4.11.25, Tuesday
“Penance of the Gaze: Rineke Dijkstra and the Elitist Sin”
The square opens with four corners: Disaster, Desert, Desire, Ruin – a geometry of our time, where creation proceeds through undoing.
Disaster, taught by Blanchot, names the instant when form fails, when every structure is shattered by its own excess. It is not calamity but revelation: that the work, if it is to live, must remain incomplete. The disaster teaches humility – the lesson that meaning survives only as fragment, that art begins again in the wake of its own impossibility. Where what endures and what is lost, presence and absence, have exchanged their roles.
Desert, taught by Jabès, follows as the field cleared by silence. It is the white page after the explosion, the horizon where the word must relearn how to speak. The desert invites us to unlearn possession. It strips, erases, burns away, so that what remains may finally receive. It teaches attention as a form of hospitality.
Desire, taught by the Ruined Subject, is the breath that returns once transcendence has failed. It is not conquest but care – the longing that moves from one remnant to another, binding what has fallen apart. Desire repairs the world through tenderness, not design. It is the erotic within the mundane, the pulse of the in-distinct.
Ruin is the flower that gathers the lessons. It is the site of insemination, where the sterile ideal becomes fertile through collapse. The ruin does not preserve; it produces. Its beauty lies in porosity, in its willingness to be entered by wind, light, and dust. It is the modern condition at peace with its own incompletion – the architecture of continuation.
***
Into this square enters Rineke Dijkstra. Her work is the confession of modernism after its exile: the camera once built for mastery now kneels before the ordinary. Her portraits transform precision into repentance. Every photograph wrestles with the sin of clarity – the elitist inheritance of the museum – and tries to atone through attention. The sterile light becomes the instrument of humility; the subject, carefully chosen, carries the texture that rescues the gaze from death. Sand, skin, fabric, fatigue – all speak against the mortifying perfection of the frame.
In Dijkstra, modernism performs its penance. It confronts its own disaster, walks into the desert of the image, rediscovers desire in the fragile stance of the body, and finds renewal in the ruin of its objectivity. Her light is chastened yet alive: a field where the ruin blooms again, and where art, having confessed its pride, learns once more to love the world.
Almerisa,
Wormer, The Netherlands, 23. June 1996
flipped
flipped
2.11.25, Sunday
Note to Mike:
(...) You know where this takes place, right? What we’re building towards? It’s Roadside Picnic. But not the event. Not even the Zone. It’s the bar they start in. It’s the mop bucket. The off-screen operator. We are staging a cut-out scene from Stalker. A deleted fragment from the bar – quiet, residual, unaccounted for. We bring it back as atmosphere. It’s the last, domestic moment of Stalker – but without climax. Just curtains. Let’s not be thematic, after all the struggle, right? It’s the cleaning lady of the numb thematic Muß.
(...)
That mythical scene.
There are persistent whispers about a “cleaning lady in the bar” in Stalker — a fragment that never made it into the final cut, though it may have existed as a sketch in Tarkovsky’s notes or early drafts.
It fits almost too perfectly into the film’s grammar: a figure of maintenance and humility entering the liminal, pre-Zone world of the bar — the place of transition, of weary men waiting for transcendence. Her gesture — sweeping, wiping, tidying what is perpetually unclean — would have punctured the masculine, metaphysical heroics with a quiet, devotional act.
Symbolically, she’s the anti-Stalker and the true Stalker at once:
– The anti-Stalker because she cleans, she remains, she doesn’t cross the threshold.
– The true Stalker because she tends to the residue of the sacred, to what’s left behind.
If that scene ever existed, its deletion is consistent with Tarkovsky’s intuition: the feminine, the humble, the cyclical work of care had to remain absent-yet-felt, spectral — much like the wife’s unseen labour, or the traces of water, rags, and debris throughout the film.
In that sense, the “cleaning lady” still haunts the film, invisibly.
She’s what keeps the Zone reachable.
1.11.25, Saturday
Berlin Art Institute, Block 11.
The Ruin Reading Group has solidified into a blueprint: for an institutional artwork.
Before we attempt a workshop, with participants reading closely a selected fragment, we consider other possible meanings of the notion “group” – one that stems directly from our curatorial practice. It prompted us to craft a shrine, its founding installation. “A Group”, precisely.
Things emerge. Half plan, half ruin – but we are moving on.
Aggregate:
A constellation of elements – works, gestures, presences – perceived as a whole only through proximity. Its unity is not structural but atmospheric; it binds without hierarchy. The aggregate includes artefacts, activities, and temporal residues. It cannot be fully totalized; every focus yields a different configuration.
Group:
A pronounced plurality within the aggregate. It emerges where relation becomes palpable – when distinct whispers echo one another. The group is dynamic, local, and transient; it forms through attention and disperses through time.
Difference:
The aggregate gathers; the group articulates.
The aggregate is a field; the group, a pulse within it.
One holds the continuity of matter, the other, the rhythm of encounter.
“Kantor”, a ceramic slate.
Emballaged.
The translucent wrapping is
an act of care and occlusion at once. It protects what remains fragile, slows the gaze, and lets the ruin breathe through daylight.