Hole is an ongoing project between Colleen Asper and Marika Kandelaki. Hole has been making holes since 2012. Hole is an impossible event, like all true events. What constitutes the Hole? A historical process of perverting the logic that marks it as lack. Hole exists everywhere where the political outplace is marked, as a proof of this contradiction. Hole is the errant subset included in all sets, to the count that claims the whole. Hole is not a sulky subject mourning the misplaced essence. Hole is a force that acts against the imposed essence that is foreclosure under the phallic name. We have united under the identity of Hole: the contradiction to the wholeness, the perversion of the phallic totality. Now we would like you to abandon and destroy the phallic measuring stick, so that we can end the eternal circulation under patriarchal law.
The subject that is excluded from the dominant order is limited to two “choices” with regard to existence: to affirm the structure and learn to enjoy one’s symbolic death, or to deny it via a prolonged and definite path to madness. The first is the choice of the independent woman who assumes a phallic position against which her lack will always appear as lacking—her only recourse is to outsource her lack onto other “others”. The second is the mystic who mourns a structure that ignores its own limit, in protest she will perform her position of lack until she is destroyed. “Revolt” in both of these cases becomes a personal experience, without the socio-structural destruction needed for class transfiguration—destruction or affirmation becoming nothing but an individual journey, a private affair. If we accept the structure all that remains is a set of representations of our exile from the scene of the political, while the aesthetics of failure can only result in reproducing the actual material impotence of the othered subject.
Hole refuses this binary. We believe resistance only takes place when the hysteric starts to speak not to the master, but to herselves—to the many in and of herself, melting the boundaries of the body as marked by the structure. The independent woman and the mystic are subjects twice split—divided between the hole and the whole, and between themselves and each other. Hole asks what happens when split subjects come together to divide the whole they maintain through their exclusion.
In keeping with this split, there are two parts to Hole: Hole ABC’s and Hole 123’s. Hole 123’s are performances that focus on structural conditions of the hole, Hole ABC’s focus on historical conditions and are centered around a dictionary of synonyms for the hole, with each entry accompanied by a text and an image. The texts are stories, poems, letters, and plays that narrate each synonym, while the images picture each letter of the alphabet in photographs made with our bodies and props. The dictionary is a way to take the language we have been given and speak it against itself and to each other; the performances are a way to play the split subject out and beyond her space of placement.
There is nowhere to flee. Lack qua Hole must become a destruction. The nothing will remain.
HOLE 