Already two hours of turbulence, and the only thing he’s thought about is drinking a cup of coffee. Take a seat, sir, the stewardess demands, with a voice so deep that rhymes with her heavy-custard lashes.

They’re flying over the Bermuda Triangle, and he thinks of being gobbled up by the sea, taken by extraterrestrials, seduced by paranormal activity. He concocts scenarios for these potential disappearances, but his more pressing craving, coffee, interrupts these attempts at narrative. If he would only be served a cup, he could be more concentrated.

The scene is of a modern orchestra in full performance, with an audience horrified by the uproar of its wind instruments. He can perceive the smell of vomit increasing. The drama. And now, aside from longing the aroma of fresh ground coffee, he yearns the scent of Brazilian Paprika… that perfume nestled in a miniature khaki-tweed bag packed in his carry-on, the fragrance he wears when he is in fact not in Brazil, a mnemonic device, Proustian madeleine, for his life there.

He only gets goose bumps when, at every jolt of the plane, his one aisle mate clings her nails on his arm; experiences dizziness by his other aisle-mate’s constant air tracing of the sign of the cross. Perhaps some coffee could induce in him a more appropriate level of anxiety, you know, to be more attuned to the spirit of the flight.

His calm body is sandwiched between these two nerve wrecks: one who’s probably never had a grip on life; the other who may have over-done it, confusing her religious ritual with air marshalling, wanting to guide something—this flight, the weather, their mortality—that she, that he, that all there, bound to seatbelts, wont ultimately get, at least this time around. Come on, one can’t even get a cup of coffee.

A ding-dong ring-tone marks survival. The aircraft has stabilized. The window shades are slowly lifted, and the light-blue hue of a clear sky illuminates the interior of the bird. Passengers slowly fall asleep from exhaustion, from their preceding edgy mood. There’s mostly silence, except for the stewards’ usher, their drink carts march. Coffee, sir? , she offers him. No, thank you, he replies decidedly, I’d actually prefer the drink pictured here.

Image: The June 11, 2007 magazine issue of The New Yorker, showing “Roy Spivey,” a short story by Miranda July illustrated with a photograph by William Eggleston.

At an acres-wide industrial dumpsite of hills made of obsolete machine parts, steel and other metal fragments ready to be molten for reuse. Some pieces from there will be taken integrally to create a sculpture.

- Shall we use the magnet or the hook?

- Would there be a difference?

- Both pick them up just fine. It’s just that the hook would leave a mark. The magnet doesn’t.

They’re on their way somewhere, waiting for someone. They’ve paused at the steps of a theatre that’s closed. It’s in the city center, and surrounding them is the jeer of a school recess nearby and the buzz of bureaucrats on their way to lunch.

- You can send any message telepathically, but for it to be actually communicated, reach, experienced, for that you need a willing receptor.

- You mean trust?

Prancing around, and overdressed for the occasion, an insect wears an aqua-litmus bugle-bead dress and a pair of Bolivian jet-black pompom earning in its delicately elongated mandarin antennas. They’ve met this elegant being in a fruit farm in the outskirts of the city. They’re in between rows of trees that move to the hiss of touching leaves provoked by the day’s breeze.

- Who would have thought that kiwi-tree branches were so entangled?

- Much more than a grapevine.

- And the eucalyptus skyscrapers there?

- They’re the farm’s walls, there to buffer the sound of the outside, you know, the highway, the cars, all that visual noise—they all however know they are in fact outside, but no one admits otherwise—you know—complicity called, begging understanding and for a more extended silence—to protect this environment.

Work brings the messmates together. Other possible affinities could be discovered as they speak, they seem to feel. It’s late in the evening, after dinner. Confessing experiences, sharing views.

- Attraction is different. It’s magnetic, a natural coming together.

- The other story is a condition of being taken, picked-up, apprehended.

- Unknowingly?

- Perhaps willingly.

- But what I like about sculpture is negative space.

- A modernist.

- Imaginably.

- That’s voluntarily, too.

- I mean the voids, that is what gives the contours to the thing, shapes what you see, discovering it, whatever it is, as you move.

Image: Capturing the winds of Osorio.

Happening: The 9a Bienal do Mercosul takes place in Porto Alegre, Brazil from September 13 to November 10, 2013. The Biennial’s website will be launched in May 2013. In the meantime, you can follow its developments on Twitter and Facebook.

Condition: The title of the Biennial, which will be used less as a name than as a phrase, is an invitation to ponder on when and how, by whom and why, are certain ideas and work made visible or not at a given state of time. The title in Portuguese is: Se o clima for favorável. In Spanish: Si el tiempo lo permite. In English: Weather Permitting.

