Overspilling Forms : Unnoticed Displacements/Tensions and Correlations~The Silent Transformations

What happens before a form becomes recognisable? Things accumulate, shift, overlap and begin to spill into one another. The ceramic body emerges here not as a stable boundary but as a place where forces become visible through displacement. Tension, excess, surface and material change remain active within the form. Something is always moving through it, even when the fired body appears still.

The Fluidity Of Life.

(or how one is already the other)

The notion of silent transformations encountered in the corner of a page. How will these unnoticed displacements, the silent transformations one day be considered.

Francois Jullien

The Silent Transformations

Things Superimposed~Dispositive~Spill

Overspilling Forms~Sympathy~Abject(ion)

Architecture In Abjection

Bodies, Spaces And Their Relations.

Zuzana Kovar

Gaston Bachelard.

John Piper.

Lucio Fontana.

https://seagullbooks.org/products/the-silent-transformations

To grow up is to grow old. With time, great love can turn into indifference. And even the most earnest revolution can imperceptibly become its own system of privilege and corruption—just as global warming has slowly modified the climate by degrees. These are examples of the kind of quiet, unseen changes that François Jullien examines in The Silent Transformations, in which he compares Western and Eastern—specifically Chinese—ways of thinking about time and processes of change.

Jullien argues that our failure to notice the effects of cumulative changes over time is due to Western thought’s foundations in classical Greek philosophies of being, which encourage thinking in terms of determined forms and neglect the indeterminable nature of the transition taking place. In contrast, Chinese thought, having a greater sense of the fluidity of life, offers a more flexible way of understanding everyday transformations and provides insightful perspectives from which to consider our relation to history and nature. In particular, a Chinese approach, argues Jullien, allows us to discover that there may be occasions when it is more efficacious to yield to situations than to confront them head-on.

In The Silent Transformations, Jullien resituates Western philosophy by examining it in the light of traditions of thought that have developed from fundamentally different concepts and contexts. Jullien here opens a space for a new way of thinking, and this refreshing book will stimulate the interest of scholars in both Western and Eastern philosophy.

This one is particularly interesting because it introduces movement rather than simply materiality. Jullien's “silent transformations” sit beside Architecture in Abjection, Bachelard, Piper and Fontana, while the post itself circles around “Things Superimposed,” “Spill” and “Overspilling Forms.”

I actually think this may be one of the most important older bodies to bring forward because overspilling connects directly to your present vocabulary of permeability, surface, force, abjection and bodies exceeding their boundaries.

First constellation — Ceramic Bodies

Making Matter(s)~Truth

Overspilling Forms

The Ceramics Reader / Brickyard Ceramics

Making Iterations / Procedures

Working Notes : Clay, Interior Skins of Light and Dark