Apr 11, 2023 · Sara Giannini
Curatorial essay
A note I didn’t take (on artworks that completely disappear)
In a recent video call Constantina Zavitsanos told me something I wish I had written down. They said, “my ultimate goal (... or was it desire?) is to make an artwork that is completely invisible (... or was it an artwork that completely disappears?).”
I wish I could be more accurate with my words.
In a recent video call Constantina Zavitsanos told me something I wish I had written down. They said, “my ultimate goal (... or was it desire?) is to make an artwork that is completely invisible (... or was it an artwork that completely disappears?).”
I wish I could be more accurate with my words.
Some background
Two years ago, I invited Constantina Zavitsanos to develop a new project as one of our three Artist Commissions for If I Can’t Dance Edition IX – Bodies and Technologies. I had met Constantina in the context of the 2019/2020 COOP–study-group which I led and taught on behalf of If I Can’t Dance together with fellow teachers Arnisa Zeqo and Geo Wyeth at the DAI – Dutch Art Institute. That year we were researching the relationship between performance and tactics of invisibility, disappearance, and secrecy through the musical term sotto voce, a word that indicates a lowering of the vocal or musical instrument, and which literally means ‘below or under the voice.’ With this study group we were interested in decentering ocular-centric regimes of performance, questioning the complicated legacies of the gaze as a tool of objectification, measurement and otherization within colonial and ableist systems. In moving away from visibility, we wanted to make room for other organs and modes of perception, shifting from seeing to sensing, thinking about frequencies and whispers.
As the story goes, in March 2020 the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic put a halt to our traveling and in-person activities, making our desire for the ‘unseen’ a material condition of life and artistic production. In the summer that ensued, as the Netherlands started to open up and allow gatherings, we met with our students for a week of study in Amsterdam. During that week my co-teacher Geo Wyeth invited his long-time friend Constantina Zavitsanos for an online seminar that was streamed from the flatscreen monitor of If I Can’t Dance’s Library. That was the first time I, as well as my colleagues Megan Hoetger and Anik Fournier, encountered Constantina and the different strings of their artistic, philosophical and spiritual practice. During the seminar Constantina talked to us about their research with imperceptibility through materials such as infra-sonics, vibrations, and holograms, but also through student debt, hours of sleep and daily acts of care. Whereas their research involves sounds below what is deemed the human hearing range or the scoring of a practice such as ‘making someone’s lap’, Constantina’s practice engages a level of experience that impedes capture and measurement. It rather happens within relationality, complementarity and shared in/capacities, pushing forth notions of inter-dependency and labour which on the one hand sit within conceptual, feminist art lineages, and on the other hand respond to the histories and experiences of disability.
A note I lost (on fractals and holograms)
During another online meeting, one of the many we had since that seminar, Constantina talked to me about their hologram-making practice in relation to fractals and the universe. This time I am sure I was taking notes—I remember my scribbles quite well—but as I began to look for them for writing this text, they seem to be nowhere.
Behind their allure of magic, holograms are in fact fractal images in which every point of the image contains the whole image through an interference pattern that records the entire scene. Fractals are objects or structures that self-replicate themselves at all scales. A part contains the whole in a repeating pattern that is displayed ad infinitum. When fractals are cut into pieces, these pieces keep reproducing the whole in an endless manner. Broccoli, trees, spirals, minerals, lightning strikes, wave, wind and cloud patterns are all concrete examples of fractal symmetries that are in fact everywhere in the world. Within quantum mechanics and string theory, even the universe itself seems to respond to the fractal/holographic principle of the ‘whole is present everywhere’. On the basis of these theories, “the three-dimensional world of ordinary experience—the universe filled with galaxies, stars, planets, houses, boulders, and people—is a hologram, an image of reality coded on a distant two-dimensional surface.” (1)
In this sense, the fractal/holographic logic contradicts the principles of scarcity which seem to rule accepted understandings of wealth, access and social life under current capitalist neoliberal regimes. Within fractals, splitting doesn’t provoke reduction or subtraction, but actually reproduction and replication. At increasingly smaller and smaller scales, fractals repeat themselves, inviting for a cosmo-political imagination of abundance and possibilities.
It is this imagination and this opening across micro and macro dimensionalities that inform Constantina’s relationship to holograms. We may also speculate that it is from this relationship that Constantina’s current research around entropy originates from, as, interestingly, the suggestion of the universe as a holographic projection arose from the study of entropy within black hole thermodynamics.
