After I moved to Austria, wherever I was, I found objects and manipulated their primary form in a way that would make them hard to recognize or at least alter their identity, by any means necessary. This was the new situation I found myself in: migrating to a new language. In the new symbolic order in which I now live, words lose their specific meaning to become pure form: unintelligible letters which have lost their semantic content.
So, everything that surrounded me took a different shape and became forms without meaning. This new experience reminded me of Bill Brown’s “Thing Theory” which is borrowed from Heidegger’s distinction between things and objects, which posits that an object becomes a thing when it can no longer serve its common function. When an object breaks down or is misused, it is not an object anymore and it appears itself as a thing. We see things when they don’t have the same function as before or there has been a disruption or flaw in their functionality or previous status. One can name an object, but one cannot name a thing. Things are to think about and a way to look more thoroughly at objects again.
