Advisor/tutor:  Amithab S. Rai and Florian Göttke

May 2021

Abstract

The act of writing a thesis itself raises questions about movement and space: Its etymology derives from the Greek verb θέτω (theto) which means to place, to situate, to bring forward or propose. A thesis is also a moment in time, not an end in itself. In any proposal laying out a position, there is also something temporary, a hint of a fixed idea, but also a concept potentially in-flux, something with no absolute finality. Every thesis is a part of a process. For that reason, a thesis is also about experimentation, improvisation, adaptation and collaboration. As a starting point it involves the writer’s position and the means needed to find the thesis. This implies a journey where body and mind come across different people and places, meaning that this action is personal as well as collective: an experience that is constantly rebuilding and rethinking itself. We always have a thesis: In our relationships with ourselves and others ; in our dreams; in our fuckups and our successes. We are always in dialogue with other people’s theses and practices, always under construction, always in question, always being repositioned. I would like to propose this thesis as a vessel to question, navigate and revisit my position within my life and my artistic practice, the two being inseparable from each other. A vessel, such as the one I describe, is of a contradictory nature: It is enclosed but porous; it is built as we ride it, made out of the materials that we might find on the way. It is as rigid as it is fragile and has the capacity to transform and travel simultaneously in different realms of space and time, and yet will only reveal itself while we are upon it. With no blueprints to build this vessel, I have set myself the task of wandering through different types of knowledge while discovering its shape as I travel, remaining open to recognize what kind of vessel comes together in the process and what kind of materiality it may produce. 

The act of wandering is something that keeps returning to me as a practice that potentially allows for free movement. Resisting any linear and binary trajectory of knowledge and any objective and authoritarian properties that have been imposed and offered to us as the only given. The practice of wandering suggests a reactivation of personal boundaries to confront and to open ourselves to the other, exploring a space where oppositions and divisions can be in conversation within their own agency and desires. I will employ the notion of wandering as a methodological apparatus to revisit how it relates to my own development as an artist and as a person.