Point: Each language version of the title brings forth a slightly distinct emphasis, highlighting climate, time, as well as weather as crucial elements in the featured artworks and in the Biennial’s conception. How are atmospheric disturbances that affect, and that have effect, experienced?

Fact: The graphic design studio Project Projects created “Porto Alegre,” a bespoke typographic system for the 9a Bienal do Mercosul. The symbol set adapts glyphs from several scientific contexts, including meteorological charts, condition maps, and early prototype versions of the Periodic Table.

Event: Pictured above is one of the design applications, the “Save the Date” email announcement sent last week, which publicly introduced the typographic system. Click links here to see the title typeset variations on the English, Portuguese and Spanish announcements.

For you, the common cold is simply uncommon; influenza is far from influencing; a stomachache is more an urban myth than a sharp pain; infection is a synonym of inspiration; virus is something that attacks computers; disease, an invention of antiquity somewhat controlled by modernity; epidemics, a subgenre of apocalyptic fiction; depression and its variations, barometers of cultural tolerance and measure of institutional mores at a given place and time.

Not that you fully embrace these conjectures. These just happen to be the ways that you’ve experienced these maladies.

Sickness is a rarity, your very-seldom visitor. And as you take a drag of your cigarette, you recognize that its paucity is not exactly because you’re a health nut. Wellbeing has simply been around. Most probably, the blessed absence of sickness is a matter of luck. Okay, maybe it’s also because you were raised in a polluted part of the World, where you came naturally into touch and no later immune to most germs.

Ay, but when sickness does strike, its visit is pitiless and dwelling bizarre. It afflicts your major senses.

Something happens in an eye, momentarily blinding you. A next to nothing upsets an ear, briefly leaving you deaf. A thing grows in your vocal cords, provisionally muting you. Exhaustion the plausible source of these ailments, your body goes on strike—telling you it’s seen enough, heard enough, talked enough. Your senses literally shut down. Keep you still. That makes you ill. Handicapped. Guarded yet defenseless. Surrendered to surgeons, their treatments, operations and machines.

This is when an absolute faith in abstract-Others and a strong belief in technology take over your body. Prayers are implored. Antibiotics welcomed. Holistic cures practiced. Witchcraft performed. You’ve tried it all. It’s worked. However, none of this remedies what’s currently affecting you.

This time, for the first time, it’s your sense of intuition that’s uneasy. You get seasick at the sight of a fountain. You’ve often forgotten to wear your Teflon suit. You’re vulnerable. Suspicion is a breath away from awareness. Feeling more than enough. And, you’re overdoing it, the sense of intuition tells you, making it work extra time in that very insinuation.

For once, you’ve fortunately identified the signs before the crash. Some symptoms are evident. The right side of your head spools white hair. A fault line deepens between the eyebrows. The upper part of an ear blushes. Some other symptoms are invisible. The muscle behind the breastbone pulsates unsteadily. Blood heats. A certain aspect of the metabolism accelerates.

You point these indicators to others, to see if they notice, to brainstorm causes, to recommend antidotes. People tell you not to worry. Your friends say we’re only getting older. Your family says that it’s life, intensely lived. Your colleagues say that it’s stress. They all suggest vacationing. Your stylist advises dyeing your hair; your yoga instructor to hold your pose longer; your psychoanalyst to increase the frequency of meetings. Your doctor gives you probiotics and creams.

You truly find all this hackneyed. You feel you didn’t explain your debility just right or that they simply, palpably made a wrong diagnosis. You wonder if this is because pain doesn’t ensue with this sickness (and if it does, you’re body is too tolerant to acknowledge it, externalize it), and without that apparent sign, whatever noticeable proof of your condition goes undermined.

Ugh, for that very thought, your instincts were beseeched. Yet again, your sense of intuition put to work.

All the while, the sense of intuition’s boycott seems impending, and you’ve decided to pre-empt that. You’ll come to terms. The sense of intuition is your dearest. You need it more than anything. Want it. You trust it. You know it’s irreplaceable. There’s no natural prosthesis for it, and artificial intelligence is not significantly advanced to rely on. Besides, you know your body best. You must act, and you have a hunch that resistance is an essential characteristic of that very action.

The self-prescribed, preventive cure you’ve concocted: to shift decision making from the right to the left side of the brain. Better for melanin to decrease from that part of the head, you think, and just like that, you deduce that it’s best to logically address certain matters. Most. If only transitorily. You want your sense of intuition at the forefront, except you deem it’s vital to leave it resting and healing for a bit. You’ve rationalized this. It agrees. Finds ease.

