Inventing other temporalities
During six days of extreme mugginess, bursts of thunder and torrential downpours in Vienna, Alix Eynaudi hosts the third instalment of her ongoing (Im)mobility Salon series together with independent publishers, poets, writers, journalists, editors and artists.
Participants hurry to the Volkskundemuseum, carrying bags and bicycle baskets like witnesses of life’s many entanglements, like reminders of the day’s pending tasks. With sweaty faces and heavy breaths that reveal the weight and speed of the daily grind, they land in a room carefully prepared with refreshments, a collection of vinyl records and a library. Shoes are taken off, teacups are filled and bags are placed in corners, as if becoming evidence of mutual trust. People sink into sofas or snuggle up on a large carpet whose stains tell stories of days gone by. Gradually, it seems, thoughts and movements begin to decelerate, giving way to slower rhythms.
In her opening workshop, Restshop, Eynaudi invites participants to engage in a sensuous study in intimate groups of four. Taking turns, each person alternately reads from a book picked individually from the salon’s library, writes a creative response to the text, or lies down while a fourth person performs consensual touches on shoulders, arms, or legs. In this way, passages from Jonathan Burrows’ Writing Dance (2022), Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s Hospicing Modernity (2021) and Minna Salami’s Sensuous Knowledge (2023) are brought to life through voice and touch, writing and sound: words fill the space, swirling between bodies. Like a score of chaotic and synchronized sequences, occasionally interrupted by seconds of complete silence.
Similarly, in another workshop, Andrea Ancira García proposes a paired reading exercise of Daniel B. Chavez and Dani D’Amilia’s Radical Tenderness Manifesto (2015). Ancira García is a co-founder of tumbalacasa ediciones, a collective dedicated to publishing, translating and archiving practices of unlearning and resistance. As they read the manifesto aloud to each other, the participants’ voices intertwine, alternate and overlap during phrases such as: “Radical tenderness is to be critical and loving at the same time (…).” With a methodology that seems radically tender in its own right, tumbalacasa approach their projects as companions, conceiving books and translations as co-productions of meaning. In doing so, the collective critically reflects on the colonial legacies of translation and implements what its name postulates in honor of Black feminist Audre Lorde: tumba la casa – tear down [the master’s] house.
During the six days, the world outside reproduces itself according to its corporate 24/7 rigidity. Inside (Im)mobility Salon, however, time melts into flatness. Like a microclimate, the Salon invents its own temporal conditions, with a total of twelve manifestations that allow different rhythms and frequencies to coexist, finally permitting bodies and minds to rest and grow together.
Frederike Sperling is the Artistic Director of Kunstraum Niederoesterreich in Vienna. In her curatorial practice, she explores time-based media with a special focus on subjects such as physicality and relationality from intersectional perspectives.