* BLINDING

The being-curator takes place in the middle of a contradictory web of relations. How to think through these contradictions while being implicated in them? A point of entry is the Blind Spot: It is a point on our retina where the optical nerve passes through in the sake of seeing. This physiological condition for blindness equals us human beings as it distinguishes us. It incompletes our subjectivities as entities, but activates a becoming-subject through relation. Not that ‘you’ and ‘me,’ ‘now’ and ‘then,’ ‘here’ and ‘elsewhere’ cease to exist but the in-between – the and – would indicate a relation that unfolds a complicated time-space of blinding. This would throw us into an arena of the curatorial, full of ambivalences, which is a space of asynchronous temporalities. While curatorial practice might help us a to program a particularly located event in public, blinding makes us entering a moment of darkness or overexposure where we loose control and orientation. It is urgently needed, because, “ … an image is never an image, but a contradiction of images. And it's the same for a sound. Okay. We return to the just contradiction within the people, reflected in their representation. No, not representation, but presentation. Not a show, but a struggle.” (Jean-Luc Godard, Le Gai Savoir, 1968/69).

Blinding contradicts with curating because it is a way to undo exhibiting, though without a withdrawal of appearance. Blinding is an example of a sliding word, the black between images of a film, the white between letters in a text, the silence between sounds of words, and the span between action and manifestation. Blinding can neither be reified nor replaced nor represented. It is because, in the moment of exposure, blinding escapes as a creative vigor. It is a moment in which 'exhibiting' is not there yet but when it might be constituted. That is to say, blinding also might help us to detect and disturb the conditions in which 'meaning' emerges. Or to word it differently: While the Blind Spot is a point of entry into a contradictory relation, blinding is a moment of danger that crashes the foundations of meaning. (Doreen Mende, 2010)