Above the Abyss

On November 27, 2019 Geneva-based Off Space Cherish and Brand-New-Life organized a reading with Fatima Wegmann. The two contributions, titled Above the Abyss and Contradiction is Unity published here originated from this reading and are published on B-N-L as video- and text-based documentation and an accompanying essay. In her performance Fatima Wegmann explores science fiction and theory - which she sees as closely interrelated - through an audio-visual practice. This allows her to investigate a space of experimentation in search of emancipatory discourse - narratives off-center from patriarchal and imperialist thought. As part of an expansion of the discussion towards French-speaking Switzerland, B-N-L offers a platform to text-based artistic practice. Writing is an artistic practice that is still not comprehensively remunerated and recognized and, in the art context, is too rarely a subject of funding programmes. B-N-L therefore gives artists a framework to develop a new text.

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I want to start with the proposition that the future is not already set.
I say this because I believe that by changing ourselves
we can also change the world
So anything is possible if we start from there.
The performative is a question of force and effect, and the answer must answer precisely in that mode: Force and effect.

A lot of people have felt the same urgency as I do
the urgency to rewrite and reprogram themselves
And to see this state of emergency as a site of emergence.

How to reveal the unconscious potentialities
waiting to be activated
but hidden by our thinking infrastructure?

Not the potentialities to repair a fragmented past
but to embrace this place of fracture
and accept this is as our state
the state of modernity.

…

I feel that there is something wrong
about this binarity between life and death
this frontier is only a modernist construction
to see the dead as unworthy of care

We must take care of those on the other side.

It is only like this that we can have a future that gives a kind of reparation for the past lives
for the silences that are suffocating us
And to finally make the pain passing from one generation to the next stop.

…

The performance and it's documentation are courtesy of the Fatima Wegmann, Ali-Eddine Abdelkhalek and Cherish / James Bantone. The project is made possible with support by Pro Helvetia.