A note on my installation FU (風/The Wind)

In the seminal film (as well as one of my favourite films) 2001: A Space Odyssey from 1968, directed by Stanley Kubrick and co-written by him and Arthur C. Clarke, a monolith appears, symbolising the source of higher knowledge that influences our ape ancestors to evolve into Homo sapiens, marking this leap as the dawn of human history.

Defined by Merriam-Webster as “a single great stone often in the form of an obelisk or column,” a monolith implies singularity and solidity.

But what if knowledge isn’t like a monolith—singular, solid, and indivisible? What if it is instead fragile, made up of many different pieces, capable of being broken, as well as inherently plural? What if knowledge isn’t a monument but rather multifaceted passages through which we walk?

What if knowledge isn’t about messages from an “advanced” future that manifest themselves, but rather a continuous reinterpretation and reactivation of, as well as unforeseen ways of reconnection with, our past and present, in which each newly discovered piece of perspective weaves an untrodden path forward by blending the known with the untried? What if there is no absolute knowledge but only the collective experience of ourselves, within whom multiple interpretations are always possible?

Imagine a future, our future, that is unknown and undetermined. Imagine now alternative possibilities to what we today aspire to, what we today assume without question, what we have so far taken for granted, and what we have until now considered always right.

And if our desire to right the wrongs of the past and the present leads us to see time not as linear, but as winding, bending, reversing, escaping, jumping, and at times even looping, how can we then proceed to decide that knowledge itself doesn’t mirror this complexity?