Amanda, Ishani, Juan Camillo, Coman, Alvaro

The following is writing by Amanda Modell:

When and in what way do things appear as things? They do not appear by means of human making. But neither do they appear without the vigilance of mortals. The first step toward such vigilance is the step back from the thinking that merely represents – that is, explains – to the thinking that responds and recalls.”

— Martin Heidegger, “The Thing”

The container stands on its own, it is independent. And yet it stands on its own because it has been made. It has been called into being not as a representation but as a self-supporting vessel. Its making aims at self-support. The making opens the way for the container to do its containing, its taking and holding. If it is a void within the container that does the holding, then the maker shapes the void. The maker calls the void into being, a spaciousness that holds by displacing the void within it.

No one made the hills or the trees, the Ishani or Juan Camilo, just as no one makes clay. Yet a mortal assemblage called them into being as a container. The calling calls attention to their capacity. The calling calls capacity into being. Capacity to take and to hold is, in a sense, void. The calling vacates the container so it may hold.

The holding can be routine or ritual. The container is the meeting point of the two – profane and sacred. Also in the container the earth and the sky meet. So the container contains a fourfold meeting – the earth and sky, the ritual and the routine. These four come into a (semantic?) folding in a single time-space. The folding is a gathering, an opportunity to meditate or deliberate. The container brings the four into relation. In that relation a nearness happens, not a knowing or a representation. One does not need an image of the nearness to be nearing the four. If one tries to explain one of the four by way of another, that explaining strangles the four. The sky is not a sky in relation to the earth, it is a sky in relation with the earth. In relation one of the four does not know the three, but know of them. To be in relation is to be responsive and receptive, to take and to hold and to pour forth.