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The Durational Refusal—Seven Years...
This article covers the networked seven-year participatory installations across multiple cities. For specific instantiations, see The Durational Refusal—Seven Years of Buenos Aires Flesh, The Durational Refusal—Seven Years of Leather Witness.
Related durational works: The Caught Descent—A Devotional Installation in Broken Hill, NSW, The Unspoken Stations — A Durational Nocturnal LARP of Bearing Witness.
The Durational Refusal is a series of interconnected seven-year participatory installations and ritual gatherings centered on The Doctrine of Refusal and the impossibility of completion. Rather than attempt to resolve the glitch, participants gather weekly or monthly in reclaimed spaces to practice living inside incompleteness as a form of sacred witness and care.
The Argentine instantiation (Buenos Aires, 2017–2024) took place across La Boca and San Telmo, inviting participants into a warehouse spiral where they walked the seven-year cycle without reaching destination or closure. Each year introduced new textual and sonic prompts: fragments of Smith's writing, Leif's twelve-word question spoken in unison then abandoned, recordings of overlapping voices naming unfinished works. Participants stitched leather panels in silence, adding to an ever-growing archive. [1]
Parallel seven-year cycles emerged in Accra (rooted in kente textile tradition), Nairobi (working with empty world meditation cartography), and Tbilisi (polyphonic singing cycles). Each adapted the refusal practice to local artistic and spiritual traditions while remaining bound to the cycle — the one-sided coin that Katita's armor embodies. The work was explicitly anti-completionist: its ethics demanded learning to dwell in the wound rather than close it.
See also
- The Doctrine of Refusal
- The Caught Descent—A Devotional Installation in Broken Hill, NSW
- Eternal recurrence / breaking the cycle
- The Covenant of Refusal—Apophatic Refusal and Sacred Incompleteness in Beach Surgery
- Empty World Meditations
References
- ↑ Curatorial closing notes, Centro Cultural San Martín, 2024.