Presence Before Naming: Stateless Mind as Threshold Space
Grace Xu on flute
During the opening of my solo exhibition at Museo delle Mura, the Stateless Mind Pavilion was activated not as a structure, not as a signed section, and not as a program. It existed as a condition within the exhibition.
There was no signage.
No announcement.
No visible framework declaring its presence.
Musicians appeared in the space.
An augmented reality intervention surfaced quietly.
Video works coexisted within the environment.
The artists were not named in the moment. Their participation will be acknowledged later, through documentation and catalogue form.
This was not an oversight. It was a structural decision.
Presence Before Naming
In this activation, authorship was not erased — it was displaced in time.
Stateless Mind proposes a reversal of the usual exhibition order. In most institutional contexts, identification comes first: artist name, biography, category, medium. The encounter is filtered through information.
Here, the encounter preceded identification.
Sound, gesture, movement, and image entered the space before being classified. Viewers responded to what was happening rather than to who was performing. For a brief time, the usual art-world reflex — to locate, categorize, and situate — was suspended.
Recognition did not disappear. It shifted from the immediate space of experience into the slower space of the archive.
Presence came before the file.
A Threshold, Not a Stage
Stateless Mind does not operate as a stage or a platform in the conventional sense. It is a threshold space.
A threshold is neither inside nor outside. It is a zone of transition, uncertainty, and potential. It does not provide clear beginnings, defined stages, or explicit separations between performer and audience. Instead, it asks for attentiveness, responsiveness, and the willingness to inhabit a moment that may not declare itself.
For some artists, this condition is liberating. Improvisational practices, responsive modes of working, and artists attuned to situational awareness often find energy in such openness. The absence of rigid structure becomes a form of oxygen.
For others, the same openness can feel like instability. Practices that rely on preparation, compositional structure, acoustic planning, or psychological framing may experience the threshold as exposure rather than freedom.
Both responses are valid.
Difference in Temperament, Not Difference in Value
The varied reactions to the live activations did not reflect disagreement about quality or intention. They revealed differences in artistic temperament and working culture.
Some artists are comfortable entering a space without clear signals.
Others need a framework in order to operate at their best.
Stateless Mind does not eliminate these differences — it makes them visible.
If every artist feels equally comfortable, the structure is conventional. A space that genuinely departs from institutional norms will inevitably empower some while disorienting others. This tension is not a flaw but information about how different practices relate to uncertainty, recognition, and control.
Statelessness and the Time of Recognition
Stateless Mind engages not only with geography and identity but with time.
In many experiences of migration and statelessness, one exists before one is registered. Presence precedes documentation. Memory forms before records are made. Recognition comes late, sometimes much later.
By delaying authorship in the exhibition space and relocating it to the archive, the pavilion mirrors this temporal condition. The artists are not hidden; they are acknowledged through documentation, but not at the moment of encounter. The structure briefly prioritizes lived presence over institutional identification.
This is not a model for all situations. It is a specific gesture, tied to the ethics and inquiry of this project.
Curatorial Growth: Translation Without Control
This activation also clarified an important aspect of future work: the need to distinguish between conceptual explanation and practical preparation.
Understanding the philosophy of Stateless Mind does not automatically prepare an artist for its working conditions. Some need to know, in practical terms, that there may be no clear start signal, that performances may emerge without announcement, and that entry into the space may require self-initiation.
Providing this translation does not institutionalize the pavilion. It acknowledges difference without imposing hierarchy. The aim is not to standardize experience but to make space for varied artistic bodies to enter the threshold with awareness.
A Living Condition
Stateless Mind is not a fixed format. It is a living condition that shifts with context, site, and the people who inhabit it. Each activation reveals new aspects of how artists and audiences relate to uncertainty, relation, and shared space.
This recent activation made one thing clear:
Some artists move easily within thresholds.
Some need doors.
Neither position is more advanced. They are different ways of working, different ways of being in the world.
The task of Stateless Mind is not to remove the threshold, nor to construct permanent doors, but to learn how to hold both — allowing the space to remain open enough for encounter, friction, and growth, while continuing to refine how its conditions are shared and understood.
Dario Paini on sax
Ilyas Poulsen and Amir on kompang
Paini and Amir
Fadly Sabran's Echoes of the wall
Dalida Maria Benfield and Chris Bratton's Five excerpts. (video)