Project Organhaus, Chongqing
The Con(tra)cave #1：On the subsumption of voidness,
or a phantasy of autopoiesis
Artists: Duruo Wang & ZHANG Wenxin
Time: 2024.11.17 (Sun.)20:00-21:00
Location: Organhaus, 5th Floor, 34 Shuren Road, Beibei, Chongqing
The Con(tra)cave is a long-term artistic research project concerned with the formation of positive-negative superimposed caves and mountains as a topological metaphor between animism and transhumanism. Through walking and driving, inhaling and exhaling, seeing and unseeing, climbing and descending amidst the karstic landforms of Southwest China, it attempts to squeeze into and slice through the discursive fissures of vital phantasy from both Western and Eastern cultural traditions, entangling itself with ghostly matters and the abject and dissipating soma situated in a state of being under representation.
The project commences its probing with a series of spaces that epitomise the quality or characteristics of hollowness, deficiency or absence, upon which negative imageries have been superimposed across the iteration of historiographical accounts. Inspired by Luce Irigaray's early work Speculum of the Other Woman, in which an (ante-/non-)Subject doubleness - functioning simultaneously as a distorted (curved/inverted/deformed) reflective device and an inwardly folded implosive envelope - is mobilised to discern the ways in which the untranslatability of an experienced and embodied opacity has been inverted and appropriated within the economy of Idea, The Con(tra)cave conducts a series of rehearsals and unmappings between the doublings and in-betweens of the multifaceted contradictions situated from the scenario of dark containers (or caves) and the configuration of con-cavity.
The Con(tra)cave is conceived as a topological complex of several interconnected cave chambers, densely wrapped around their situated past and present, running away from and into each other in different ways. It will be composed over the coming years as a series of audio-visual works, performances, writings and archives.
The movements unfolding in the first chamber concern with the earth, cave, body and dissipation of energy associated with abjection, as well as the homology between the projection onto and appropriation of an absence within this geo- and chrono-political context and the function of cinematographic speculation. It is triggered by a well-circulated unblessed love story from a stateless region in pre-modern times, in which the female protagonist is said to have been cast into a sinkhole on the town border as a punishment for their dissolute spiritual attachments, and to have haunted the area as a dumping ground in her afterlife. We regard this ungovernable obscurity and uncanniness as an invitation from sunken (un)worlds, conjuring up a refusal to sublate towards a univocal economy of signification, an invitation to linger a little longer along the liminality between a topographic resistance and fugitivity and the demateriality and immediacy of speculative language and image, among the dark intervals, the unidentifiable, the not-yet-but-already matters.
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