Quasi-Things

What circulates through Nonterritorial is neither object nor nothing. The phenomenologist Tonino Griffero calls such entities quasi-things: spatially effused, radiating effects that are largely shared, yet resistant to the ontology of discrete objects that can be owned, stored, traded. A quasi-thing cannot be grasped in the way a painting can be crated. It cannot be insured in the way a sculpture can be valued. It exists in its effects, in what it does to the space it inhabits and the bodies that encounter it.

An exhibition in the Nonterritorial network is precisely this kind of entity. It has identity—the same exhibition in Tokyo and Lagos — but no substance that can be transferred between hands.

It generates atmosphere, but the atmosphere arises fresh in each context, co-determined by the space, the hour, the bodies present. The quasi-thing is what remains when you subtract ownership from art: not nothing, but something that resists the categories through which the market operates.

You cannot speculate on a quasi-thing. You can only encounter it, be touched by it, let it change the air around you. This is not a limitation but a liberation — the recovery of what art was before it became property.