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Freesearch_2019_exhibtionview_traverdsin
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Exhibition view AURAL Galeria, Traversing the Unthought, with Judith Egger, 2021.

SOME SECRETS ABOUT FREESEARCH

(Neonletters, 2019)

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On a personal level, I might secretly wish that this work would be part of my project "Somewhere on this Planet". That would mean it would be installed at any thinkable everyday place, or allow me to say, any location in the world. Maybe next to some other highway signs, hiking trail, above the instruction of a museum's emergency exit or a tailor shop in Dakar. Admittedly, I mostly doubt, but in this specific desired case, I would even through all doubts over board that any further explanation to ‘explain’ this work would be more than superfluous!


As a neon lettering, and as I initially made it to be installed in the context amongst other artworks, it is like a kind of reminder alarm for what 'artistic research' is/could be or could become if it truly resists other established regulations that quality research in other disciplines and keeps on insisting on finding, formulating and researching its own characteristics beyond a competitive or to adaptative mode to other common research regulators and methodologies that set and qualify research standards in other academic disciplines. Questions that remain important for me: What 'form of language' can serve art instead of covering or domesticating it? Artistic research as an independent discipline; one could almost claim that time could not be better than now to ask what the specific contribution of artistic practice can be to thinking and being within the world.

As modus operandi it is based on the assumption that art can research and generate new forms of knowing without leading to a scientific nature of art based on a purely scientifically founded truth. If it is consciously, it can perhaps also contribute to new artistic research paths or simply to new possibilities of being with or merely part of the world.

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Freesearch as a revelation of (artistic) research: I consider it exceedingly indispensable that artistic practice first and foremost reflect on and relate to its own way to be as independent and free as possible what research concerns. Then maybe that's what I could mean by FREESEARCH.

UNBURY TOMORROW: Against the Normalisation of War is a variable installation
composed of printed micro-essays (multilingual, free for circulation), a portable analogue television
(Tele Star 4004, late 1980s), a telescopic antenna, a white textile, plastic and electricity.

The installation is variable in scale, approximately 250 × 130 × 120 cm.

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UNBURY TOMORROW: against the normalisation of war, constitutes the second public occurrence within
Chimeric Embassy of Cosmic Concerns (2025–2028), a semi-nomadic research project initiated by Mirjam Kroker.
The project unfolds through invitations from institutional, semi-institutional, and independent spaces,
forming temporary assemblies and shared inquiries.

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UNBURY TOMORROW: against the normalisation of war unfolds from the recognition that war is not an exceptional rupture of order, but a recurrent power logic through which order itself is produced and maintained. Historically, war has structured the world through cycles of conquest, destruction, repair, reconstruction, and renewed militarisation. These cycles are reproductive. They generate infrastructures, industries, political vocabularies, and aesthetic regimes that stabilise power while rendering violence necessary, manageable, and legitimate.

Within this logic, war does not need to declare itself. It operates as an atmospheric condition—shaping perception, affect, and time. Its visual languages are deeply sedimented: images of damage, restoration, resilience, and post-conflict repair circulate with strong aesthetic force. Contemporary art and critical practices are not outside this economy; they are often drawn into reproducing its grammars, even when opposing its outcomes.

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UNBURY TOMORROW does not seek to counter this condition with alternative images or representations. Instead, it acknowledges the persistence of this power logic and withdraws from its modes of production. The work refuses the aesthetic operations through which war renders itself intelligible, 'attractive', and culturally operative. The installation consists of multiple elements arranged horizontally. None of them functions as a centre. This lack of hierarchy is deliberate. Centrality reassures; it stabilises meaning. It mirrors the logics of targeting, focus, and command that structure militarised perception. By refusing a centre, the work resists the comfort of orientation and the expectation that meaning must be anchored in a dominant object.

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A portable analogue television, Tele Star 4004, is present among the elements. Designed for terrestrial signal reception, the device no longer receives any broadcast. Its screen flickers continuously, producing electronic noise without legible image. The words UNBURY TOMORROW are handwritten directly onto the glass surface. This flicker is not an absence of image, but an image rendered unreadable. The refusal to repair or replace interrupts the familiar cycle of damage and restoration—a cycle deeply aligned with the temporal logic of war, in which destruction is followed by repair, reconciliation, and renewed violence. By remaining unresolved, the device withdraws from productivity, resolution, and narrative completion.

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Attached to the television’s telescopic antenna is a white cloth. The configuration frequently evokes the image of a flag. This reading is neither accidental nor corrected. It functions as a moment of exposure. The immediacy with which the cloth is perceived as a flag reveals how deeply perception is trained by sovereign and militarised aesthetics—how quickly fabric, elevation, and visibility are associated with territory, allegiance, and security politics. The cloth, however, is not a flag. The antenna is not a flagpole. The antenna no longer receives signals; it does not transmit messages or claim ground. It has been repurposed into a support without function or designation. In this misrecognition, viewers might encounter their own habituation to the aesthetic value of power and the visual attraction of war’s ordering forms.

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Equally present are the micro-essays, printed in Spanish, English, and Spanglish, and currently being translated into Arabic and Hebrew. These texts are made available for free circulation. They do not explain the installation. They move alongside it.

Their circulation from hand to hand, rather than from screen to screen, follows a different historical logic of transmission. Hand-to-hand circulation is slow, contingent, and relational. It depends on proximity and trust rather than speed, scalability, or control. It resists the militarised infrastructures of contemporary media, which privilege surveillance, optimisation, and algorithmic reach. The texts do not produce visibility metrics, data traces, or stable archives. Circulation here is understood as companionship rather than dissemination.

UNBURY TOMORROW does not name an alternative condition or offer a reconciliatory horizon. Instead, it opens a field of questioning:


How might perception be loosened from militarised habits of seeing?
How might language be relieved from the pressure to justify, secure, or stabilise?
How might one begin to live otherwise, without transforming uncertainty too quickly into answers?

These questions are not posed from a position of certainty. They are part of the work’s own hesitation. The installation does not instruct; it attends. It remains with the difficulty of recognition, with the unease of not knowing how interruption might look or feel.

In this sense, UNBURY TOMORROW operates as an insurrection at the level of perception—not through confrontation, but through attentiveness. An insurrection that does not overthrow, but subtly disorients; that does not declare, but circulates; that does not resolve, but stays present with the conditions that make resolution appear necessary.

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