Katya Ev
(ekaterina vasilyeva)

‘" [...] 'doing nothing’ in Visitors is not just subject to, but also enabled by the legal framework and conditions advanced in and by the piece. Here, a look at the contract and the paratext accompanying the work is in order. Consider, for instance, this particularly glorious mobilization of the perverse poeticpotential of legal-administrative language, on the webpage that explains the premises of the work: “In whichever way ‘doing nothing’ is enacted concretely, the contract signed by participants formally recognizes that what they are doing is what ‘nothing’ is.”

The pragmatic solipsism of contractual and legal circumscription here substitutes for rather more lofty meditations on the ontology of ‘nothingness’. The performativity of legislative utterances is what makes the impossibility of ‘doing nothing’ appear as available and renders it practically realizable—but not really, as participants in Visitors will naturally experience first hand. In this  context, it is worth recalling the example of the perception or experience of the absence of a friend in a café, which philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre uses in Being and Nothingness to demonstrate the dialectical entwinement of appearance and non-appearance, and ultimately of being and nothingness. Somewhat like Sartre's absent friend, the contract and the discursive framing affords a kind of perception of nothing(ness), and sets off a series of reflexions on a paradoxal nature of such perception." Steyn Bergs, "Nothing/Doing: On Visitors of an Exhibition Space are Suggested to ‘Do Nothing’", TIM Magazine #2, 2021 full text here​