Punctum.

By: Mieke Bal

ABSTRACT

Both the semiosphere we live in and the curating we practice are constantly changing. Hence, the meanings thesepractices produce are unstable. In this essay, I attempt to join semiotics, the theory of signs and sign use for communication, with its ‘sphere,’ and curatorial practice, as a mode of making art active, inter-active; to make it work. In my latest book, currently in press, I argue, through invoking life experiences of the most diverse kind, that the tools of meaning-making are not simply a solid knowledge of the language. They involve listening, dialogue, the temporal aspect of looking back, and the creativity of imagining other possibilities. Meaning happens in encounters. The practice of curating is a key one of those. And so is, to bring in my own practice, filmmaking. The primary one of the encounters that curation produces is the first- and second-person exchange between viewers/participants and the work of art (rather than artworks as things). Semiotics is the theoretical field where this is recognized and theorized so that it becomes possible to analyze meaning-making without dictionary-like simplicity and rigor, and without eliminating subjectivity, which is neither void nor all-encompassing. The second part of the concept of semiosphere comes from an awareness of the spacetime-specificity of meaning-making. This is what semiotics and curating also have in common. Ambiguity is crucial to meaning-making, and specific semiospheres can become prominent as the meanings shift and multiply. To understand, negotiate, and deploy meanings in the European semiosphere, alertness to ambiguity as productive is of crucial importance. In this essay, I go through several of my works in which filmmaking and curating have joint forces. The key
term that connects them is the ‘essay’ in Adorno’s sense.

 
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