Spill Stains: Tomb (plastic plurality)
by Jonathan
Boddam-Whetham
Inscription // Exscription
We are moving from the singularity of
The Machine Legends at
Spill Festival 2014 where Adam Electric dealt with fetishism and
mythology, creating a singular performance [singularity] that placed the
human body within a space of both absence and presence. A second skin
that only touched me through breath; a death-rattle that brought about a
presence of the body. His performance became a gravity well, drawing
us in with a rhythmic gasping for life. Both freedom and the
delineation of the body became problematised through a constraint that
also formed and gave life. A singular projection of ego where space
surrenders to vacuumed presence.
Moving toward this newest iteration,
Tomb resonates with
much of the festival workings, where memory and eulogy seem to be
inscribed upon those other works. A broken circumference of a plurality
of plasticity; a remaking of the self à la Malabou and
neuro-plasticity. But this is not just a re-forming – like neuronal
pathways – or singular transformation. My breath is our breath, I
breathe for you. If breath is life, this is a shared life, but more; it
is a shared shaping of bodies in the same [second] skin. If kabbalists
inscribe the name of God upon the Golem’s forehead to give it life,
then perhaps this is what Nancy calls an
exscription.
This is an impossible term, referring to that which is outside the
text. But ‘this “outside” is not that of the referent that
signification would reflect’, it is not something outside of meaning to
which the text refers. But is what Nancy calls the ‘infinite withdrawal
of meaning’. He talks of an ‘“empty freedom” by which existence comes
into presence – absence’, but this emptiness is not a lack as such,
rather a dynamic movement of being. Which is no-thing as such, not
meaningful, but also not senseless. Being is always
with and I am never alone even being alone. It is a primordial condition of my being that existence is shared.
Exscription travels through the text, contaminating it with a
freedom, with a sharing that is the possibility of death which affirms
existence, affirms others in the world. So in this working, the meaning
– the
with – dances across plastic skin forming and erasing
presence and absence in a breathless momentum. In my own possibility of
death, I desperately breathe – life – I create a space, an absent and
present one, touching others. A monumental tomb where I do not inscribe
a eulogy, but exscribe the co-possibility of Being, which is both
singular and plural.
Adam Electric moves his working on, not just on a grander scale, but
in a reflective way that represents [as such] our existence with others
in the world. We do not die alone he seems to write, or perhaps
tattoos, on his plastic skin. We are always with others, who we touch,
even when we are alone, because meaning always touches, always
circulates between us, is able
to be because
we are with.
http://spillfestival.com/spill-stains-tomb-plastic-plurality/
Big insparation for the form Final design sketch Fully working model with 5 Star 