Entrophy
For their Artist Commission with If I Can’t Dance, Constantina has taken a path of inquiry that extends their research to entropy, heat and the wavelengths of infra-red light. The connection between heat and entropy is given by the second law of thermodynamics, a physical law concerned with the irreversibility of natural processes, and, particularly, with the flow of heat and energy interconversion in the universe. According to this law, heat in the universe always, inevitably and perpetually moves from hotter to colder bodies. This irreversible movement from hot to cold is dictated by the law of entropy itself, which can only ever increase when left to spontaneous evolution. The increase of entropy, therefore, has to do with the exchange or, rather, with the dispersion of heat between closed systems. From the perspective of entropy, heat is not to be understood as a thermal emanation coming from one isolated body but as a transfer of energy between bodies. Infra-red light is, on the other hand, the electromagnetic radiation that heat generates and that remains outside the visible spectrum, at least in its socially and historically constructed form. From this standpoint, heat can be thought of as infra-red light we generally don’t see, and, conversely, infra-red light can be thought of as heat we generally don’t see but feel.
The interest in entropy, infrared light and heat is a continuation of Constantina’s ongoing study of shared in/capacities, asserting disability as a metaphysical space which lays bare that what “has been posited as universal is in fact a mere contingency.” Through these experimentations, the artist insists upon a “hapticality beyond, below and before the invariable idea of a ‘body’ cast by Enlightenment thought.” (2) In Constantina’s work thinking through and with hapticality is a philosophical, spiritual and phenomenological ground which also questions the coordinates of representation, hyper-visibility and hyper-performativity disabled bodies have been subjected to throughout (art) history. (3) In their performative installations, the power dynamics of the difficult histories of opposing subjects and objects, humans and things, as well as performers and beholders are contested through the de-platforming of the gaze as a method of capture, and the unfolding of a situation in which bodies are ‘able and unable to’ together.
The images shared on these pages are research materials as well as tests that sprung from working with heat and infrared technologies. They also constitute a point of departure to complicate our understanding of seeing and sense-making. Layers of image descriptions, both text and sound based, are progressively added, opening up the images to more voices, eyes and in/capacities. In the same spirit of the collaborative performances that will be presented in September 2023 as the culmination of their Artist Commission, these descriptions break apart the idea of individuated authorship, performing interdependency and the conviviality of art and life.
A last note I didn’t take, but found a great quote to replace it (on occlusions, revelations and double binds)
Constantina once told me how their whole work as an artist is fractally contained in a vision they had as a child. As I remember it, they visualized two shapes revealing each other through their mutual occlusion. This apparently counterintuitive mystical realization is, they told me, what drives all their experimentations with disability as a cosmological condition. The covering is not a limitation or an impediment of one thing. It is the offering of another. This third being is bound to a logic that unhinges the binary of the ‘either / or’. It’s not either one shape nor the other, it is both. In their text-based work, for instance, sentences are often broken, and their resulting fragments are pieced together or superimposed, creating different meanings. In the performative installation L&D Motel, shown at Participant Inc in New York City in 2019, a video projection of superimposed texts functioning as a caption of a gigantic ramp-turned-into-stage, turned-into-infrasonic-musical-instrument, was positioned in such a way that visitors to the exhibition would inevitably block the beam of light with their body. The texts, already the results of an intercalation, would have to be read through and with the performativity of their corporal fragmentation. In Constantina’s words:
––
About Constantina Zavitsanos
Constantina Zavitsanos works in sculpture, performance, text and sound to elaborate what is invaluable in the re/production of debt, dependency and means beyond measure. Their work interferes with what is perceivably accessed through fixed form or any one given sense and arises in the superposition of need and desire, as well as at the limits of what constitutes matter and capacity. Sometimes this means sculpting inaudible sound waves, holographic transmissions or infrared light; it can also mean reshaping or congealing in sculpture the performance of everyday life often rendered immaterial like school loan debt (hours in debt), or years of sleep (hours in bed). Their work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, New Museum, Artists Space and The Kitchen in New York as well as at Arika, Glasgow, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. With Park McArthur, they coauthored ‘The Guild of the Brave Poor Things’ (in Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility, 2017) and ‘Other Forms of Conviviality’ (in Women & Performance, 2013). In 2019, they co-organised the crossdisability arts events and study sessions, ‘I wanna be with you everywhere’ at Performance Space New York and the Whitney Museum. Zavitsanos is a recipient of the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art & Activism at CCS/Bard College (2022) and the Foundation for Contemporary Art’s Roy Lichtenstein Award (2021).
