PERFORMANCE / LECTURE / OBJECT

»Our existence in the world involves the need to find a logic that makes it possible for us
 to deal with the fact that at the same time we are observing the world, we are the subject and live in it, that is, that we are part of the world.« (Felix Guattari)

DER DIE DAS is an écriture as a space-time machine in which the materials become the speakers, in which Holzer and Hauser question the dichotomies that plague Western thought patterns: subject / object, observers / observed, nature / culture, male / female, materiality / discourse, matter / meaning, past / future, space / time, something / nothing.

DER DIE DAS invites visitors into a room with a table and chair.
What else is necessary to liven up a place? Noises, movements, pictures. Presences and absences. Fantastic stories will arise from them. Sentences as we know them from philosophers and trashy novels catapult us into what we are seeing with our own eyes but cannot quite grasp. Don’t we rather orient ourselves with our skin? What has gotten under our skin? Bodies. Spirits. Connections. Languages. Knowledge. Desire. The other. Textures. Oscillations. Perceptions that are marked by specific histories and images. From childhood, for example. And other patterns of dominance. Materials that convey themselves through other media – interlock, layer, disappear, and develop their own poetry.
Based on breaks in self-definition, Holzer and Hauser want to move, appeal for the cultivation of dissent, and find that they have to oppose something to the infantilizing capitalist consensus. How can they do that? And what role do they have in this process?

Materials: Simone Forti, Karen Barad, Felix Guattari, La Monte Young, Gilles Deleuze, Dennis Hopper, Heinz von Foerster, Jean Luc Godard

Performance by Jack Hauser & Sabina Holzer
Space and film: Jack Hauser
Text and sound: Sabina Holzer
Artistic friend: Philipp Gehmacher

Supported by: City of Vienna
Co-production: cattravelsnotalone and Tanzquartier Wien

SCRIPT
1
Everything is here and now.
I learned that from my grandmother.
It was her magic spell. Everything. Here. Now

So. The beginning of the universe, all historical problems, all wars, exploitation, revolutions, colonization, revolutions, achievements, failures, solutions, and agencies of civil courage are happening here and now. Even my feelings about the war back then are happening here and now. And also my feelings about the wars that are happening here and now.

It is a quite complex kind of mixture we share. Now, here. Together. With our bodies, thoughts, sensations, emotions. Here and now. Sharing the space – with each other – with all these different things. The walls, the bricks, the stones, the floor, the woods, the trees, the curtain, the cotton, the wool, the threads, the textures. The light, the fires, the explosions. The air, the wind, the breaths, the dust, the death, the forgotten, the remembered, the unknown future, the sounds, the whispers and mumbles, the creaks, and the rifles. And the cracks. Sharing the substance of our bones with the walls and the stones this space is made of. Structures, spaces, stones, bones. Muscles made of fibers, like motors that make us move. Electronic impulses stream through our nerve tracts. Transferred by liquids and space. Bodies in motion. Things with strange notions. The reason for my existence is a configuration of matter, a friend once said. Similarities, differences, otherness, sameness. Deviations, mutations, transformations.
Continuously passing lines and thresholds.

2
Every time we talk, we construct. It depends on the person I talk to how my construction will turn out. Depending on situation, condition, environment. Interdependence.
Talking to oneself in silence is often referred to as „thinking.“ How do you realize that you think? Through words, images, sensations? Silent rejections and affirmations. Reinforcements or rearrangements of patterns.

3
I once visited a school for journalists. In the entrance hall, there was a sign saying, „Tell how it is.“ I thought, thinking of my grandmother, it is the way you describe it. Because you construct the “it”. No one knows what “it” is. If “it” happens, it is already past when we describe it. We just can reconstruct it and there it is different for sure.
So if you make the “it” while describing it, you are part of it, you are responsible for it.
Responding, participating. Sharing. Daring. I want to discover how to see things differently in order to be able to do things differently.
How do I see?
Because my surroundings are touched by light and reflect it, and because my eyes are touched by light, light comes into existence, and so does the world around me visually. An image is created through touch and a certain organization of patterns. Some of these images are created because light passes through the lens of my eye and touches the retina, where the impulses get translated by my nerve system and connected to who we have grown to become, what we have learned, and what we will become. Desire. Pathways of plasticity. Deviations, mutations, transformations. Imaginations. Every arrangement has a specific order of light — the way light enters, passes through, is swallowed, or is spread.
Through the distribution of the visible and the invisible, a body comes into existence that would not exist without this light.
Everything that materializes carries darkness within, is not see-through. Even in the confrontation of light, it stays within the fluidity of darkness, engraved by darkness. Like our bodies which are dark inside. Matter and space. Darkness and light. Light, particles, and waves.

4
To insist that light consists of particles means to insist that light consists of localizable objects, which take up a given space at every possible moment. To insist that light consists of waves means to insist that it is made of objects with spatial dimensions that are able to be in more than one place at the same time. Like the waves of the sea,
which move along a shore, overlap, flow, and are here and there at the same time.

5
When I think about you, am I part of these thoughts, traveling to you, reaching out to you?
Maybe some of my connective tissue in the coral-like three-dimensional internal bone structure is recognizing something is missing. Your presence here is memory being conscious of itself now. Your memory. My memory. Here, now. Consciousness. Light. Darkness. Matter. Space.

6
So. Where are we here? Are we part of the object? Where does the object start? That what is thrown at us. That in which we are thrown? Do we stand, sit, and walk right inside, right through it? Outside, inside. Lines, colors, sounds, postures, particles, places, spaces. Holes, abysses, darkness, and the unknown. Here and now. Structures, bones, stones. Air. People and things fleeing, disappearing, or appearing. Light that goes. Light that returns. I watched the night create the day, while we seemed unchanged. I tried to touch the light. The only thing I achieve is the shadow of my fingers. (Sabina Holzer)