With the Future on our Backs: Notes on the language of undocumentation

This iteration investigates second takes, doubles, repetitions, and revisions. The work installed in the entrance gallery of Wild Projects presented a photograph of the back of a guard posted at the entrance of a museum. The photo is flanked by two walls with mirroring installations of Pablo Diaz and Sofia Dixon’s work, double takes of their work. Mikhaela Quezada’s sculpture doubles a take on leaf with a representation of a plant on a bundle of napkins; paper leaves themselves. As with any creative process, revisions help elaborate a project. Christhian Diaz’s work, which he performed past the gallery entrance in the Wild Project theater, builds on a repetition of gestures to build Instructions for Lamentation, a 25 minute performance.

Grammatical revisions were suggested by the curatorial team at Wild Project in an effort to publish an announcement for the exhibition opening. In response we wrote an addendum to the original statement which, due to word count limitations, was not published. Prompted by the need for clarity, we have included our addendum below.

Any statement published as part of an A-Museum iteration is considered a text, a document, an iteration of its problematic to the extent that it represents it and becomes increasingly literal. The equivocations are intentional. For example, a crisis of meaning is actualized when grammar is prioritized over the meaning sought in syntactical play. Grammar iterates the border condition in the sense that it implies that there might not be any meaning or considerable reason for breaking the rules. What we write might not be poetry but it crosses the same grammatical lines seeking meaning. To take that away is a gesture which, however minimally, takes away its potential meaning from becoming a document. This is what we mean by the verb to undocument.  

When we read the Wild Projects curatorial revision,

“Through cultural production, A-Museum addresses the crisis of meaning produced by undocumentation.”

the subject becomes unequivocally A-Museum, as in, the museum. It may be grammatically correct but not exclusively what we mean. 

The rest follows in the same logic.

It is not the museum, it is A-Museum. A-Museum which when read and turned into sound is equivocal to a museum, and carries meaning in its alliteration: a museum, any museum, could address the crisis of meaning produced by undocumentation through cultural production. Because, it is through cultural production that we reproduce undocumentation.