eschatology of the unnamed

By Agnė Jurgelėnaitė

“..... and we went looking for something unnamed. We found nothing.”

(Evelyn Raudsepp and Henri Hütt, “unnamed nature project”)

One of my favourite art projects is a set of postcards by Evelyn Raudsepp and Henri Hütt. When you open it, the authors immediately warn you: ‘Nothing worth mentioning occurred during the next twenty-four hours,’ and the images remain faithful to this conviction. There is nothing overtly riveting in them—only empty landscapes, and the absence of the human, felt precisely through the ways in which nature has been shaped to the liking of the human.

Lately, I have developed something akin to fetish for them. I would come home, open the set, and go through the cards one by one. Perversely, I would gaze and linger at the smallest details. Afterwards, I would wrap them again and safely place them on the table next to my bed. I would return to them only the next day; sit down and repeat the process again. At that moment I would be part of a ritual, some ahistoric religious practise, only I have been called upon to perform.

Admittedly, the set has depleted since I bought it two years ago. I kept giving the cards away, mostly to strangers I felt faintly indebted to—the picture of an unnamed seemed like a fair trade for the relationship that we did not have. Somehow, when passing them, I would feel as if I was offering some kind of wisdom: ‘Look at this non-being,’ I would say, ‘Isn’t it amazing? Have you ever seen something like this before?’

I cannot visualise the ones I’ve given away. And yet, it does unnerve me. I would have looked at them almost daily. I can neither remember to whom I have given them, nor under which circumstances. Perhaps, I could trace three, but it would offer me no answers. Likewise, the role of a photographer displaces me into an even deeper sorrow. I should have contacted them and asked for clarifications—the whys and the hows. But what would I say—give me the images I am missing, I need to check whether something was left behind? Some hidden trace of human presence—‘aha! You have not succeeded in revealing nothing, there is still something left and I have found it.’ I have succeeded in my mission of an unworldly magnitude.

One should not fear the slightly eerie notions my predicament raises, as the images still bear the imprint of a human; it remains the world-as-we-know-it. The windmill in the picture no.5 is familiar solely because it has never been captured; rather, it is simply a clearing where one might have been built.

An apocalyptic scenario for the post-apocalyptic mind—what does it mean for the world to end and no humans to be left in it? Concurrently, this is simply impossible; the non-existence is unthinkable. And yet, I am witnessing one as it unfolds and remain unable to explain. The abstruse presses down onto my mind.

Hence, I propose, that this image-captured end would have to be unnamed in a very tactful manner; the current phenomenological weight of an apocalypse simply does not account for a scenario like this. On the other hand, the potentiality has been expressed—the Eloi, as an instance. It is simply a minor error, an insufficiency, a scholarly dearth on the account of a fervent millenarian, that the current eschatology is associated with an outset; the feeling that when there is an end it must attest to something beginning. We will wait up to a hundred years; the dispensations will pass and there still will be a human in the apocalypse. We must hope for the end of a different kind. We must hope for the end that is truly empty.

How would it happen? Surely, it could not occur out of nowhere, humans do not start to vanish at one single point. Therefore, it should follow some kind of pattern, intelligible enough, but not obvious to every bystander of the change.

For instance, the general trivia; a b c’s as answers create a structure familiar to everyone, replicable in different languages and scripts, symbolically and constructively legible. Suppose one could identify all the general trivia's that ask, ‘How many continents have a city named Rome?’ and then find those who gave b as their answer. A pattern like that could distribute disappearance evenly, as it would locate the end in a familiar enough Rome, but on the level of recognition and semiotics, not geography. Alternatively, an alphanumeric system—more abstracted and nuanced than the a b c‘s but still decipherable. If people could live within such system, as in the Brasilia city, someone unknowingly must have already cracked the code just by the simple act of walking. We would only need to find them.

Or 12 postcards in a white cardboard shell, the imprint that says, ‘Wish You Were Nowhere’. Admittedly, this non-place was never on my mental landscape as a location for all to collapse, but if the place of nowhere could happen only in there, I had to agree. I had to practice recognising it.

The end of the world will follow like this:

1. Nothing worth mentioning will happen

2. Nothing will appear in one of the images, numbered in a particular order:

a. A road with a lamp post on the side

b. A road under a bridge

c. A windmill between clouds

d. Three hay sacks

e. A birch forest in the autumn

f. A meadow with two static conductive cables

g. A lake with non-descript sign

The other images have already been given away

3. I would not have to think about the non-existence. Hence, it will exist and has already- been-existing.

4. Afterwards, I would wrap them again and place them on the table next to my bed.

Agnė Jurgelėnaitė is currently based in Vienna. Previous works include essays on urban landscapes and cultural commentaries in community-based zines and journals like Lūžis and Rose Tinted Glasses.