Two years ago, I invited Constantina Zavitsanos to develop a new project as one of our three Artist Commissions for If I Can’t Dance Edition IX – Bodies and Technologies. I had met Constantina in the context of the 2019/2020 COOP–study-group which I led and taught on behalf of If I Can’t Dance together with fellow teachers Arnisa Zeqo and Geo Wyeth at the DAI – Dutch Art Institute. That year we were researching the relationship between performance and tactics of invisibility, disappearance, and secrecy through the musical term sotto voce, a word that indicates a lowering of the vocal or musical instrument, and which literally means ‘below or under the voice.’ With this study group we were interested in decentering ocular-centric regimes of performance, questioning the complicated legacies of the gaze as a tool of objectification, measurement and otherization within colonial and ableist systems. In moving away from visibility, we wanted to make room for other organs and modes of perception, shifting from seeing to sensing, thinking about frequencies and whispers.
As the story goes, in March 2020 the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic put a halt to our traveling and in-person activities, making our desire for the ‘unseen’ a material condition of life and artistic production. In the summer that ensued, as the Netherlands started to open up and allow gatherings, we met with our students for a week of study in Amsterdam. During that week my co-teacher Geo Wyeth invited his long-time friend Constantina Zavitsanos for an online seminar that was streamed from the flatscreen monitor of If I Can’t Dance’s Library. That was the first time I, as well as my colleagues Megan Hoetger and Anik Fournier, encountered Constantina and the different strings of their artistic, philosophical and spiritual practice. During the seminar Constantina talked to us about their research with imperceptibility through materials such as infra-sonics, vibrations, and holograms, but also through student debt, hours of sleep and daily acts of care. Whereas their research involves sounds below what is deemed the human hearing range or the scoring of a practice such as ‘making someone’s lap’, Constantina’s practice engages a level of experience that impedes capture and measurement. It rather happens within relationality, complementarity and shared in/capacities, pushing forth notions of inter-dependency and labour which on the one hand sit within conceptual, feminist art lineages, and on the other hand respond to the histories and experiences of disability.
A note I lost (on fractals and holograms)
During another online meeting, one of the many we had since that seminar, Constantina talked to me about their hologram-making practice in relation to fractals and the universe. This time I am sure I was taking notes—I remember my scribbles quite well—but as I began to look for them for writing this text, they seem to be nowhere.
Behind their allure of magic, holograms are in fact fractal images in which every point of the image contains the whole image through an interference pattern that records the entire scene. Fractals are objects or structures that self-replicate themselves at all scales. A part contains the whole in a repeating pattern that is displayed ad infinitum. When fractals are cut into pieces, these pieces keep reproducing the whole in an endless manner. Broccoli, trees, spirals, minerals, lightning strikes, wave, wind and cloud patterns are all concrete examples of fractal symmetries that are in fact everywhere in the world. Within quantum mechanics and string theory, even the universe itself seems to respond to the fractal/holographic principle of the ‘whole is present everywhere’. On the basis of these theories, “the three-dimensional world of ordinary experience—the universe filled with galaxies, stars, planets, houses, boulders, and people—is a hologram, an image of reality coded on a distant two-dimensional surface.” (1)
In this sense, the fractal/holographic logic contradicts the principles of scarcity which seem to rule accepted understandings of wealth, access and social life under current capitalist neoliberal regimes. Within fractals, splitting doesn’t provoke reduction or subtraction, but actually reproduction and replication. At increasingly smaller and smaller scales, fractals repeat themselves, inviting for a cosmo-political imagination of abundance and possibilities.
It is this imagination and this opening across micro and macro dimensionalities that inform Constantina’s relationship to holograms. We may also speculate that it is from this relationship that Constantina’s current research around entropy originates from, as, interestingly, the suggestion of the universe as a holographic projection arose from the study of entropy within black hole thermodynamics.
