For Example / For Eksempel
Tim Flohr Sørensen’s Insignificants installation for March is For example / For Eksempel. The material for the exhibition is a constellation: a stone, a broken-off hammerhead, a piece of burnt cotton, and a traceless stowaway.
The items refer to classic examples of examples: Martin Heidegger’s hammer, exemplifying the difference between Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit; Tim Ingold’s stone, exemplifying the usefulness of the term “materials” over “materiality”; Graham Harman’s fire-burning-cotton, exemplifying how objects interact without knowing the full range of each other’s properties; Eelco Runia’s stowaway, exemplifying how aspects of history go unnoticed, then suddenly emerging as a form of presence.
What I try to work with in the exhibition is the idea that the actual thing used to illustrate the point in each of the examples becomes entirely insignificant, because it is used only to point to something outside itself.
Heidegger could have used a bicycle instead of a hammer as his example, and it would not have changed a thing.
Ingold’s stone is entirely generic, but what if he had picked up a particular stone, say a diamond from a wedding ring?
Harman does not seem to have deduced his object lesson by experimenting with setting cotton ablaze himself, because he would then have noticed that what fire does, when the flames start dying out, is to crawl across the surface of the burnt cotton as embers looking like tiny caterpillars, exploring or caressing the charred surface.
And Runia doesn’t seem to take into account that the successful stowaway does not emerge as a form of presence; she disappears without a trace. Hence, I couldn’t place a stowaway in the exhibition, and you’ll have to conjure that one up yourselves – I recommend a method called “speculative fabulations”.
As for previous installations of Insignificants, Tim created bookmarks, images of which are included below. Reproduced here is the bookmark text.
the example is characterized by the fact that it holds
for all cases of the same type, and, at the
same time, it is included among these.
(Giorgio Agamben)
A hammer - Martin Heidegger
A stone - Tim Ingold
A stowaway - Eelco Runia
Fire burning cotton - Graham Harman
I had never seen fire burning cotton. Occasionally, I had read about it, each time perplexed about the abstract character of this image: fire burning cotton. Why does the author not write about the heat of the fire? Or about the softness of the cotton? How exactly does fire burn cotton?
Allegedly, objects interact without exhausting one another. Fire burning cotton, the author tells us, is an example thereof. Thus, fire burns cotton stupidly.
Have you ever seen fire burning cotton? Well, I hadn’t, so one day I decided to set a piece of cotton ablaze. Whether the fire burnt the cotton stupidly, I don’t know, but it surely burnt beautifully.
To see other installations from Insignificants, follow these links:
For more information about Tim and his work, check out these links: