Yokohama Triennale 2020: Afterglow

Courtesy Yokohama Triennale.

Yokohama Triennale 2020
Afterglow
July 17, 2020 – October 11, 2020
https://www.yokohamatriennale.jp

Afterglow
A luminous interval, a glowing anticipation, a lambent flow, a charged current of energy between thickets of presence and becoming

The milieus that emerge with a Triennale are an invitation to a migration of concerns, hibernating or urgent, from distinct and diverse locations. They then stand re-aligned and re-drawn, suspended in co-presence. We commenced our own crossing, leading to this edition of the Yokohama Triennale, about two years ago, with questions about care, about care with toxicity, about care and friendship, about luminosity within friendship, and about cosmologies of luminance. We shared these sources, not only with the artists but also the world in Episōdo 00.

Meanwhile, in the course of a few months, a tiny virus, an un-living being, emerged, upending assumptions and assigning a task to the entire species. For the first time in human history we, all the billions from all parts of the world, have to undertake—in awareness of each other—the re-making of forms of life. It has brought to the foreground the necessity of re-apprehending the world.

We are now in the afterglow of an unfamiliar, viral, and partly unreadable time, and are without familiar protocols. Alone, and collectively, we have to navigate the oscillation of scales, quickened by the alteration in familiar rules. We are now immersed in a turbulent flow whose pressure rides through us all.

The Afterglow is also a site: it is this exhibition where you walk through deliberations with artists, activating an auto-didactic impulse for the sensing and making of the spectrum that arches from our inner to our cosmic worlds. Autodidacts learn and un-learn everything. If necessary, they need to become misfits in relation to all that is given and taken for granted, because when all the functions and instructions that are written into the manual for fixing a world can’t be fixed, they must be altered.

The Afterglow is also an infrastructure of relationships, of precepts and affects, of an ability to see and narrate the world with patience and wonderment. This scaffolding helps us sense tremors and fault lines, breakdowns and breakthroughs in the pulsations of life. These capacities are necessary to access sources within us, which may sometimes be hidden in the reservoirs of our common life, of our connected and contiguous landscapes. They help script the forging of bonds, and of affinities and sororities, so as to change the rules of the game.

In the Sourcebook (2019) to Afterglow, we had shared an amazement, which we would like you to feel again:

“Life, the universe, the world, and the time of each day disintegrates and gets re-constituted through innumerable acts, incrementally rebuilding through luminous care. Broken minutes are mended in the afterglow of time’s toxic debris.
Life is a luminous autodidact.”

In this Afterglow, we welcome you.

Raqs Media Collective
New Delhi, July 2020