Entrophy
For their Artist Commission with If I Can’t Dance, Constantina has taken a path of inquiry that extends their research to entropy, heat and the wavelengths of infra-red light. The connection between heat and entropy is given by the second law of thermodynamics, a physical law concerned with the irreversibility of natural processes, and, particularly, with the flow of heat and energy interconversion in the universe. According to this law, heat in the universe always, inevitably and perpetually moves from hotter to colder bodies. This irreversible movement from hot to cold is dictated by the law of entropy itself, which can only ever increase when left to spontaneous evolution. The increase of entropy, therefore, has to do with the exchange or, rather, with the dispersion of heat between closed systems. From the perspective of entropy, heat is not to be understood as a thermal emanation coming from one isolated body but as a transfer of energy between bodies. Infra-red light is, on the other hand, the electromagnetic radiation that heat generates and that remains outside the visible spectrum, at least in its socially and historically constructed form. From this standpoint, heat can be thought of as infra-red light we generally don’t see, and, conversely, infra-red light can be thought of as heat we generally don’t see but feel.
The interest in entropy, infrared light and heat is a continuation of Constantina’s ongoing study of shared in/capacities, asserting disability as a metaphysical space which lays bare that what “has been posited as universal is in fact a mere contingency.” Through these experimentations, the artist insists upon a “hapticality beyond, below and before the invariable idea of a ‘body’ cast by Enlightenment thought.” (2) In Constantina’s work thinking through and with hapticality is a philosophical, spiritual and phenomenological ground which also questions the coordinates of representation, hyper-visibility and hyper-performativity disabled bodies have been subjected to throughout (art) history. (3) In their performative installations, the power dynamics of the difficult histories of opposing subjects and objects, humans and things, as well as performers and beholders are contested through the de-platforming of the gaze as a method of capture, and the unfolding of a situation in which bodies are ‘able and unable to’ together.
The images shared on these pages are research materials as well as tests that sprung from working with heat and infrared technologies. They also constitute a point of departure to complicate our understanding of seeing and sense-making. Layers of image descriptions, both text and sound based, are progressively added, opening up the images to more voices, eyes and in/capacities. In the same spirit of the collaborative performances that will be presented in September 2023 as the culmination of their Artist Commission, these descriptions break apart the idea of individuated authorship, performing interdependency and the conviviality of art and life.
A last note I didn’t take, but found a great quote to replace it (on occlusions, revelations and double binds)
Constantina once told me how their whole work as an artist is fractally contained in a vision they had as a child. As I remember it, they visualized two shapes revealing each other through their mutual occlusion. This apparently counterintuitive mystical realization is, they told me, what drives all their experimentations with disability as a cosmological condition. The covering is not a limitation or an impediment of one thing. It is the offering of another. This third being is bound to a logic that unhinges the binary of the ‘either / or’. It’s not either one shape nor the other, it is both. In their text-based work, for instance, sentences are often broken, and their resulting fragments are pieced together or superimposed, creating different meanings. In the performative installation L&D Motel, shown at Participant Inc in New York City in 2019, a video projection of superimposed texts functioning as a caption of a gigantic ramp-turned-into-stage, turned-into-infrasonic-musical-instrument, was positioned in such a way that visitors to the exhibition would inevitably block the beam of light with their body. The texts, already the results of an intercalation, would have to be read through and with the performativity of their corporal fragmentation. In Constantina’s words:
The notion of visibility is tethered to knowledge. I’m into seeing in the sense more of feeling than of representation. In that essay [“The Guild of the Brave Poor Things” (2017)], we [Zavitsanos and Park McArthur] were thinking about gambling and probability, thresholds and doors—that is, access in the sense of traversing a threshold, but also access in the sense of knowledge of what is on the other side. For example, the three doors on the game show Let’s Make a Deal, where the threshold represents a question of probability and a question of knowledge that is suspended. When people talk about going in blind, or other variants on that, it’s a slur conflating blindness with the position of a compromised observer. We’re into the slur—it slides toward something that interests us—but we reject the ableist insult.
In poker, the blind is a forced bet that rotates from one player to the next. The blind goes first and others must choose to call (match), raise, or fold. The blind puts in the minimum bet for everyone, the entry price of that hand. They’re the only player who can’t decline to play, because they initiate the game. They can win or lose that hand, but they have to play at least one round, because their money goes in the pot, no matter what.
A double bind is an apparent but false choice, a lose-lose. Two determinants, two ways of losing, are held in a state of indeterminacy. It’s double because it looks like “or,” but it’s actually “and.” It’s not life or death, it’s life and death. Ride and die.
We were thinking about what it is to superimpose these two states, the “and” of the double bind and the “or” of the blind. Imagine it as an eclipse—one body moving in front of and occluding another—such that playing (the blind) is superimposed over being bound (the double bind). That’s what we meant by “double blind.”
