Grapefruit: A Sensorial Archive of the Imperceptible

The fabric of becoming is woven of the imperceptible traces of past events, things and beings. Our perception of the world is the product of previous marks and memories, our own, and those of other creatures, people and elements. The imperceptible environmental, material and social writing constitutes perception pre-perceptually. Just as the eye can’t see itself by itself, perception can’t perceive itself at a pre-perceptual level. But that doesn’t mean that the writing ever stops. Nothing that has ever existed can be completely erased. Everything is always present even if only to an infinitesimally small degree; it is present by being absent.
This talk illuminates the sedimentation of present absences. Focusing on a selection of Yoko Ono’s early instructions (Grapefruit 1964), it develops an archeology of the world’s spatial and temporal layers with the aid of three notions: Kitaro Nishida’s paradoxical theory of time as the continuity of discontinuity: Shigenori Nagatomo’s notion of intercorporeal attunement; and Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the ‘crystalline image’.