UNEXPECTEDLY ADRIFT

The “UNEXPECTEDLY ADRIFT” portfolio, like Guy Debord’s work, invited us to emphasize the condition of “drift” and the very need to “derive”. The trait of Debordian situationism is in fact the interest in the “de-situation”, a condition in which it is necessary to “de-situate oneself”. The “de-situating” in art refers to a clearly Duchampian sensibility, to “doing work” starting from a displacement, from an estrangement to which the object is subjected. We are always observers, and as it happened when reading Foucault we have the feeling that the experience surpasses us, we insist on trying to understand it, we insist on its continuity. The “contingency” is a “temporal act” and allows an experience to be momentarily photographed in an instant and in a place, capturing a movement that makes it constantly tend towards an elsewhere, which is only indicated by it. Initially, the experience of contingency is lived with anguish, it is distressing that we cannot draw from elsewhere in any way. The “deriving” gives us the possibility of finding that elsewhere in the immediate aftermath, to the extent that one is aware of the openness of the experience one is living. So memory gives awareness to the gaze that allows us to be contingent with respect to reality, de-situating ourselves with respect to it and projecting ourselves ceaselessly already elsewhere. We find ourselves constantly “wandering”, both us in contemplating it and the work in offering itself to our gaze, always able to be put back into play by the unexpected. The result is a fourth dimension, apparently imaginary, where past, present and future coincide, and where we can simultaneously experience both the three temporal dimensions and a fourth, that of the unexpected. This dimension opens up infinite margins of freedom: driven by the need for truth, truth as the effect of letting oneself “drift”, as an act of availability that is offered to the unexpected, as a reflection of the being of abandonment, as an opportunity for gratuity, “De” comes into play to the extent that each of us makes the experience of the possible in all its forms his own, and only at that point are we able to go beyond contingency and therefore give continuity to the experience itself.