The double blind describes the stakes of dependency, or love. Something you are bound to do that you still play at anyway. The stakes are so low—like, the lowest; they’re common, basal, banal, deep. It’s the hardest easy thing, the falling in and through of love.
For disability, some things will need to be held in superposition precisely because there are two or more co-extant states here; it’s a both/and, not an either/or—a no-state dissolution. This is what I mean by deforming: dissolving boundaries and still being bound, bonding in this way that nonlocality conditions, the informality of animateriality and anamaterial presence. My bodymindsoul is already touching yours despite the juridical notion of consent and in the actual haptics of “feeling with” that the word consent is meant to attend to, which is to say care for.
Okay, so, hmm, superposition, interference, hapticality, contiguous and noncontiguous touch, telephonics, tectonics, plating—as in serving dinner, service, digestive discursion, inertial force, immobility, movement, dark fluid, blackness, fatness, flow, thickness, scale, frame, slip, feel, I don’t know, maybe just love—these are some other words I’d like to put on beyond visibility. (4)
In poker, the blind is a forced bet that rotates from one player to the next. The blind goes first and others must choose to call (match), raise, or fold. The blind puts in the minimum bet for everyone, the entry price of that hand. They’re the only player who can’t decline to play, because they initiate the game. They can win or lose that hand, but they have to play at least one round, because their money goes in the pot, no matter what.
A double bind is an apparent but false choice, a lose-lose. Two determinants, two ways of losing, are held in a state of indeterminacy. It’s double because it looks like “or,” but it’s actually “and.” It’s not life or death, it’s life and death. Ride and die.
We were thinking about what it is to superimpose these two states, the “and” of the double bind and the “or” of the blind. Imagine it as an eclipse—one body moving in front of and occluding another—such that playing (the blind) is superimposed over being bound (the double bind). That’s what we meant by “double blind.”
The double blind describes the stakes of dependency, or love. Something you are bound to do that you still play at anyway. The stakes are so low—like, the lowest; they’re common, basal, banal, deep. It’s the hardest easy thing, the falling in and through of love.
For disability, some things will need to be held in superposition precisely because there are two or more co-extant states here; it’s a both/and, not an either/or—a no-state dissolution. This is what I mean by deforming: dissolving boundaries and still being bound, bonding in this way that nonlocality conditions, the informality of animateriality and anamaterial presence. My bodymindsoul is already touching yours despite the juridical notion of consent and in the actual haptics of “feeling with” that the word consent is meant to attend to, which is to say care for.
Okay, so, hmm, superposition, interference, hapticality, contiguous and noncontiguous touch, telephonics, tectonics, plating—as in serving dinner, service, digestive discursion, inertial force, immobility, movement, dark fluid, blackness, fatness, flow, thickness, scale, frame, slip, feel, I don’t know, maybe just love—these are some other words I’d like to put on beyond visibility. (4)
––
About Constantina Zavitsanos
Constantina Zavitsanos works in sculpture, performance, text and sound to elaborate what is invaluable in the re/production of debt, dependency and means beyond measure. Their work interferes with what is perceivably accessed through fixed form or any one given sense and arises in the superposition of need and desire, as well as at the limits of what constitutes matter and capacity. Sometimes this means sculpting inaudible sound waves, holographic transmissions or infrared light; it can also mean reshaping or congealing in sculpture the performance of everyday life often rendered immaterial like school loan debt (hours in debt), or years of sleep (hours in bed). Their work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, New Museum, Artists Space and The Kitchen in New York as well as at Arika, Glasgow, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. With Park McArthur, they coauthored ‘The Guild of the Brave Poor Things’ (in Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility, 2017) and ‘Other Forms of Conviviality’ (in Women & Performance, 2013). In 2019, they co-organised the crossdisability arts events and study sessions, ‘I wanna be with you everywhere’ at Performance Space New York and the Whitney Museum. Zavitsanos is a recipient of the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art & Activism at CCS/Bard College (2022) and the Foundation for Contemporary Art’s Roy Lichtenstein Award (2021).
- Susskind, Leonard (1995). “The World as a Hologram”. Journal of Mathematical Physics. 36 (11): 6377–6396.
- From the artist’s statement on Entrophy.
- For more on hapticality see Stefano Harney & Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, New York: Minor Composition 2013.
- Constantina Zavitsanos in “Giving it Away. Constantina Zavitsanos on Disability, Debt, Dependency,” by Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez, in Art Papers, 42.04, Winter 2018/2019. Full interview available in the reading table at the bottom of the artist’s page.