«Slowing down creation and research can be a way of recognizing that delaying and making things last can lead to a fertile process of inventing the unknown. A Reading Group gathered online from April to June 2020 to think, read, create and meet.»
Doutoranda em Estudos Artísticos- Arte e Mediações NOVA-FCSH Investigadora no Instituto de História da Arte IHA-NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST | FCT- Portugal [2020.06548.BD]
The meetings of the Procrastination School reading group coincided with the first months of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, and therefore took place within the discipline of confinement, with rooms in zoom. The virus was managed as a catastrophe; the spatial separation and social discipline were instructed by modes and measures of time that organized the collective urgency [the speed of deforestation of the primary forest on the planet contrasts with the slow growth and regenerative capacity of the secondary forest, the fastest bat in the world can fly at 110 km/hour, a sneeze can reach the speed of 160 km/hour; the SARS-COVID 19 virus stays alive for up to three hours in the air outdoors, up to seven days in materials/objects such as plastic or stainless steel; that the speed of testing at home slows transmission in social settings; it takes ten years on average to produce a vaccine; that the vaccine holds the world record for speed/rapidity of vaccine production in all known histories of science and humanity; vaccines have a shelf life of 6 months to 2 years (depending on the lab); that the speed of vaccination in European countries contrasted with the wait and slowness of vaccination in poorer countries. The cancellations, the postponements, the waiting, the extensions].
I can’t think of the reading group without the experience and memory of the pandemic. Procrastination was talked about in our group, from text to text, from zoom to zoom, with a bibliographic list on fatigue, exhaustion, laziness, denial, desertion, persistence, durational resistance, and agonism. Despite the diverse nature of the texts, procrastination, as a practical and (from my perspective) politically refractory critique of absolute (and illusorily collective) time, started to impose on my perception of the management of the catastrophe. The texts and the reading group moved with me from the passive suspension of social discipline to an imagination of alter-rhythms without deforestation, a “I prefer not to” to accelerated capitalism as a historical force [look at the polysemy of this acceleration in the narratives of catastrophe, again, the waiting, the resilience, the cancellation, the postponement, the prolongation] . This is the first observation I make from my participation in the reading group, both through access to the bibliography and through the conversations that were generated in a real and tangible time of situated sharing in our zoom meetings: zooming in with the speed of the finished reading - zooming out with the slowness of dissent; zooming in with the argument - zooming out with a cadavre exquis.
The second note has to do directly with the reverberation of Procrastination in my academic practice. Thus, I also cannot think of the reading group without considering the coincidence with my first year of a PhD in Artistic Studies at NOVA-FCSH. I am writing a thesis on artistic practices in Southern Europe that are situated with the material conditions of precariousness and conflict from the 2008 economic crisis to the pandemic we were going through at the time. Exhaustion as a critique of space (experience and production of space) emerged in my research (and in the Research Methodologies classes with the incredible Margarida Brito Alves) as an operative concept that allows to align distinct practices in a single body of aesthetics and politics. The texts proposed in the Procrastination group unfolded my initial proposal of exhaustion to other conceptual possibilities that connected with time: the management of fatigue in a durational practice such as activism; agonism and resistance as temporal contractions; the anticipation at play in the prefigurative artistic practices of a common (possible?) future among living beings; the time of critical attention. The School of Procrastination and the reading group opened my research on the production of social space to time, and this was determinant for the path I have been tracing for the thesis until today. But it was Procrastination as a way of thinking, of creating articulations and researching, that was the definitive inframince that arose, and that I only allowed myself to receive and realize later in my academic practice. Promising the final form at the beginning of the PhD and simultaneously postponing it for four years, the delivery. To replace the suffering of the promise to be kept by the critical, tactful postponement, the apparently slow or invisible movement , that seeks in itself the realization of the form while postponing it, in my case the thesis. To postpone it in order to stay vital in the articulations which are in fact the potency of being able to fulfill that promise. [writing a lot and laterally, focusing on an end that does not exist, lazing around reading a whole book for the imagined thesis, an article from one end to the other that leads me to another, talking a lot because I am not sure of what I want to say, participating in silence because I am not sure of what I want to say, stuttering, stretching the time in communications].
As I have been putting it here, and of course in dialogue with the proposed texts and the experience in the reading group, procrastination as a practice is an alter-rhythm that postpones form, a time without positivist measure, and that can eventually create tensions to the construction of collective time. Depending on the context and intensity, it can be, and as I said at the beginning of this text, refractory.