Chisenhale Residency, 2010/2011 website: thisdisaster.posterous.

com

The Columbia Reconstruction Project Team attempt to reconstruct the bottom of the NASA orbiter
as part of the investigation into the accident which occurred on February 1, 2003.1

The Chisenhale Residency as Disaster

Rationale
The word disaster derives from the Greek prefix δυσ-, (dus-) "bad” and ἀστήρ (aster), "star". A
symbol plucked from the heavenly network which spoke of impending calamity. Today, rather
than read the heavens to predict events on Earth, we re-write disasters after the fact, sketching
giant grids on airplane hangar floors onto which fragments are placed/re-placed/cajoled. And
from the endless cycle of mitigated disasters (robust economic models/off-shore oil response
teams/earthquake-proof skyscrapers) we develop new ways to imitate, avoiding risks which might
produce hazards, leaving us vulnerable to further disasters. Disasters we don‟t know how to
mitigate. Disasters we can‟t even imagine. Yet.

We can prepare for disaster, but we are only judging the system, holding probability to account.
Disaster is the perpetual „before‟, a point where the network collapses in on itself, leaving a
fissure, a ghost of an event, a subject/object that organises a new network we sketch on the hangar
floor. As we analyse, model and re-enact we move away from prediction. We will never reach the
disaster itself. The true disaster hasn‟t happened yet.

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Image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:STS-107-Debris_KSC_Hangar.jpg
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The disaster compels us, repels us in equal measure to mitigate, to network as verb and plan as
noun. The disaster is here, but only just. The disaster is bound to happen eventually.

Proposal
Inspired by Chisenhale‟s forthcoming Hito Steyerl exhibition, In Free Fall, I propose „Disaster‟
as the starting point of our year long residency. Following our first Steyerl inspired workshop we
will respond to two further Chisenhale exhibitions (see „Timetable‟ below).

What if the Chisenhale residency is a disaster? Would that be such a bad thing? For many moons
afterwards we‟d have witness statements to write and letters of apology to draft, harking back to
the terrible, impossible instant when everything went wrong. Should we mitigate now? Prepare
for the worst? Isn‟t that what we do anyway when we ready an exhibition or performance? Should
we warn them? Who is the disaster going to affect?

I propose that rather than preparing for the worst, we prepare the worst. I propose we plan,
orchestrate and affect a disaster. Is it possible to intend disaster? Can we, with dignity, plan,
orchestrate and shape The Bad Star itself - shimmering there, on the Chisenhale gallery floor -
warning others of the ordeal (the one that hasn‟t happened yet)?

I propose that for our first workshop we manage risk inappropriately. We hunt for the vulnerable
points in our work and make them weaker. I propose that hazards be acted rather than re-enacted.
That we redefine the word „mitigate‟ as: “to make severe”. That we allow the very worst to
perform us, to map us on its hangar floor: to enable the perfect disaster.

Timetable
Workshops, Mondays 12-2pm

1. 8th November / Hito Steyerl

2. 21st February / Daniel Sinsel
3. 4th April / Janice Kerbel

Final Exhibition

Thursday 16th June

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Primary Sources

Forthcoming exhibitions at Chisenhale (please visit and read around the work):

http://www.chisenhale.org.uk/exhibitions/forthcoming.php?id=108

Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of Disaster (please read at least the first 7/8 pages):

http://www.scribd.com/doc/25472176/8519-The-Writing-of-Disaster

Extract 1 :
J.G.Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition

(Annotated) Flamingo Modern Classics - Harper Perennial, 2006

(extracts taken from early in the „novel‟ - more specific references available on request)

Mimetized Disasters.
The helicopter banked abruptly, pulled round in a gesture of impatience by the pilot. They
plunged towards the underpass, the huge fans of the Sikorsky sliding through the air like the
wings of a crippled archangel. A multiple collision had occurred in the approach to the underpass.
After the police had left they walked for an hour among the cars, staring through the steam at the
bodies propped against the fractured windshields. Here he would find his alternate death, the
mimetized disasters of Vietnam and the Congo recapitulated in the contours of these broken
fenders and radiator assemblies. As they circled overhead the shells of the vehicles lay in the dusk
like the crushed wings of an aerial armada.

(Ballard’s notes on) Mimetized Disasters.

Most of the machines that surround our lives - airliners, refrigerators, cars and
typewriters - have streamlined their way into our affections. Now and then, as in the case
of the helicopter, with its unstable, insect-like obsessiveness, we can see clearly the deep
hostility of the mineral world. We are lucky that the organic realm reached the foot of the
evolutionary ladder before the inorganic.

A Cosmetic Problem.
The star of the show was JFK, victim of the first conceptual car crash. A damaged Lincoln had
been given the place of honour, plastic models of the late President and his wife in the rear seat.
An elaborate attempt had been made to represent cosmetically the expressed brain tissue of the
President. As she touched the white acrylic smears across the trunk Koester swung himself
aggressively out of the driver‟s seat. While he lit her cigarette she leaned against the fender of a
white Pontiac, their thighs almost touching. Koester took her arm with a nervous gesture. „Ah, Dr
Austin . . . ‟ The flow of small talk modulated their sexual encounter. „ . . . surely Christ‟s
crucifixion could be regarded as the first traffic accident - certainly if we accept Jarry‟s happy
piece of anti-clericalism . . . ‟

The Transition Area.

