Thing Without Necessity

The project presents an object that outwardly resembles a bundle, or something wound in ribbon. The very manner and shape of the winding lend the object a temporal dimension — duration and extension: time that stretched, coiled into loops, formed knots, as the ribbon wound tightly and repeatedly around something — as though the process had been long and painstaking, undertaken to conceal what is wrapped, to package it in such a way as to preserve it, forming an archive that reproduces memory, and that generates the need to be recognized, confirmed by whoever this memory is preserved for.

Likewise, archiving an object through successive winding outwardly resembles the making of a mummy. What is mummified is an unknown object: it is not anthropomorphic, and therefore not a human body. Mummification, as a ritual, was considered necessary for a person's passage of the soul into the world beyond. What the project depicts creates a paradox: it is not a body that is mummified, but something else — a particle of a world lying beyond the human, yet represented within it; a particle of a world capable of continuing to exist without being given to anyone.

Further: the thing so carefully wound excludes any possibility of understanding what the ribbons are concealing, giving rise to countless guesses. An atmosphere of mystery thus emerges, and with it seduction, intensified by the aestheticization of the winding itself, where the shape of the many ribbons hovers on the edge of ornament. For an even stronger visual effect — to create an "eye-trap" — actual ornament has been used in some of the works. All of this shifts any reasoning about the hidden object onto ground where someone else is presumed — some external instance, within whose field the scene of hide-and-seek and the shaping of an illusion is played out.

All of these readings — archive, mummy, mystery — are binary in structure, presupposing the presence of some Other from whom something is hidden. If this logic is not followed, it becomes apparent that along with this presupposition, not only the necessity of taking on the required form disappears, but also the object's very status as something concealing.

In that case, what appears to be an object wound in ribbon is simply the ribbon's spontaneous movement, which looks like movement relative to itself. Each new coil, layering onto the previous one, produces the effect of yet another object, one that reads as intricately constructed. Unlike any other form, whose construction usually implies a plan or a function, here the pattern arises from the mere repetition of the coil — a form that looks deliberate, though no single coil was necessary in that particular place or order. In other words: the ribbon is wound upon itself and shapes itself by itself. From this standpoint, it had no necessity to be exactly as it happened to turn out. It is the same particle of the world as the mummified thing: capable of continuing to exist without being given to anyone.

P.S. This very text is a demonstration of the need to explain what the ribbon is.