Being-in-Common Without Common Origin

Jean-Luc Nancy wrote that literature means "the being-in-common of what has no common origin." The phrase could describe Nonterritorial exactly. Here is an artist in Manila. Here is a curator in Amsterdam. Here is a café owner in Accra who has never heard of either. Here is a university administrator in São Paulo with a hallway and a budget. Here is someone in a Berlin apartment who wants to host. None of them share an origin. They did not emerge from the same school, the same scene, the same geography, the same market position. They have no common root.

And yet: being-in-common. The network makes possible a form of co-existence that does not require shared origin, shared language, shared institutional affiliation. What they share is the relation itself—the exhibition as relational space that each of them enters differently, from different positions, for different reasons, receiving different atmospheric effects. The Manila artist exists, as artist, in this being-in-common. The Accra café becomes, as cultural venue, through this being-in-common. The exhibition is not the common object around which they gather. The exhibition is their being-in-common: the relation that constitutes each of them as participant in something larger than any could produce alone.

This is the archipelago made operational. No common origin, no center from which relations radiate, no continent to be conquered. Only islands in relation, submarine unity invisible but real. The relational poetics van Rooden sketches for literature applies even more forcefully to exhibition practice: the literariness—or let us say the exhibition-ness—of an exhibition is not given in advance. It is not a property the work possesses before encounter.

It comes into being each time anew, in community, however small and momentary that community may be. Two people in a Berlin living room watching the same projection as a hundred in a Lagos screening: both are communities, both are occasions for being-in-common, both are sites where exhibition-as-relation comes into existence.

The network does not discriminate between scales because relation does not require scale. Relation requires only encounter. And encounter we can provide—anywhere a screen exists, anywhere someone cares enough to host, anywhere the air is willing to be changed.