As Trabert prepared for his departure, the elements of apocalyptic landscapes waited on the
horizons of his mind, helicopters burning among broken gantries. With deliberate caution, he

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waited in the empty apartment near the airport overpass, disengaging himself from the images of
his wife, Catherine Austin and the patients at the Institute. Wearing his old flying jacket, he
listened to the unending commentaries from Cape Kennedy - already he realized that the
transmissions were coming from sources other than the television and radio stations. The deaths
of the three astronauts in the Apollo capsule were a failure of the code that contained the
operating formulae for their passage through consciousness. Many factors confirmed this faulty
union of time and space - the dislocated perspectives of the apartment, his isolation from his own
and his wife‟s body (he moved restlessly from one room to the next, as if unable to contain the
volumes of his limbs and thorax), the serial deaths of Ralph Nader on the advertisement
billboards that lined the airport approaches. Later, when he saw the young man in the laminated
suit watching him from the abandoned amusement park, Trabert knew that the time had come for
his rescue attempt: the resurrection of the dead spacemen.

A Watching Trinity.
Personae of the unconscious:

Xero: Run hot with a million programmes, this terrifying figure seemed to Trabert like a vast
neural switchboard. During their time together, as he sat in the rear seat of the white Pontiac, he
was never to see Xero‟s face, but fragments of his amplified voice reverberated among the
deserted stands of the stadium, echoing through the departure bays of the air terminal.

Coma: This beautiful but mute young woman, madonna of the time-ways, surveyed Trabert with
maternal eyes.

Kline: „Why must we await, and fear, a disaster in space in order to understand our own time? -
Matta.‟

(Ballard’s notes on) A Watching Trinity.

The Chilean painter, Roberto Matta, one of the last of the surrealists, asked this as yet
unanswerable question. All disasters - earthquakes, plane or car crashes - seem to reveal
for a brief moment the secret formulae of the world around us, but a disaster in space
rewrites the rules of the continuum itself.

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Extract 2 :
Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture and Time

NOTE: In the conversation below Michel Serres and Bruno Latour talk about The
Challenger: a NASA rocket which exploded shortly after take off on the 28th January
1986. The onboard crew included Christa McAuliffe, a school teacher who had ‘won’ her
seat as part of the nationwide Teacher in Space Project. The project was cancelled
following the death of Christa, its very first participant. Media coverage of the accident
was extensive: one study reported that 85 percent of Americans surveyed had heard the
news within an hour of the accident, including many millions who watched it live on
television.

University of Michigan Press, 1995 - p.138 / 161

Michel Serres: …if we now and again cast a different look at our scientific and technical
exploits… does the accident of the Challenger rocket strangely resemble the sacrifices to Baal, in
Carthage? Indeed, a certain number of contemporary actions, behaviours, or thoughts repeat,
almost without change, extremely archaic modes of thought or behaviour. We are ancient in most
of our actions and thoughts. This history by schisms or revolutions, which is more repetitive than
any other, creates a screen that is so opaque and dark that we don‟t even see our veritable
archaisms.
[…]
I believe that the Challenger affair is seen best as I show it. This fleshes it out. This object, which
we thought simply brought us into relationship with the stars, also brings us into relationships
among ourselves. It‟s at this point that it occupies its full reality. When we place society on one
side and science on another, we no longer see anything.
[…]
Baal is in the Challenger, and the Challenger is in Baal; religion is in technology; the pagan god is
in the rocket; the rocket is in the statue; the rocket on its launching pad is in the ancient idol – and
our sophisticated knowledge is in our archaic fascinations. In short, the construction of a failed or
successful society is in the successful or failed project of going toward the stars.
The object becomes what I call in The Parasite a quasi object, which traces or makes visible the
relations that constitute the group through which it passes, like the token in a children‟s game. A
quasi object that nonetheless remains a useful technical object, even a high-tech one, directed
toward the physical world. It often happens that the most sophisticated tools play their main role
socially but without losing their objective purpose.

Bruno Latour: So, we never have only one pole – that of the object or of the subject – but at least
two?

Michel Serres: It seems to me that this is a great, magnificent story, an epic with double access.
Perhaps we no longer know how to narrate because we‟re unable to stitch together what happens
at the rocket-launching station at Kourou and what happens, for example, at Lourdes… In
devoting myself to the task of stitching, I dream of translating (with good reason) the immense
word phenomenology by the expression “the apparition speaks.” In this we are both in the realm
of philosophy and in the grotto of miracles.

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Secondary Sources
Note on The Writing of the Disaster:

http://www.apieceofmonologue.com/2009/11/maurice-blanchot-writing-of-
disaster.html

Interview with Tom McCarthy about his novel Remainder:

http://static.londonconsortium.com/issue07/09_McCarthy_interview.pdf

Disaster and Emergency AlertMaps (click on specific regions for a closer view):

http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/index.php

FEMA helps kids prepare for disaster:

http://www.fema.gov/news/newsrelease.fema?id=52819

Art marks the New Orleans disaster:

http://lifewithoutbuildings.net/2008/04/art-from-disaster.html

Catastrophic Disaster Response Staff Officer's Handbook:

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/call/call_06-08.htm

Disaster re-enactment footage:

http://stock.mrfootage.com/Disaster_Disaster_reenactments_panic_people_31_foo
tage.php

American TV show Seconds from Disaster:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seconds_From_Disaster

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=seconds+from+disaster

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