Decalogue for Personal Use, 2024
- Accept the constitutive incompleteness of life, distrust beginnings and ends
- Repudiate uniform, unidirectional and measurable concepts of time upon which myths of endless progress are grown and maintained
- Commit to unlearning ideas of all-encompassing rationality
- Pledge fidelity (with reservations) to production without immediate profit
- Take yourself seriously
- See limitations and flaws as resources
- Do not force your work to fit a determined typology or tradition
- Explore the margins, trespass occasionally
- Do not reduce multiplicities to rigid dichotomies
- Fully embrace ambivalences and contradictions
- Exercise the mimetic faculty
- Include your situation and the conditions of the context
- Keep a critical attitude towards any form of cult of the personality, but commit yourself in the construction of your own story that otherwise would be left at the sole mercy of future historians
- Acknowledge yourself as a human being, sobbing, gasping, enjoying, etc.
- Be visionary, do not dilute your plan from the start, rather adapt it at need
- Life is dramatic, work is important, allow your sense of humour to dwell there
- It is ok to make works about not having brilliant ideas (remember when you were struggling to avoid generalities about the pandemic, the way the cultural landscape changed and the polarisation of the public debate while finding your personal experience less relevant, considering you didn’t loose your job or spend the lockdown days in hell, and you were anyway taking parental leave and moving to a new place with no time to enjoy the flood of content suddenly available online since some assumed others had extra time off you were also hoping you could work on your stuff you even bought an old sewing machine to learn something new and you rather wanted to look ahead to a hopefully brighter future and you felt silly because you didn’t have any good ideas and maybe even more idiotic for being occupied with that craft and resorting to that broken English in those tough times with yet another war that time at your doorsteps you hoped it could turn out ok considering the nonsense all around you)
- Hack the pillars of your upbringing
- As you are erratic by inclination, you can both indulge into it and go against it.
- Remember to set time aside, to the extent this is possible, to find poetry in your everyday experiences, while acknowledging the privilege to have such opportunity
- Always consider the class perspectives
- Do something, do anything, doing nothing maintains the status quo
See also:
- Wassily Chair Replicas Society, 2025