A Wabi-sabi Guide

Posted March 30, 2024 by Maja Kuzmanović, Nik Gaffney, Justin Pickard, and Theun Karelse

Introduction to FoAM's edited reader and guide to the wabi-sabi route, which dwells with the transient, incomplete, and unnoticed.

This route allows you to wander and observe. Watching, abiding, it’s a chance to defer the temptation to intervene, and let things unfold. An invitation to seek out places of enchantment and seclusion, it can support reflection on transitions, liminality, and the often neglected art of bringing things to an end.

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The Exquisite & The Liminal. 侘び寂び moods & textures, where matter records its own weathering. Worlds abide in the humble and mundane, with hints of becoming otherwise.

Stillness. Stills from a world in motion. Seeking out that which hides in shadows, flickers in refractions.

Where the Fireflies Glowed and Flickered. Behind the Big Wooden Buddha Temple in a Summer Long Ago, and Other Lights in Other Years Blinked in the Liquid Darkness.

In Shadow. A visual essay with selected quotes from Jun'ichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows.

Warping Time Frames. Arrows and circles, warps and whorls; instances of movement from linear time to something else.

Times Like These. Spotlighting alternative temporal orders, where gridded time loosens or breaks; spaces and situations beyond the reach of the clock.

The Dance of Not-Knowing. Cultivating beginner’s mind in a thickening present.

Fallowing. A regenerative practice benefiting fields, bodies and networks.

Lying Flat. Tangpingism, a movement encouraging its proponents to lay flat.

Planning with the Seasons. An experiment in de-homogenising working time.

Traversing Transitions. Navigating the liminal and the in-between.

Timelesness. An impressionistic collage on timelessness, time unbinding, and the experience of being outside time.

We find ourselves beyond the reach of the clock, spiralling through seasons, contorting our comportment to attune to the path’s dense polyrhythms. Though it may feel like we’re going nowhere, doing nothing, the path deepens, thickens, like a fallow field teeming with life. With no destination in sight, we turn 90 degrees, falling to the floor sinking deeper into the transition, finding space to rest outside of time.

Standing at the threshold, we are stirred by the slightest movements. Arrows and circles, warps and whorls, steering us from linear time toward something else. The movement carries us forward , gracefully stumbling, dancing with the unknown. We are on the path now, wandering, not moving forward. The path’s temporal order disorients our attempts to make progress, as the hold of regular, grid-like time loosens and frays.

Crafts of Noticing. Immersive, multisensory practices for being-in-the-world

The House is Haunted by Itself. Moving, Still. A call to partake in the radical act of noticing.

Seeing Just as It Is. Meditating on a noisy, impermanent world.

Upon Arrival. Practices for landing, lingering, and leaving.

Performing the Unknown. Human skins moved by the myriad skins of the Earth.

A Spectral Ocular. Making an instrument to colour the world anew.

Walk with me. You must exchange your feet with your hands.

Dwelling on Rocks. Geomantic sensing and sensemaking. Sifting through the noise of our mineral substrate.

Monster Code. Encoding millennia of human and elephant evolution in Amsterdam West.

Becoming Birdlike. Birdsong as a creative resource, enriching humans’ musical ideas and listening capabilities.

Vernacular Magic. Words become amulets. We chant and become enchanted.

Figments of Affordable Mysticism. Accessible occult technologies and other instruments of everyday resistance.

Re-enchanting the Present. Animating non-modern sensibilities of magic and ritual. From static matter to a space of operation. ∆[∆]]

A World Replete. The bubble as double agent, a symbol of existential uncertainty and a trope of playfulness.

Approaching the Inexplicable. Eyes in the place of eyes, ears in the place of ears, tongues tasting chemical gradients across a fungal network of thread-like cells.

Hexecutable # query sibylline. Through iterative generative processes, visions from three of antiquity’s sibyls; Persia, Libica, and Delphica.

Spell Kit For Navigating Uncertainty. A set of navigational instruments to accompany spellwork.

Portals. Crossing thresholds with the care they deserve.

Panpsychist Propositions. Or "How the terms ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ are abstractions which in their concreteness are identical."

Weatherlore. With our ears to the ground, following stories and sayings about the weather.

Otherworlds Oozing. Glimpses of the mythical amidst the mundane.

Mycelial voices condense into three sybils of old, their eerie utterances emanating from shuffled book-slivers. They urge us to delve deeper, to lose and find ourselves in the maelstrom of uncertainty, navigating with thread, needle, compass, artificial horizon.

We cross thresholds with care, skirting the peripheries of the sensible, this unquiet matter. Ears to the ground, guided by weatherlore, we catch glimpses of the mythical amidst the mundane.

Surrounded by occult technologies, magic and ritual, we are transformed from static matter into a space of operation, a bubble-world. The bubble, a double agent, a symbol of existential uncertainty and a trope of playfulness. When the bubble bursts it disperses, leaving fungal patterns, fairy-ringed; echoing through the chatter and crackles of the radio spectrum.

Convivia & Refugia. Making places for connection, imagination and transformation.

Cornerstone of the Outer Monastery. A manifesto, a pattern language, generative guidelines for a network to come.

Isolation Training. Locked down, cast out, alone and together, together and alone.

Art of Something Larger. Museums, galleries, theatres and other arts organisations as refuges amidst cultural dissonance and social upheaval.

Ties, Bonds, Grips. Things to cling to.

Being with. To care, to cure, to comfort, without intervening; helping cope, regardless of the situation.

To care, with care, for care. To care for someone is to allow yourself to be touched.

Making Dis-ease Matter. Transforming the pain and discomfort of chemotherapy into a Tibetan singing bowl.

Rituales para mi corazón. Rituals for my heart

Beyond the Spoken. Notes from a year in transience. A letter to desire.

Repair! Restoring and revitalising damaged objects, systems, structures.

Death and Gardening. The individual disintegrating into the many.

Conscious Closure. How to intentionally dissolve a studio.

Walking this route, we are called to care, to cure, to comfort. Practices that help us to cope, regardless of the situation. We allow ourselves to be touched, to be vulnerable, open to impermanence, illness, and pain. We notice that pain, like sound, isn’t continuous, that there is silence and peace beneath. We find solace in the tendrils of kinship and friendship that cradle our failing bodies. Our burnt-out minds long to rethink the world, finding ways to mark our unacknowledged loss.

We work to repair, restore, revitalise, coaxing damaged parts, systems, and structures back to life. And yet, some things, beings, situations remain beyond repair. We confront death in the thick of life, the individual disintegrating into the many. Whether natural or legal persons, kingdoms, cultures, ages, aeons, we feel the end is near. Rather than resisting, we choose tocelebrate the conclusions. A closed life cycle. A release.

Final Grumblings. The inevitable fade out.

Created: 29 Mar 2024 / Updated: 01 Apr 2024

A Wabi-sabi Guide

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