A Performative Prelude to Paradoxes

• In Event: Gradients-in-Relation: Distance as Continuous Variations in Artography

Abstract

Objectives or purposes:

The purpose of my presentation is to deliberate on movement during the pandemic, in which emphasis on distancing has intensified in contrast with my performative enactment of immobility and stability. Throughout this time, to maintain distance I prefer to disrupt movement, rather than distancing myself from others and my surroundings. I attempt to achieve ‘going the distance’ by staying still and in proximity, in an effort to interrupt mobility as a key element of distancing.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework:

Continuous movement is a necessary condition of living inquiry, making the concept of paradox central to the realization of new meanings. In other words, paradoxical conditions have created the need for me to access new practices. The creation of a necessity to invent new possibilities is more important than the intervention itself or the quality of such intervention, because without new possibilities, there can be no aesthetic appreciation and no change can be achieved.
Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
The co-existence of static-movement creates a paradoxical condition, and in response, I employ an object to support my motionless body during the pandemic: A chair. For me, the chair serves as a psycho-social interruption. In crowded places, such as crossroads, shopping malls and metro stations, I deliberately locate my chair in the flow of movement, and then simply sit. I seek to bring disorder to the structured form of distancing now regulating public movement. This delineation of distance has prompted curious questions from strangers: Are you sick? Do you need help? Why are you doing this (security guard)? Through such performative acts, I seek to craft, mediate and articulate a different form of distancing as ‘moveless’ while there is movement at the same time.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials:

To analyze this paradox-in-action, I map flows from the photos and videos of my practice to-date. I am fixed and all other bodies are moving around me, with their distances continually changing due to their responses. Within their dominantly linear movement, different distances highlight gradients caused by the immediacy of the encounter. This suggests that the paradox of moving and not moving enabled me to understand a new meaning of going, keeping and knowing my distance through an arbitrary, improvisational and responsive performance.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view:

In my artographical inquiries, the idea of a paradox moves beyond standard definitions of contradiction, confrontation, or duality of concepts. Rather, it refers to the co-existence of opposing concepts in the presence of tension between them. For the concepts to be sustained in this tension, ‘between’ spaces must be created and new meanings must emerge.

Scholarly Significance:

The co-existence of movement and immobility is a “paradoxical ‘exhaustive’ model” in both doing and making (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987/2005, p. 361). This allows the concepts of distance and gradient to be disturbed across, deviated from, and articulated through movement in new ways. I am living my inquiries because inquiry cannot be separated from my lived experiences.

Author

• Elly Yazdanpanah, Concordia University - Montreal