Artefacts, texts, interventions, actions, seminars, lectures, notes, posters, publications, webworks, propositions. Contact us at hub at nanostate dot org
1. Independent artworks
2. A multiplicity of artefacts for the archive - ie displayed on a set of shelves
(moveable - on wheels literally)
3. Actions, speeches, performances
4. The snooker table (inventive / re-inventive game-play)
5. Catalogue / librarian-ship (principally via snooker play)
The site:
A private snooker and social club, avowedly 'non-political', built in the 1930s,
and by benefaction, now with no more than 40 members, two beautiful snooker
tables (one with heating), a sprung dance floor, bar, dark leather armchairs,
on Finchley Road 4 minutes north (by foot) from Golders Green underground station,
located centrally within the proposed local 'eruv', converted (temporarily)
into a glass factory during WW2, a furnished space (not white, not bare, not,
certainly not decontextualised)...
A I don't think we need be inhibited by worries about whether the Nanostate Reading Room is "in" the Nanostate itself. The fact that the Nanostate is only "here" for an instant before "moving on" will save us the difficulties a New Guinean tribesman for example would have had in coming to terms with being informed one day that he was "in" Indonesia, or one's continual confusion in being aware that "one" is in England while forgetting that the predicated location (England) is a notional (non-physical) space presupposing an abstract subject ("one"), and that such a predication is not at all the same thing as the physical containment meant in saying for example that one is in one's bath.
B A reading room is not the same as a library. Libraries are nouns, reading rooms are verbs, processes rather than objects. Reading rooms are places where work is done - on texts, not just books. Readers process information but information processes readers, an "invasion of Body Snatchers". Is the reader reading the Daily Mail for example copied or written by it? Is s/he the same reader when reading the Koran? As public places, reading rooms have civic purposes, "to promote enlightened citizenship and enrich personal life", in the view of the American Library Association. What is the Nanostate's civic purpose and what conceivable enrichment of personal life might it instigate? These are questions the Reading Room might explore, as well as the gulf separating man and citizen that concerned Rousseau.
C In a recent paper "Virtual places. Imagined Boundaries and Hyper-reality in Southeastern Europe", Aleksandar Boskovic notes the arbitrariness involved in constructing ethnic or cultural boundaries, but also that "even something that does not exist 'in reality' can produce very serious and real consequences". The Nanostate takes this as a completely general principle, as in the geometric Mercatorian grids which "squared off empty seas and unexplored regions in measured boxes", preparatory to war, conquest and colonization. These of course are not the purposes of the Nanostate, and its space-time contour(s), while using these ("unreal") grids, radically subvert(s) the stability normally required of boundaries as instruments of domination. It does nevertheless agree with Boskovic in stressing a "contractual" reality with material consequences. A reader entering the Reading Room might well ask for maps of the Nanostate or indicating its whereabouts. Some already exist.
D The Reading Room will no doubt contain objects, newly made or already there, which for the purposes of the project will probably be seen as texts to be read. Because of the way the Nanostate is in time, recurring but having no duration, there are no objects which belong to it in the ordinary sense. This doesn't mean however that the Nanostate doesn't have a very serious relationship with objects. In fact the only kinds of relationships to objects not inscribable within it are the fictional, administrative ones of possession, belonging and material permanence. There is no particular difficulty in taking the rest - the instant of conceiving an object, the movement of its making, shifts in the seeing of it - as being "in" the Nanostate.
E An odd thing happened to me in the (British Library) reading room recently. Looking in the Oxford English Dictionary for a word beginning with Z, my eyes and mind, as happens, began to wander - ZENO (the philosopher of the paradoxes of the instant), ZETA (potential difference at the interface of solid and liquid), ZAP, ZAPATA (hero of a new state), ZEEMAN splitting (of a spectral line), ZEMLYA (Russian for the Earth), ZEN, ZIGZAG AND ZILLION, ZINGARO (a gypsy wanderer), ZEUGMA (a word in a sentence bifurcating meaning), ZOOPHYTE (plants with animal characteristics), ZODIAC and ZONE, ZOLLVEREIN (a union of states), ZERO - a non-existent necessity. I was seized not by a bout of etymological mysticism, but by a kind of pleasure at finding so compact a figure of the hints and clues and creatures strewn through the world bespeaking its flux, paradoxes, splits, shifts, transforms and elisions. I imagined the Nanostate reading room might have need of glosses, glossaries and syntactical manuals thereof, sympathetic correspondances to its own being.
F I promised to show you a map you say but this is a mural/then yes let it be these are small distinctions/where do we see it from is the question
Here is a map of our country:/here is the sea of Indifference, glazed with salt /This is the haunted river flowing from brow to groin...
Catch if you can your country's moment, begin where any calendar's ripped off...catch if you can this unbound land/these states without a cause...
you are taking parts of us into places never planned/you are
going far away with pieces of our lives.....
from Adrienne Rich: "An Atlas of the Difficult World. poems 1988-1991"
G A quote from Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations":
"Of course there is such a thing as seeing in this way or that ...For example
if you see the schematic drawing of a cube as a plane figure consisting of a
square and two rhombi you will, perhaps, carry out the order 'Bring me something
like this' differently from someone who sees the picture three dimensionally."
The shift involved in seeing something as something different from what it was
just now seen as, isn't something peculiar that happens only in either a treatise,
or in the Nanostate - it probably goes on all the time, but often utilitarian
considerations lead to its being disregarded. Maybe the Nanostate Reading Room
will draw attention to it.
H Cartographic conventions graphically depict the fact that nations and states have a relation of symbiosis with each other - they occupy different (but related) spaces at the same time. The Nanostate's relation to every other sovereign political entity is one of metabiosis - occupying the same space at different times. This is not the "low frequency" oscillations of the time scale of the political (often future) history of nations, but an ultra-high frequency of "visitation" of other territories, perpetually re-enacting the kind of instant when for example the Russian Federation "visited" the USSR, New Orleans Nouvelle Orléans, or New Zealand Nieuw Zeeland. It may be that the Nanostate may wish to make representations regarding the use of its territory by big logging operators in Brazil or Indonesia, or to certain clauses of the North American Free Trade Agreement, at times when these territories coincide with the Nanostate, issues which readers may well wish to be informed on. (acknowledgements to V Khlebnikov for "symbiosis" etc)
I The reading room experience strikes one by its grafting of the global onto the here and now. Texts are read, whose subjects may be utterly remote from the local hereabouts of its site - they may be about other localities and places, or about the most abstract spaces of music, macroeconomics or genetics. The Nanostate Reading Room may effect a real, rather than an imaginary or dreamt fusion between what is remote and what is here, since both inhabit the same domain. Some current preoccupations of cultural theory regarding theorized hiatuses between place and space, panopticon and carnival - between Benedict Anderson's "cloisonné" world of non-communicating, sealed-off localities and the "global babble" of instantly traversable world space, undergoing randomizing homogenization, are dissolved, conceptually at least. But reading needs practising.