An invitation calls for more invitations.¹ Lantian Xie’s Heavy Rotation Infra-habibi-technics is an exhibition set that draws on a collisional and discordant world using interrelational tactics and techniques. A constellation of relations is made in varying scales,² some easily discernible while others remain opaque until you look closely at how the world spins. No material is possible without a dizzying set of connections. Every object shows a chain of links to politics, policy, architecture, class, deep time, sauces, sources, and more.

Heavy Rotation Infra-habibi-technics draws on the following concepts:

Heavy Rotation – Frequency, volume, churn, hurtle, circulate. If you have 3 pairs of shoes but you only really really wear 2, those 2 pair are in heavy rotation. If a song gets a lot of play or a lot of push, that’s heavy rotation. When you sing so good you can sing a phone book, that’s a heavy rotation. When traffic jams a choke point, that’s heavy rotation. When life makes ways from no way, that’s heavy rotation. When a world gets jammed broadside into a canton, that’s heavy rotation. When a planet spins 100kmph on its axis and runs a 100kmph orbit at the same time, that’s heavy rotation. When Chadaians realized their Toyotas wouldn’t trip Gaddafi’s land mines if they drove over 100kmph, that’s heavy rotation.

Extempo – Extemporaneous as in off-the-top, out of nowhere, out of time, spontaneous animation, freestyle, improvised thought-act-address—life as extempo, life practice as team-sport group improv, extempo infrastructure as a milieu for discourse that de-plans like in the lanes and on the roads between dogs and dogs and dogs and autos and cars and horns and lorries and bikes and cows and gods.

Legato – Jazz piano player Barry Harris said that once you hit a sound on a piano, it dies. Piano is a staccato instrument and the calling of the player is to turn the staccato into legato by finding the sound and rolling around in it. Take institution as that; a staccato instrument, and this as a legato.

Omnihabitus – From Ornette Coleman’s formulation on holding not through proprietorship in the classical modeling but instead holding and being held through carriage—vehicular-like, to be held in being carried, to get carried away as being held by life. Think habitus this way, as a lively, windy disposition. It is a post-asset imagination of habitus registered crucially not at “all” but at “every”.

Brawl Cloud – in cartoons, comics, illustration, illusionistic representation, a brawl cloud is a device often rendered as a cloud of autogenerated smoke that renders a ruckus often replete with fists, shoes, weapons, strays, passersby caught up in its gravity, sometimes spinning out of the cloud before getting yanked back in. The cloud sometimes starts roaming around, sometimes dissipating as a reveal-gag towards an unexpected mutation of whatever was discrete prior to entry.

Traffic – Jam, yes, sure, but more density of discordant colliding churning flowing kino-dynamics. A trafficino as a small time slinger bootlegger side-eye-glancer. A realm of things not quite objects, items not quite indexed in the manifest, sliding slightly ill-fitting along integer horizons. Also, massive heavy contractions and surges along planetary logistics pipelines, shipping lanes, undersea fiber-optics cables, satellite arrays, cows flown to Turkey so milk production can circumvent EU sanctions, handshake deals, revenge tourism, VFS, single entry, double entry, Rolex registered as a non-profit.

Infra-habibi-technics – Call the number I gave you and tell them I sent you. They’ll get you on the list and put you in touch with the place I was telling you about. Then they’ll send you a confirmation on your phone and tell you to wait but don’t wait, just go there directly as soon as you get the confirmation. Go in the afternoon. Take a token but don’t wait in line. Ask for the person I was telling you about.

¹ Lantian Xie extends invitations to exhibit his work to a set of relations that can be found in music bands, film, photographic, and theatre sets, ecosystems, and more. The intellectual pull that an exhibition draws from is oftentimes invisible. This exhibition shifts that invisibilised network into focus and uses it as a technic. My initial invitation to Lantian thus extended into an invitation to the following protagonists: Aarushi Surana, İpek Hamzaoğlu, Kaushal Sapre, Aasma Tulika, Alla Semenovskaya, Sabih Ahmed, Laura Nitsch, Ornaghi & Prestinari, FRAME and Nanni. The invitation then returned to Kunsthalle Bern, asking us to think and produce with this relational frame in mind.

² In the documentary film Un Monde en Relation (One World In Relation, 2010) by Manthia Diawara, Édouard Glissant describes a complex web of relations that also includes the opaqueness of life, which formed the basis of his work.

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