The challenge of the treatment will be how to avoid the wrought belief of common sense supplanting the sense of intuition. And you prepare to tackle this.

You purchase Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor. Download all Lispector’s novels. Dive in Laguna’s poems. You frequent cafés named Barbarella, Alto Astral, and the cosmic like. You even make time for solitude at the ever-barest Everest. You take up a new language, and in that infantilizing learning-process you cling onto basic words, forget complexity, and disregard enunciation, that is, intent, because, fact is, you’re unable to fully grasp it… for now. You think.

You study Cancer, not your horoscope, but the disease that has assaulted close friends, that tough course on empathy that you’ve skipped. You address the signs of aging in loved ones, that stage of filtering memories, that questionable argument for deskilling, the hardest class on compassion. These sicknesses that have (up to this point) only presented themselves as lessons in life, some of which you’ve clearly flunked before, will be tried again.

Image: “I’s for the Cubies’ Immense Intuition” from The Cubies’ A B C by Mary Mills Lyall and Earl Harvey Lyall (USA: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1913), drawn from 50watts.com after Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University, and landing here via Mario Garcia Torres.

In the past six months, I’ve had a handful of experiences that I’ve come to consider gems. These are passing instances that are small relative to world events; that are mostly brief and light, unlike the span and weight that comes with life; that are ephemeral as the second that just passed by. Yet, these are significantly shining, valuable moments to treasure. So when artists Melissa Dubbin and Aaron S. Davidson invited me to participate in their new project with and about gems, I accepted with no hesitation.

I wore one of the four precious-stone artworks created by the artists. It was a work in the form of a pendant. This was a roving, intimate display of sorts preceding the artist’s current exhibition, Making a Record (Diamond, Ruby, Sapphire, Emerald). My then pendant has three emeralds: the larger one is the raw, natural mineral; the thinner one is sculpted as a sharp spine, and was used as the stylus to record an album about emeralds; a rounder piece is a cut crystal, like those more commonly seen in jewelry.

Emerald was the color of the tunic I was dressed in the day I met Caetano Veloso. That sunny morning, I learned about a song he dedicated to his friend, the artist Lygia Clark. Apparently I gifted that musical theme to someone with whom I didn’t exactly want a friendship. (Where did I go wrong?) Emerald the present’s ribbon. Emerald also the color of the box of pistachio Turkish Delight, those candies savored on the afternoon of farewell to such affair. Hexagon the shape of that little candy box, as the form of the pendant’s largest, natural stone.

The gemologist and jewelry designer Karen L. Davidson, who was interviewed by the artists, her words recorded onto the album with the stylus on the pendant, tells that emeralds are a gem considered both fragile but hard; that these have a longer history than most stones; that they are great for one’s vision. It’s been hard not to associate my temporary pendant with other comings and goings that have, at best, arrived and ended because of some misinterpretation, at worst, because of finding indistinguishable the differences between possession and comprehension.

Now with the pendant’s physical absence yet its luminosity’s presence, I keep on reconsidering the assumed but most probable fragility of this hard, long-history stone. And so, I recognize that emerald is indeed the color, the mineral, the hexagonal crystal that has accompanied me lately in learning about what bonds, on how intimacy or complicity binds. Emerald is my gemstone. It’s the brilliant companion that keeps me lit even when it’s hard to shine.

Pictured above is the emerald pendant of Making a Record (Diamond, Ruby, Sapphire, Emerald) by Melissa Dubbin and Aaron S. Davidson, an exhibition on view at Audio Visual Arts in New York City from January 18 to February 17, 2013. Pierre Huyghe, Marina Warner, and Jamieson Webster wore and wrote about the three other pendants.

Brown sugar, electric cigarettes, and sculpture. Overpriced, all three, all the time. And hard to get here, all three, most times. No doubt, availability of things, their prices, depends on location. Enough learned of over-determinism; distributive economy, overrated. Point is, all three things I want here, and wont it now appears to be.

Sea, sí, I want to get rid of that refined dust that spoils my morning coffee, and instead feel the more brittle texture of its sandy sister on my tongue; want to blow scentless, evaporating clouds in environments prohibiting the dragon smoke of my reds; want to quit images for a moment, be compelled to walk around shaped matter that draws me, it, beyond a picture. I want some kind of gravitational force.

Just that is what I want for now. And here, without that, no magnet around, I am left to fingertips tap dancing passwords into portals where imagination machines are said be treasured. Once in, says so, one floats among some kind of cumulus monotypes that rain experience. Weather permitting.

