Silent as Spirit: Joachim Koester
The exhibition HOWE at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is followed by an event at Kadist SF, organized by Joachim Koester in conversation with Robin Selk, Michael Loncaric, Michelle M. Helene, and Dylan Godwin. The event will be accompanied by a publicationand a collaborative installation—expanding upon the works presented at YBCA. Silent as Spirit The story is well documented: in 1894, the Lumiere brothers, who have been trying to achieve motion projection for years, still can’t get their machine to blink. Their breakthrough comes with the ‘intermittent mechanism’ of Howe’s sewing machine. Grab-pull becomes light-dark becomes advance-pause-expose, and negatives are subjected to a rhythm that projects the fluidity of real life. But the transference from one frame to the next is also the transference of creative powers from the machine to the viewer. Just as the mechanism is helpless but to project, the human eyes discover a seamless stream that can only appear continuous by illusion. The reverse of remembering is hallucinating : We may remember that Joachim Koester’s Of Spirits and Empty Spaces takes as its focus the utopian efforts of John Murray Spear to reinvent Howe’s sewing machine through the combination of séance and trance athletics. What we watch, however, is a projection of lambent dust particles while subtitles recount the effort of Spear’s supporters to summon Benjamin Franklin’s spirit. Like ghosts, dust is the medium-in-waiting of all that was and ever will be—but to witness this cosmological drift we need projections. Erasure grows: By engaging with the archive, one is constantly negotiating the relation between active loss/erasure and recovery/remembrance. Yet the outlying and silent witness to this dialectic is the space of all that is lost and dead, that which exists beyond the horizon of the historical, conceptual or representational limit. Here, the unanchored, digressive, beyond the point and beyond the grave, wanders against the horizon of the archive. Wednesday, November 20 Cocktails at 6pm, event at 7pm Continuing Saturday, Nov. 23 and Sunday Nov. 24, 12-5pm