(wood, metal, Japanese paper)
Fragile Indestructibility was a site-specific installation exhibited as a part of ‘Moment 22’ group show at Köttinspektionen in Uppsala 19/02/2022 – 6/3/2022.
Fragile Indestructibility is about a virtue of temporality, it’s about randomness and contradiction, about creation and failure simultaneously…
Fragile Indestructibility is a site-specific installation, focused on the phenomenon of paradox and space failure. The form of the installation is inspired by a bridge. The bridge symbolises transition, stability and connection but also a great height which ensures lethality. In this specific context it has been built demolished and positioned in such a way that it no longer functions as a passage. Its black wooden skeleton is randomly, but with purpose, positioned and screwed together, crashed and pushed towards the wall where it cannot be a symbol of transition but simply an obstacle.
The core of the artistic investigation is inspired by Buridan’s Bridge (also known as Sophism 17) a theoretical self-referential paradox that involves a proposition pronounced about an event that might or might not happen in the future:
“Socrates wants to cross a river and comes to a bridge guarded by Plato. The two speak as follows:
Plato: ‘Socrates, if in the first proposition which you utter, you speak the truth, I will permit you to cross. But surely, if you speak falsely, I shall throw you into the water.’
Socrates: ‘You will throw me into the water.’
Response of Socrates puts Plato in a difficult situation. He could not throw Socrates into the water, because if he did, he would violate his promise to let Socrates cross the bridge if he spoke the truth. On the other hand, if Plato allows Socrates to cross the bridge it would mean that Socrates spoke untruth when he replied: ‘You are going to throw me into the water.’ In that case Socrates should have been thrown into the water. In other words, Socrates could be allowed to cross the bridge if and only if he could not be.”*
*Dale Jacquette (1991). “Buridan’s Bridge”. Philosophy. 66 (258): 455–471. doi:10.1017/s0031819100065116
Eliska Kovacikova 