September 16, 2017
Why are we here now? — After the Wildly Improbable
Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany

Performance with slide projection and storytelling
Curated by Adania Shibli

The Intimate Knowledge of Things is a performative installation developed within the interdisciplinary programme Why are we here now? — After the Wildly Improbable, curated by Adania Shibli at Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

The programme departs from the question: what would a railway say, if it were to speak, about our journey through the century to the here and now? It reflects on unfinished large-scale railway projects intended, in the late 19th century, to connect Berlin with Baghdad, Damascus with Mecca, and Jerusalem with Alexandria. Within this framework, artists, writers, sociologists, anthropologists and thinkers are invited to operate as mediators for this speculative speech.

Within this curatorial context, The Intimate Knowledge of Things unfolds as a staged session in which film, performance and narration are articulated as successive but interconnected modes of address. The work is structured as a temporal alignment of different formats, each one reframing the conditions of attention and meaning established by the previous.

The session begins with the screening of Ecstasy and Eden, a film that establishes an initial perceptual and conceptual field. This is followed by a live storytelling performance accompanied by slides, in which spoken narration, image and projection construct a shifting layer of interpretation and reconfiguration. The programme concludes with the screening of Masters of Velocity, which repositions the preceding materials within a renewed register of tempo, movement and perception.

Rather than functioning as separate works presented in sequence, the three moments form a continuous structure of displacement, where each component alters retrospectively the reading of the others.

Developed as part of this curatorial proposition, the work engages with the idea of mediation as a form of transmission: not only between disciplines, but between historical infrastructures, speculative voices and present-day forms of listening.

The project proposes a form of knowledge grounded in proximity rather than abstraction — a knowledge produced through timing, framing and successive exposure, rather than through fixed interpretation.

In this context, “knowledge” is understood not as possession or resolution, but as a fragile condition of encounter sustained across different modes of presentation.