Grains of metal, rubber, plastic, and powder flit across the screen like a limit surface. They appear not as forms but as dynamic event contours – bare activity at work. 1 Their mattering vibration is echoed by the long, slow pans across canyons filled with dumped vehicles, and then later pharmaceutical scenes, in Aernout Mik’s Osmosis and Excess.

The video-installation consists of two sets of images juxtaposed around the circulation of materials: abandoned vehicles and medicine in pharmacies. The materials’ singular presence resonates with the borders, bodies, and matters they circulate with. The two scenes take place in and around Tijuana, Mexico. The work arose in the context of a series of interventions entitled inSite_05: Interventions and Scenarios located in “San Diego-Tijuana”. 2 The aim of the series was to investigate border spaces not as “absolute territories” but as “spaces that are constituted by, as well as constituted of, social relations and practices”. 3 Mik’s installation takes the form of a high-definition panoramic screen hung in spaces of passing-through; for inSite it was located in an underground parking lot, and the work has appeared at the front desk of the MoMA. The work generates a surface “embodying the time-lapse during which the situation gets out of hand”: children hitting piñatas next to the junkyard, sheep running through the abandoned cars, and muddy broken up floors in the pharmacy where children play cars with medicine boxes. 4 But these social scenes are in some sense incidental: it is the surface and matter that count in this work.

“Potentials haunt the surface” of the screen and emergent contours modulate them into modes of existence. 5 The image of a peaceful landscape distorted by debris does not work as a reference. Signification does not reach out from it. There is no exteriority to these images, the film’s rhythm. On the contrary, the screen is a vortex consuming its milieu and simultaneously creating an emergent and metastable space-time. The film is a surface across which intensities run – a membrane, a converter of energy. Matter in the form of debris, chemical substances and soil become the ungrounding limit along which colour, movement, and time compose the ephemeral expression of filmed images. These images, their references and associations are conventionally attributed to political, critical or socially aware interpretations. 6 7 What the screen as surface and membrane enables, however, is a point of entry into a folded and complex zone where matter and movement rework habitualized accounts of supposedly “critical” or “political” art. This process evolves less through means of exhibiting the work in a public parking lot, than through techniques of folding matter on a par with time’s polyrhythm apparent in the visual slowness of the images and the change of scenery. The images pass by tranquilized, yet temporally splintering. The perception of time precedes spatial (signifying) capture. The video-installation expresses a politics heralding perception as open-range emergence where the multiplicity of potential can be felt and worked with. From this point of view it calls forth a constructive perspective beyond pre-defined categories dear to critical assessment, classification and order. Matter, the main focus of the work, escapes its instrumentalization as an agent in a human assertion. On the contrary, it puts itself on a par with time’s rhythmic undoing of the grid of clearly defined signifiers. By doing so, matter puts itself right at the heart of the overall concern, the border of San Diego-Tijuana – not as a symbolic divide but as a moving ground from which all sorts of enclosures and openings arise.

One possible understanding of the border is as great symbolic divide, creating two worlds that clash and separate in politically unbearable conditions. Another possibility is to consider it as a diagram contracting multiplicities of matter and their flows into geographical, social, political and ecological topologies. The border becomes a thick line, a membrane, and limit whose edges, confinements, and enclosures are constantly in the process of capture and its undoing. On a formal or foundational level, commodities might define the scope of Osmosis and Excess. Cars of American origin are abandoned in the junkyards around Tijuana and medicines are stashed and exported to the US. Pills and cars cross political, social and/or cultural borders. Their flow and circulation into and around bodies creates a reciprocal web of connections and signifying chains. But something goes astray in Osmosis and Excess. Slowness, repetition and absurdness are the forces at work. The primary surface of clearly defined categories is constantly suspended toward another perceptual shock across the plane of the screen. These shocks of perception create resonances between body, milieu and screen that move through and abstract matter. The shocks are not points in time but movements that “frequent the surface” in an “untimely” manner. 8 9 They are expressions constitutive of a microphysics where “micro … means mobile and non-localizeable connections”. 10 The physical border of San Diego-Tijuana is a frequented surface as much as the screen across which matter, bodies and forces pass. Both the screen and the border are not mere lines that are traversed but define a contour of a diagrammatic quality.

Let’s start extending the line: “I draw a chalk line on the board. This discontinuity is one of those brute acts by which alone the original vagueness could have made a step toward definiteness. There is a certain element of continuity in this line. Where did the continuity come from? It is nothing but the original continuity of the black board which makes everything upon it continuous. What I have really drawn there is an oval line. For this white chalk-mark is not a line, it is a plane figure in Euclid’s sense – a surface, and the only line that is there is the line which forms the limit between the black surface and the white surface. This discontinuity can only be produced upon that blackboard by the reaction between two continuous surfaces into which it is separated, the white surface and the black surface”. 11

