On the Work of The Oceanographies Institute
by Marcus Bergner
To introduce myself, for the last few months I joined The Oceanographies Institute as an outside ear and eye to provide suggestions about various activities in preparation for the performance in Ostende. But I find myself now extending this role as an outsider to becoming a kind of insider and participating guest in the performance. With the understanding that the basic obligation of any good guest is to pose the sort of questions and thoughts that fall outside the usual thinking habits of their hosts. Therefore, I'll provide a few mislaid anecdotes and observations about the journey getting here. Then later I'll perform some sound poetry and other literary pieces I've written for this event.
To confess, my natural inclination is always to avoid institutes and institutions per se. I associate them with unnecessary and sometimes suffocating levels of formality, hierarchical structure and rigidity. Fortunately, this is not the case with The Oceanographies Institute where things proceeded in a quite open and unpredictable and sometimes, chaotic way. All of which are factors and qualities that I find quite admirable and pleasurable to work with. At least this is my perspective, as I have a particular leaning in these areas. For instance, in the last week, I found myself daydreaming about a blue flashing neon sign that spelled out the name of the institute, and between the words "Oceanographies" and "Institute" appeared, in pinkish-red neon lettering, the word "anti", which was flashing just out of sync with the rest of the sign.
Thinking about how institutes might or might not function brought me to reread Robert Walser's totally special novel Jakob von Gunten, published in 1909. The book is set in the Benjamenta Instituite, a place of study for young people described through the journal entries of one of the students, Jakob von Gunten. Walser, in his writing, uses language in such innovative and abrupt ways, explaining how the institute functions through a range of strange theatrical and subliminal deviations or inventions exercised by everyone in the institute. Accordingly, institutional protocols infect and transform the behavior and personal mannerisms of everyone in the institute. Facial expressions, the slightest physical or verbal gestures, sleights of hand, incompressible vocal mumbling, or simply the way one opens a door become subversive acts, as well as standing orders for those attending the institute. For nothing can be learned here, other than everything institutional must eventually crumble away to make a place for a limitless horizon of poetic and ludic experience out in the real world. Near the end of Walser's book, the main character of Jakob exclaims: “I feel that life demands impulses, not considerations”.
From my outsider insider perspective here there seems ways to compare and connect Roberts Walser's Benjanenta Institute to the Oceanographies Institute. Connections that cast a useful light over the activities and phenomena presented in Ostende. For what is barely visible or barely audible becomes the best key and frame to accessing and even applying the kind of oceanic investigations or mindsets conjured up here today. Over the last weeks, I've witnessed Marielena, Elpida and Charlie rehearsing, researching, and converting individual sea stories or testimonials into actions and verbal arrangements. Grappling with what seemed like mysterious moments of psychic elasticity and wayward energy joined by necessary doses of doubt, the three of them were able to invent the finely errant behavior and observations which is the raw material for the work presented here in Ostende.
Speaking of which, the wooden benches and stools we are now perched upon were designed and made by the Institute members and are physical props for the kind of nomadic and tactile thinking patterns central to the health and agenda of this somewhat unfixed institute. Structurally flexible and quickly moveable, these wooden objects, and also tools, provide solid evidence of the institute's infrastructure and preoccupations. Furniture following thought and thereby becoming thought-furniture, no less.