(Everything is everything)
consent not to be a single being wiggle
Let’s get down now
I hear voices, I see people
I hear voices of many people
(Oh, yeah)
I hear voices, I see people
I hear voices of many people
Sayin’ everything is everything
Yeah, oh, yeah
Yeah, they’re sayin’
Everything is everything
(Oh yeah, shut up)
Let me do my do my
Everything is everything
Everything is everything
(Yeah)
Everything is everything
Everything is everything
(Yes, it is)
Everything is everything
(Yes, it is)
Everything is everything
(You gotta believe it now)
Everything is everything
(Don’t you know now)
I say everything is everything
Oh, yeah
Everything is everything
Everything is everything
Everything is everything
Everything is everything 1
Everything is everything is wiggling out of ones’ skin. Wiggling out of
expectations. Wiggling out of performativity. Wiggling off script. Wiggling into
existence. Wiggling into joy. Wiggling into being. Wiggling through and around
schemas, traps, cages. Wiggling into a cocoon. Wiggling away from prying
eyes. Waiting room. Holding room. Green room. Leg room. Elbow room. Wiggle
room. Who has wiggle room? Who has time to wiggle? How do you carve out
time away from basic demands to wiggle your way into your own? To wiggle
into multiplicity.
Living Room deploys refusal as a tactic to move from the traps of storytelling 2
through a moving image disavowal of the spectacular-bio-explicatory-climactic-
narrative-developmentalist-apparatus. Here, waiting is staged as a casting that
never finds its own resolution.
Donny Hathaway’s song is about the entanglements of life and reconciling
oneself to this multiplicity. Edouard Glissant in a conversation with Manthia
Diawara says that “to consent not to be a single being” is to accept multiplicity. 3
Kara Keeling in their book The witch’s flight write that:
A cliché can be understood as a common memory-image directed onto a
perception prepared according to a common sensory-motor schemata. A cliché
is a type of common sense that enables motor movement to occur.
Common sense, in my usage of the term, refers simultaneously to a shared set
of motor contrivances that affect subjective perception and to a collective set of
memory-images that includes experiences, knowledges, traditions, and so on
and that area available to memory during perception. 4
What uncountable miles and inches of wiggle room constitute a common
provision—a commons’ provisions? What images fill it? Evade it? Constitute it?
How much scant makes it? How many evasions? How much of its warmth is
made from a wiggle that commons, a commoning wiggle?
at Kunsthalle Bern
until December 3, 2023