Peirce’s example illustrates the interplay between surface and movement as diagrammatic. The ground of the blackboard gives a first determination while the line in itself is extensive. Both board and line do not exist without the interstice or interval between them, not as a connection but as their incubator. The diagram is determination, expression, and changes constantly, working anew through the middle of its existence and across its surface: determined indetermination. The situation of a border separating two countries, imposing rigid enforcements of power, violence, law, and order is another diagrammatic ecology, an example of how the line between the two countries emerges simultaneously with these countries. The line of the border only emerges by way of a specifically rigid and stratified diagram of law, judgment of rules, and subjection. The bare activity of life pulsing along this supposed line is harnessed into a structural frame of immobile positions: a wall, an observation tower, a machine gun mounted on an SUV. But, bare activity, or movement as the base-layer of existence, is immutable and unstoppable. What keeps on moving in Osmosis and Excess is a diagram of matter in circulation, entering and leaving bodies. The assumed line of a border is co-extensive with the diagram of matter it rests upon. They shape-shift with their dynamic event contours. 12

 

Extending the borderline into a diagrammatic movement of multiplicities Osmosis and Excess actively experiments with different matter, times, and their perceptual lures to enable an effective variation on continuing. The habitual mode of continuing operates by stratifying statements and actions which insist upon the border as a divide. Indeed, the divide is a diagram in its own right but it is not detachable from the shifting and varying field of a dynamic event contour. From this point of view, the video considers the border as diagrammatic movement: the trafficking of material and substances, their circulation, and the economies attached to them (cheap medicine and old car disposal). In this, there is a no moralistic stance. The slowness of the two, incoherent, mingling scenes forces the perceiver to feel time differently through sensation across an immense surface/screen. Osmosis and Excess is not a representation, it does not render matter into a speaking object, on the contrary, it strips an overcoded landscape bare of its cast and invites an experiential, perceptual re-activation through bare activity’s dance.

Architect and urban activist Teddy Cruz acts in a similar way, when he traces the flow of materials along and across the diagram of the borderline. Abandoned bungalows hauled south and mounted on metal framings become new housing constructions. Walls are made out of used car tires or lightweight scaffolding produced in Tijuana for the American market are the flows of matter Cruz is following and drawing into new diagrams. Diagrammatic thought takes the process of abstraction and attributes it to an entire ecological field. The process of abstraction is not a process of transcendentalizing bare matter of fact. On the contrary, the process of abstraction means reinserting instances of mattering into diagrammatic movement. Matter in its activity is constantly self-abstracting into diagrams. Thing and thought are not separated in this instance of experience. Abstraction is the conversion, the relaying of diagrams one into another without the necessity for resemblance. If Cruz considers debris along the borderline as a suitable lure for abstraction he mobilizes the potential of constantly overlooked forces of matter. From this point of view neither Cruz nor Mik create works of art or architecture; their activities do not pertain to conventional critique inherent to most “critical” accounts of the US-Mexico border. Their practices sketch out a “pragmatics of the multiple” 13 where “the experiences of tendency are sufficient to act upon”. 14 The diagram in this case becomes a constant pragmatic point of entry for problematizing, that is, for asking how the movement of different forces gives way to a multiplicity of interlacing diagrams. This diagram calls for a second step, one which asks us to experiment with techniques for modulating the diagrammatic field by means of inserting, following, and bringing in resonances of different forces. Only then do modes of expression, the infoldings of times and spaces, the shifting of materials and their expressions take on their active role of “a life that is larger, more active, more affirmative and richer in possibilities” – a life beyond any measure. 15

  1. I take the notion of bare activity from Brian Massumi’s adoption of William James. Massumi defines bare activity as “a life [that] is formatively barely there, tensely poised for what comes next. In that measureless instant, a life is intensely barely there, re-gathering in an immediacy of its capabilities” Massumi, Brian, “Perception Attack: Brief on War,” Theory & Event 13.3 (2010).→
  2. Sánchez, Osvaldo, Donna Conwell (eds): InSite_05: [Situational] Public, San Diego: Installation Gallery, 2006. p.7→
  3. Conwell, Donna, “Border (dis)order/ on the imaginative possibilities of the in-between” in: InSite_05: [Situational] Public, ed. by Osvaldo Sánchez, Donna Conwell, San Diego: Installation Gallery, 2006, 9-22. p.9→
  4. Sánchez, Osvaldo, “Osmosis and Excess: Notes from the Borderline,” in:  Aernout Mik: Communitas, ed. by Tania Milewski, Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2011. p.117→
  5. Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Trans. by Mark Lester and Charles Stivale. London: Continuum, 2004. p.118→
  6. Sánchez, Osvaldo, “Osmosis and Excess: Notes from the Borderline,” in:  Aernout Mik: Communitas, ed. by Tania Milewski, Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2011. p.118→
  7. Conwell, Donna, “Border (dis)order/ on the imaginative possibilities of the in-between” in: InSite_05: [Situational] Public, ed. by Osvaldo Sánchez, Donna Conwell, San Diego: Installation Gallery, 2006. p.13→
  8. Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Trans. by Mark Lester and Charles Stivale. London: Continuum, 2004. p.119→
  9. Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. p.109→
  10. Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. Seán Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. p.74→
  11. Peirce, Charles S. Reasoning and the Logic of Things. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992. p.262→
  12. In addition to the movement of matter co-extensive with human circulations across borders, artist Riikka Tauriainen reminded me of the migration of animals across borders as another way of looking at systems of reference and their values different from the human scope.→
  13. Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. Seán Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. p.84→
  14. James, William. Essays in Radical Empiricism. Mineola, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. p.69→
  15. Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. Seán Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. p. 84→