Joseph Baan: "Structures of Unfeeling"

prologue [structures of unfeeling] installation and three-channel sound piece, sound by Luc Häflinger, image credit: Zoe Tempest
prologue [structures of unfeeling] installation and three-channel sound piece, sound by Luc Häflinger, image credit: Zoe Tempest

In my PhD research, I investigate the liberatory potential of performance practices, proposing performance as a means to interrogate and negotiate the constraints that one is borne into and as having the potential to undermine or possibly escape these constraints by “training one’s incoherence” through the employment of ambiguity, negation, confusion, and illegibility as performative strategies.

Structures of Unfeeling is a three-part performative learning environment that intends to use the exhibition format for the formation of a public culture around sexual trauma. Taking place in Helmhaus in July (prologue), ETH, BINZ39 and Tanzhaus in October, and Museum der Moderne in Salzburg in November (epilogue), the research specifically delved into trauma and its relation to performative and aesthetic strategies of illegibility, unfeeling, and incoherence. Each public moment offered an opportunity to find out how these strategies function when exchanged with an audience or a group of participants.

One important impetus for this project is that the working group consists of a majority of artists and researchers with histories of being subjected to sexualised violence or childhood sexual abuse. These experiences feed into our aesthetic practices and shape our activities as educators, community builders, thinkers, and makers, whether directly or indirectly. In conversation, we discovered that openly addressing sexual trauma as part of one’s biography and as embedded within an aesthetic practice oftentimes risks being pathologized when shared publicly, both within educational and cultural spaces. This tendency towards silencing contributes to the fact that the ordinariness of sexual violence remains unaddressed.

Structures of Unfeeling consisted of three main events. The largest and most collaborative part of the project happened in BINZ39 and Tanzhaus. This was bookended by two exhibitions in Helmhaus and Museum der Moderne, for which I developed and exhibited a new work titled prologue [structures of unfeeling].

  • prologue [structures of unfeeling], Helmhaus Zürichprologue [structures of unfeeling], Helmhaus Zürich

prologue [structures of unfeeling]

prologue [structures of unfeeling] is a performative installation that aims to find expression for unfeeling and affective incoherence, thereby questioning the legibility of affect itself. In Lauren Berlant’s text, Structures of Unfeeling: Mysterious Skin, Berlant reflects upon the relationship between trauma and underperforming, framing unfeeling as a plausible response to sexual violence, especially in the context of a society that is unlikely to acknowledge the assault or pursue the perpetrator(s). Unfeeling here is not only a response to the violent event itself, but also a way to cope with a world that does not offer support, recognition, or repair in order to deal with that event. More broadly, Berlant coined the term “politicized dissociation”: “…which describes the subject’s exit from prescribed ways to feel about the world, while not knowing how to feel otherwise, yet. This cannot be treated as an individual disorder but has to be acknowledged as a consequence of capitalism and the material affective necessities which are part of life in a wrong world.”

  • prologue [structures of unfeeling], Helmhaus Zürichprologue [structures of unfeeling], Helmhaus Zürich

Following unfeeling as an aesthetic language to engage with my own history of childhood sexual abuse, prologue [structures of unfeeling] proposes reticent or recessive performative modes as a means to stage crisis, effective precisely in their illegible or inevident forms. The installation forecloses a coherent relation between reality and the affective response to reality, thereby offering instead the unexpected spaciousness of affective disengagement. Through the use of colour-negating light from sodium vapour lamps, an extension of the space through a mirrored floor, aluminium sculptures engraved with victim-survivor accounts that have been revised to their grammatical denominations, and accompanied by a sound installation, the work attempts to create a space of “flat affect”; a space in which affective incoherence, lowered intensity, and a decrease of legibility aims to offer escape routes from normative ways to feel about the world.

Structures of Unfeeling
Initiated by organic research group SOHERE (Joseph Baan, wolf engelen, Vanessa Jane Phaff), Structures of Unfeeling brought together a diverse group of practitioners from the fields of contemporary art, education, music, performance, dramaturgy, and academia, providing a diverse and comprehensive environment to foster conversation, collective thinking and making, and a discursive framework to encounter the topic of sexual trauma through aesthetic, material, embodied, and theoretical means.

  • Structures of Unfeeling, BINZ39 (image credit: Marc Jauss)Structures of Unfeeling, BINZ39 (image credit: Marc Jauss)

Structures of Unfeeling took shape as a 4-week exhibition and events series in BINZ39 and Tanzhaus Zürich. Approaching the exhibition format as a performative learning environment meant that it was a space that invited continuous change due to events, gatherings, and contributions that result from the seminars and workshops taking place within the exhibition. In this sense, Structures of Unfeeling was only partially curated, consisting of autonomous works, infrastructures, a reader, an archive, and methods and practices for encounter. We adopted an exploratory approach, open to all possible outcomes, expressions and experiences. On the basis of mutual trust, each of us developed different parts of the project, allowing heterogeneous elements to coexist.

  • Risking Repetition, Tanzhaus Zürich (image credit: Marc Jauss)Risking Repetition, Tanzhaus Zürich (image credit: Marc Jauss)

A central event within the project was the symposium, Risking Repetition. Aesthetics of “Survival”Risking Repetition. Aesthetics of “Survival”Risking Repetition. Aesthetics of “Survival”, a two-day polyphonic format that engaged with the question how “survivors” of sexualised violence perform “survival”. Encompassing concerts, performances, lectures, and an experimental, participatory roundtable discussion, the symposium offered an important experimental approach to engage with this complex topic through practical, discursive, and aesthetic means. Co-curated by Joshua Wicke and Luc Häfliger, invited guests included sound artists Ronce, bela, and gotgha, performance artist Carolina Mendonça, and psychoanalyst and theorist Avgi Saketopoulou.

This project was not an attempt at repair or intended as a therapeutic space. Rather, it intended to offer participants, students, and visitors the possibility to engage with this subject matter in a variety of ways. We wished to grant access to a different register of engaging with sexual violence, one that demystifies and dedramatizes its occurrence. A matter-of-fact approach to encounter these realities, to grant emergence of untold stories, unshared thoughts, or structures of unfeeling that might allow histories of sexual violence to take shape in (semi-)public spaces as matter, practices, affects, or words.

Team: Joseph Baan with SOHERE (Joseph Baan, wolf engelen, Vanessa Jane Phaff), Luc Häflinger, and others.

Locations: Helmhaus Zürich, July 12 - September 15 / BINZ39 und Tanzhaus Zürich, October 10 – November 9 / Museumd der Moderne Salzburg, November 20 – January 12 (2025).