Currently, I am in bed, reworking my thoughts on a conference, making notes for part of a talk I will be giving some time in the near future. The Global Adhesive and Sealant Conference takes place every four years alternating between Europe, the USA and Asia. The attempt to summon my memory, that is, only part of an interpretation, a slippery, contingent, mental space under construction, collides with the prior event of the conference which in turn confronts the white rectangle of a new “Pages” document I am yet to fill. This rectangle appears to emerge as another designation of time elapsed. Is this where the past meets the prior in the present tense?

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I notice two internet tabs open in Safari, the first: an article on a software program aimed at lazy writers, that would poke you into productivity by monitoring stretches of inaction and when such a stretch grew to the length you preselected, would start to delete words you had written prior to fixing the setting. The second: an image of the artwork ‘Monochrome Till Receipt (white)’ by Ceal Floyer. The work is in fact, a yellowish-white till receipt listing in purple ink several white items the artist had purchased from a German supermarket: milk, cotton wool balls, sea salt etc. I think about how it confronts its own redundancy and the fundamental question of emptiness in Lacan. I picture five, yellowish-white, plastic squares depicting letters from the game of Scrabble: “L” “A” “C” “A” “N”, joined in a somewhat circle producing a void in the shape of a pentagon.

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Adhesives, I realise, stick both to which and to what. The anaerobic adhesive rapidly polymerises in the presence of oxygen and consists of a liquid formation whereby a single drop freezes to still life in a matter of seconds. Anaerobic adhesives however do not bond well to plastic.

Looking at the receipt, I perceive a slight curl of a corner that’s pulling away, yet stuck in the photograph, that’s sticking on the internet in the screen of my laptop sitting amongst the folds of my coincidentally, white bedsheets. Also lying there is a discarded ball of tangled sellotape, touching dust that’s settled from the air around. Romantically, the image of Piero Manzoni’s ‘Socle du Monde’ comes to mind: a sculpture taking the form of a plinth, which he turned upside down causing it to hold up the entire world.

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Recalling why the sellotape is there, I look across the room over to the two taxidermy magpies: one, head bent down looks in sly at the other, whilst the other looks directly back at me. Their legs are fixed to a copper pole with garden wire, after unsuccessfully finding the adhesive of sellotape not strong enough to hold them in place. Sometimes, they are part of my installation “Con” and are named after the two voices of the ancients: “Enarthos” and “Sunkéchyméne”: the “articulated” and the “confused”. One fixes mimetic relations and the other, mimesis, undoes those relations in order to mobilise. I notice the light from my laptop reflecting in the mirror behind touching the sellotape. Enarthos swoops down landing gracefully on my bed, plucking at the sellotape, plucking at my conjuring memory of the conference. “Oh, Enarthos, take what you will, but please spit the words back out to me. Permit me to steal from you for once”. I sigh, “Is there a need to have a confusion which will be clarified along the way? Or should I work on, let’s say, an aesthetic productive type of confusion that produces dialogism?”

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As Enarthos flies back to the copper pole, the discarded ball of sellotape trapped firmly in his beak, the two magpies begin to perpetuate themselves, antagonising each other like characters from a Beckett play, creating a space, where, production, fits in. They examine notions of continual learning, teamwork, the flexibilisation of environments, contingency and agility in a fashion depicting an ongoing referral to a strange lexicon of cyphers. The foil of all this fuzziness and dematerialisation looks like an incredibly concrete and abstract object. A process without a subject and the subject of process. They work against each other, not set in a binary opposition as such, but fold into one another, like covalent bonding, and from experience, I sense, this has so much to do with sustaining deferral. The constant and absolute deferral of arriving to conclusion.

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Sunkéchméné snags at the wing of Enarthos who kneads his beak breaking the skin of Sunkéchméné’s neck, who in retaliation, gauges rapidly, burying his face into Enarthos’s chest, manically extracting strings, elastic ligaments, twist, tear, accelerating the frenzy, they chew, vigorously, and before I realise, I’m observing a mutual cannibalism, adhesive interlocking phenomena, their screeching existing at a frequency almost beyond human cognition. And once again I hear, the silent sound of compromise and witness, the consequence of ultra-violent semiology; the “articulated” and the “confused” mangled together dead on my bedroom floor. Their feathers slowly descend, finding themselves sticking to the discarded ball of tangled sellotape. I write.

The Global Adhesive and Sealant Conference