UNDECIDABILITY | World for the Future

Curator Silvia Bottiroli proposes Undecidability (a word taken from Italo Calvino) as a strategy that is capable of producing different conditions of visibility. A quality specific to artworks with which different real and imagined worlds meet yet remain intact. Spectators gazes are composed into a multiplicity of horizons; a radical collectivity based on confliction positions. The artistic response is the ‘doubting chair’, a story made up from text and image documentary material from a project by scenographer Jozef Wouters: “When you say the word Undecidability I see someone who is standing still. Someone standing next to something in doubt. It seems to be a choice. An ability; an ability to linger, to remain undecidable.”

Words for the Future is a many-voiced series of ten words that point to the possible imaginations of various futures. Ten people from diverse fields of knowledge were asked to propose a word for the future through an essay, while an artist in whose work this particular world seemed to already be latently present, was invited to respond to it. Bringing both perspectives together in one publications, each issue becomes a dialogue around one word.

UNDECIDABILITY is issue #6 in the series Words for the Future, curated and edited by dramaturg Nienke Scholts. (The full series (limited edition) is available through San Serriffe aswell.)