Image: somewhere in the Pacific.

I was unsure of leaving this entry’s title in first-person. Was also unsure of how and if I should punctuate it—to end it with ellipsis, as in here goes the list of reasons, or to add a do before the I and end it with a question mark, as in I am bewildered.

Point is: I always do cry during air flights. It seldom happens before take-off or landing, so no need to associate it with fear of flying. It actually tends to happen mostly after an hour or so on air. Sometimes tears just begin rolling down. Other times tears are announced by a knot on the throat or accompanied by some indeterminate muscular pain. Few times there’s actual weeping, and I am unsure if it’s because these are tears of exhaustion or of measured emotion. For sure, never are these alligator tears.

I’ve decided to wear prescription sunglasses during flights to avoid exhibition. Reddened sinus effects, blush cheeks, and slightly swollen lips rarely manifest. Though parallel and occasional teardrops from the nose are inevitable. The uncertainty of these discrete waterfalls prompts me to push the orange-button on the seat dashboard. Once the steward arrives, I request a tissue, then some bubbles, and if possible, I add to my request, to serve them on a crystal glass rather than a plastic cup. Sunrays or stars are hidden from the aisle seat—my preferred area on-board—so seeing sparkles on a glass and feeling them down my throat always trigger the experience of moving in a landscape, of being grounded yet on air.

From the explanations available online, the reason for my tears is probably because I fly coach, unfortunately. According to recurring travelers and pseudo-scientists that populate the Web, oxygen is limited in the back of airplanes, making those people seated in economy more sensitive, teary, as they say, during flights. That theory, however, is mostly associated to crying while watching movies on planes, specifically romantic comedies and generally-tasteless Hollywood melodramas on airline repertoires, which, to me, this only means that films on planes (should I add tears here?) cannot be taken all too seriously. In any case, that popular theory would not reason my tears, as I tend to read or dream on flights.

It’s unclear when this started happening, the crying. I barely noticed them last year or so. When the tears actually settled into ritual was just some months ago. As of late, it is their appearance of comfort, their I am here to stay while on air, that has become somewhat preoccupying, sometimes even more daunting than the tears themselves. And so, I’ve begun wondering if crying is because I am leaving a place—my home, or a place that feels like it, or a space that could be that should I had stayed. I’ve also wondered the opposite, if crying is because of having to go back home, or to a place that feels like it, or to a space that could be that someday.

Whether it is the sense of impending arrival or the acknowledgment of a departure, I’ve begun coming to terms with tears and some day will do so with the idea of home—whatever or wherever that is.

Image: detail of Dear Mr. _____ (from a desert to a mountain to a waterfall), 2012, by Tania Perez Cordova.

Especially conceived for the Museo Tamayo, El día del ojo is a new work by Pierre Huyghe entailing research, travel and chance encounters across Mexico. It will be inaugurated next week, as part of the re-opening of this newly expanded and renovated museum. Pierre and I started discussions and work on this project in 2009, during my tenure as director of Museo Tamayo, and it’s a pleasure that it’s finally come into fruition.

The artist’s work consists of a water-filled pool inhabited by live, blind-cave fish and by floating volcanic rocks. It’s built in the museum’s indoor sculpture patio. Within that quasi-natural, quasi-artificial environment underground, these species are left on their own, without any other being bearing witness to them. This work, which is made invisible or visible at the museum according to rituals defined by the artist, will be uncovered by opening the floor… and will remain so until future yet undefined protocols create its disappearance.

To create this work, the artist sited natural phenomena and cultural manifestations that exist, but that are invisible or likely go unseen. Aside from this being insinuated formally through the work, this is also implicated in its title: El día del ojo. If the exhibition title was literally translated to the English, it would refer to a designated day for the warranted observance of the eye or simply of observing; if the translation was more openly interpreted, it would suggest, possibly, looking at the predicaments arising with eye witnessing.

Presented along with this live-sculpture by Huyghe are a number of artifacts and sculptures, all made of minerals and drawn from the collections of the Museo Tamayo and the Museo de Arte Prehispánico in Oaxaca City, both institutions founded by the artist Rufino Tamayo. The placement of these objects in the sculpture patio is determined by the sunlight radiating through the building skylights and cast on its grounds at specific hours. And, their presentation calls on the display that Huyghe experienced on his first visit to Museo Tamayo in 1987. However, it is far from a reconstruction of the exhibition that Huyghe witnessed at that time, and that he captured others seeing with this own film camera twenty-five years ago. Instead, it is an attempt to reverse the condition of encounter: from exhibiting something to being exposed to something.

