Exercises for Not Disappearing

Abstract of a curatorial study for Le Vide AUM by Ricardo Mancilla Garay, 2021.

Techno-industry tacitly imposes an experience of the world that understands our passage through it as a constant escape of time and an accumulation of disposable data. One instant, not yet finished, is immediately overlaid by another. Moments without meditation pile up incomplete within our subjectivity,

invading us with the despair of not knowing everything—everything that is claimed to be “important” and that happens outside of us. The human risks being displaced by the hegemony of the moment, which replaces experience as a process of learning identity.

Catastrophe has become an intimate event.

In his performance, IK’Tein proposes a structure that operates in favor of life, thereby reversing the program, mechanics, and function of the machine. His pendulum, activated through collective and individual actions across Chile, reclaims the ritual and transcendent aim of performance, carrying a nostalgia for the human. Its emergence seeks to reintegrate the infinite force of terrestrial gravity into the human axis.

We must return to the earth.

In its hypnotic swinging, the pendulum is both suspension and change—an inner movement, a being in the instant, an internal oscillation charged with the precariousness that operates within subjectivity, obstructing and arresting us. The human will come to inhabit the planet, not the machine. A sacrifice must be established: letting the load collapse, releasing the desire for progress so that the intimate dream of the species—personal and collective—may emerge.

Alienated by the productive goal that forces us to look obsessively forward, we must recover, through the inverted gaze and the abrupt descent of the pendulum, the intrinsic desire of the human—in the contemplation of the intimate and the transcendent—replacing the idea of efficient time with conscious time; returning to the belief that the vital unfolds in the precarious temporality of the instant and the accident, as a way of not disappearing into the mirage of a future that has already ended.

Ricardo Mancilla Garay, 2021