Mirjam
Yazïra
Kroker

If I can’t, I won’t - If I don’t, I will
(Unshared Territories of Imagined Communities)

year: open ended since 2024

material: index cards, carrier object

 

If I can’t, I won’t. If I don’t, I will (unshared territories of imagined communities) A refusal that unfolds into a necessity, a necessity that folds back into refusal. What does this oscillation reveal about the ‘imagined communities’ that condition our bodies, our gestures, our possibilities?

 

Benedict Anderson described nations as i m a g i n e d  c o m m u n i t i e s —constructed affinities held together by symbols, narratives, in- and exclusions. This work borrows that notion, but reconfigures it through refusal. As affirmative refusal that reverberates across different contexts, adapting to prohibitions that mark the limits of belonging.
This open volume of index cards refers to laws from different states that forbid certain fundamental rights—laws that regulate who may dance, sing, love, and plant and under what conditions. Doings that are so significant for maintaining community they should not require any permission, yet they are denied to certain bodies in certain places on different scales. These restrictions gathered here, do not name their territories (nation states); they move away from exclusion across geographies. They are small enough to be carried across borders and smuggled from hand to hand, continued, altered. With the possibility that each encounter contributes to the open-ended-volume.  The cards are like vessels for recognising architectures of control—how the nation-state is not only imagined but enforced, embedded in the gestures it allows or forbids. But if the restriction is also an opening, if the prohibition reveals its undoing, then the loop continues: If I can’t, I won’t. If I don’t, I will.

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Where does the impossibility fracture? Where does the prohibition turn porous? Where does the unshared dissolve?