of the writing and re-arranging them into a least-hierarchical composition. The work is suggested not as an “artwork” but rather as a part of the library collection of Bubu and me. Two books were placed in front of the mapping for further intersections, Vistas of Modernity: Decolonial Aesthesis and the End of the Contemporary by Rolando Vazquez and Schlangenritual by Aby Warburg.

“The scientific world view, which treats nature as a book, something to decode, uses mathematics as its tool to read off the nature. Then could we place the tool/mediation space, mathematics, at the same place with other knowledges?

Could we think mathematics/science as an amulets/ritual/religion that create “Denkraum” between nature and humans? (Then we, in the current knowledge system, might be trapped in the other side of the demonic power of the amulet named mathematics, when we think each mediation space has inside its own polarity.)

Could it be a start of de-constructing the science-dominant social structure and non-hierarchical mapping of knowledges?”

a note in the mapping on 11.03.2022

On the ceiling, you may find another mapping work summoning a certain sky, which is drawing a ritualistic oval composition of 16 drawings of ground-based space observatories in Hawai’i and horizons of the lands on which they are constructed, summoning a sky with twinkling satellite internet constellations in its inner circle. The installation shares similarly different research ground with the library, raising a question of the power dynamic between the dominant knowledge systems/change of the knowledge paradigm. I worked on the project further and showed it as an extended scale with the title summoning a certain sky: Lands, space observatories and satellite internet constellations on the ship Dauerwelle in April in the same year. (as a part of exhibition our porous limits II)