I Giorgio Agamben fries an egg I, 2015
(Double-Alice, or a Pawn and a Queen )
documentation of the performative journey (Olavsvern Nato Base, Norway - Grado, Italy), August 2015 :
Katya and Hanna propose to Giorgio Agamben to fry an egg.
ed.1+1AP
courtesy of the artist
Katya and Hanna propose to Giorgio Agamben to fry an egg.
A fried egg (sunny side up or oeuf au miroir) is simultaneously one of the most common examples of a breakfast and also a reminiscence of a day-to-day breakfast of Wittgenstein. The philosopher’s ascetic, austere and chaste manner of everyday life was a projection of his mode of thought. His late idea of «form of life» is developed by Agamben from the point where Wittgenstein stopped due to the end of physical life.
By focusing on a mundane act and by an attempt to translate it to a domaine of absent purpose, we are addressing to questions as that of action and gesture, anonymity of names (paradox of White Knight), suspended image and image-movement, being and language and being; and others, in a form of a gag-like situation as that of frying an egg with a philosopher.
A proposition to fry an egg exists in a form of an address to a philosopher who’s critical writings largely influenced the sphere of contemporary art, engaging him to empirical transfiguration of theoretical concepts as the third author and performer.
This proposition also exists as such - a sentence with subject and predicate. As an utterance, which means being in language, the phrase «Agamben fries an egg» incorporates all potential scenarios of how this phrase could be actualized - but also it simultaneously and radically denies them all. Therefore being in language comprises all possible and impossible scenarios at the same time, making room for hope and for whatever.
Hanna and Ekaterina are proposing a method by which this being in language could be translated into being, while at the same time continuing to preserve the whatever-singularity-being. Therefore, an utterance- in language becomes a reference point of living backwards and triggers a formula of transformations, where logic is infinitely converging to the limits of language, and paradox infinitely expands them, so that the formula itself becomes a parable, a gesture becomes a language, and language becomes a recipe. The literal actualization of the proposition is happening occasionally during the whole lifetime of the philosopher.