The Momental

2006

6. Mai – 10. Juni, 2006 | Sparwasser HQ, Berlin
Group Exhibition, lecture programme and workshops.
The Momental Online

“ Through all the changes ‘something’ remains – that something is the moment…no sociological or historical determination can adequately define this temporality…its wish is to reinstate discontinuity, grasping it in the very fabric of the lived.” Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life Volume II

Participants:
Larissa Fassler (CA), Ivana Franke (HR), Germaine Koh (CA), Stephan Kurr (DE), Jeff Preiss (US) und Åsa Ståhl (SE).

A series of lectures and workshops reflected on key themes instigated by the platform:
Mark Paterson (UK), Christel Weiler + Barbara Gronau (DE), Johan Zetterquist (SE) mit Judith Manzoni (ES), Jürgen Krusch (CH) und Markus Miessen (UK/DE)

The Hybrid as Interface

Popularized historical events are frozen and endure in time for a collective gaze by the Monument. The everyday, on the other hand refuses an enduring expression, residing in a muddled zone of fleeting instants of co-presence. The tension between the everyday and the monument is captured in the hybrid terrain described by The Momental, of standing out only to disappear, all the while making itself felt. The interfacing of this highly subjectivized temporal interval (the moment) and its’ occasional perception as a phenomenological, albeit fleeting, ‘monument’ of sorts, questions the notion of time itself, shifting our mundane experience of mechanical time into a an unmeasurable realm, where duration is malleable.

The diverse collection of works and events operate as experiments in dis-alienation. They seek to instigate responsive situations for their receivers by giving voice to silent codes of common behaviour. From an anonymous delivery of flowers, to the audibility of a stranger – the works dwell in the infra-ordinary, yet subtly twist its numbed course, skewing the habitual beyond habit. As gestures of encounter, the works collectively seek to re-write co-habitative rituals from the inside – the lived. The works deliberately stall the ethics of circulation, preferring rather to delicately obstruct the negligent flow of efficiency, opening up a space where other narratives can find a temporary abode.

The Momental confronts the colonization of everyday routines, through de-rational modes of production, analysis and discourse. Like the indeterminacy of the moment itself, these forms of knowing reside in the interstices between the proverbial map and the territory, between the read and the spoken. This alternative grammar of the everyday percolates through our coherent surroundings, producing novel choreographies of the quotidian – where lived time re-enters the stage and reveals the poetic potentiality of the theatre of the trivial.