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| AFTER WORD'S 1 |
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From After Words
"The earth's surface and the figments of the mind have a way of disintegrating into discrete regions of art. Various agents, both fictional and real, somehow trade places with each other…One's mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing."- Robert Smithson
- The land is a provisional space, a space of the provisional, for the provisional. It is a space of fragility, a space in balance and in the balance. What the land stipulates is the provisional state of all our spaces, the temporality of the tentative, of the attentive, heightening our attention to the transitory. The land bears witness to a transience that is intransigent. Being provisional, the land endures, moment to moment.
-But couldn't we say also that the land provides, if we were to attribute an agency to the land, if the land doesn't always already suspend, put into suspense, all our ideas and ideals of agency. For instance, the land provides for thought, for movement, for art, for life, for spirituality, for reflection, for itself, for others, for any number of material and immaterial things.
-What it provides, however, it only provides provisionally. That is to say, the land provides for those who tend to it, on the provision that one attends to its signs. The land provides, but only if we are willing to receive, willing to perceive, willing to sieve through its material and immaterial provisions. These provisions are offered to a thinking with the land, but are not available to a thinking against the land. Between a thinking with the land and a thinking against the land, we can begin to trace a provisional limit, something that delimits the space and spaces that have defined and defied, if not deified, the dreams of the modern era. That is to say, the categories that order human thought largely think against nature, setting up an antagonistic relation to nature, trying to dominate nature and hold dominion over nature. Instead of thinking against nature, we need to think through the spaces where we brush up against nature, finding and founding spaces where we can dwell with nature, where we work and dwell in balance with nature. The land offers a space for such a dwelling.
- But this would only ever be a provisional type of dwelling...
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