One more component in a multiple set of operations that constitute El día del ojo is a publication on Huyghe’s journeys and encounters in Mexico. Neither a visual essay nor a travelogue, it includes a text that I penned preceded by images of the Museo Tamayo’s 1987 exhibition drawn from the artist’s personal film-reels; pictures from his journey to the Naica Caves in northern Chihuahua, and; several other points of interest that were unearthed from caves to archives in the process of creating this work.

Huyghe’s El día del ojo—the work and its opening rituals, the presentation determined by a sun-clock, and the accompanying publication—attempts to either expand or constrict the sense of time between what exists in itself and what appears to the eye. In doing so, it is an invitation to reconsider the spaces of interpretation that reminiscences and oblivion create as the place of the unknown. In between all that, the figure of the witness is observed.

Pierre Huyghe’s El día del ojo opens to the public on August 26, 2012 at Museo Tamayo in Mexico City. El día del ojo is commissioned by Museo Tamayo; Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, curator; Daniela Pérez, project coordinator; Melissa Dubbin, producer; key collaborators include the biologist Víctor Hugo Reynoso and architect Juan Carlos Garduño.

On Monday, the Fundação Bienal do Mercosul announced my appointment as the chief curator of the 9th Mercosul Biennial, scheduled to open on September 13, 2013 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. A press release of this announcement, and, perhaps most importantly, a curatorial statement for the biennial, can be found here. All the while, I will continue to work as curator of contemporary art of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. Seems like I should also begin writing more regularly here, posting research-in-progress.

To join me in the adventure of organizing the biennial, I’ve brought together a team of curators and educators that I highly respect. The team includes Raimundas Malašauskas, a curator who I’ve collaborated on several projects before, as well as the educator Mônica Hoff and the curator Bernardo de Souza, both based in Porto Alegre. They will be closely involved in the curatorial research, including the artist selection, commission of new work, and the conceptualization of the biennial’s exhibitions and educational programming.

In addition, an interesting group of curators will be engaged in the research towards the biennial through a curatorial fellowship program. I’ve called this program the “Cloud Fellows,” as they will help determine the shape, the place and the experience of information in the biennial. They will certainly also influence the artist’s selection –are already doing so– and project development in general. These are the fellows: Sarah Demeuse, based in New York City, and co-founder of Rivet; Daniela Pérez, based in Mexico City, and co-founder of De Sitio; Julia Rebouças, based in Belo Horizonte, and member of the curatorial team of Inhotim; and, Dominic Willsdon, based in San Francisco, and the Leanne and George Roberts Curator of Education and Public Programs at SFMoMA.

The appointment of the curatorial team for the 9th Mercosul Biennial was publicly announced through a smoke signal on Monday, August 13, 2012 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The image above is of this event; it was taken by Cristiano Sant Anna (indicefoto.com).

A while back, I wrote here about Raimundas Malašauskas mesmerizing Hypnotic Show—an exhibition that an audience experiences while hypnotized. It’s one of those curatorial projects that I wish had occurred to me… but it would have been impossible, my mind works differently, even while in trance. The latest iteration of Hypnotic Show took place in Turin, Italy last November within the framework of the art fair Artissima. On that occasion, the show had a slightly different format (for a description, please read the earlier post linked above). For that new iteration, Raimundas invited me and three other peers—Angie Keefer, John Menick and Robert Snowden—to write scripts about historic exhibitions.

We wrote scripts for about thirty or so other exhibitions, which were used as instruction pieces generating the phenomenological experience of the hypnotized audiences. Once in a state of trance, audiences could time-travel and experience exhibitions like the first Documenta (1955) curated by Arnold Bode in Kassel, Germany; witness the Charioteer of Delphi (474 BC) at the Delphi Archaeological Museum in Greece; visit Information (1970) curated by Kynaston McShine at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; and, walk around the city of Ghent and visit private homes to see the various projects of Chambres d’amis (1986), a multi-sited exhibition curated by Jan Hoet for the Museum Van Hedendaagse Kunst in Antwerp.

Artissima published a small book with the scripts for this latest iteration of the Hypnotic Show, and you can download it here for your perusal—to read or use for getting hypnotized at your own risk.

Image: Tomorrow evening, at McNally Jackson Books in New York, Raimundas Malašauskas launches his book of collected texts, Paper Exhibition. Some Ten Years of Writing, published by Sandberg Institute, Kunstverein Publishing, Sternberg Press and The Baltic Notebooks by Anthony Blunt.