Influent: B. n. 1. A river or stream which flows into another or into a lake; a tributary, an affluent. (OED)
I thought I had made up the word influent as an alternative to influence and inspired by Lorine Niedecker’s neologism: bluent. To play with words in one’s mind is a way to connect with writers, death and alive. We share systems of languages, the same words can mean something else to different people. But, sometimes, it seems, as though we understand exactly the word of another, as though the veil that is someone else’s perception almost merges with our own. Recognizing oneself and/in another. Looking into a dirty mirror, or stirred water. There is a movement that reaches inside and pulls outward simultaneously, we cannot be still.
[break]
How does one collect seemingly disparate works, workings, and hold them together to let them: exist. To allow for the conditions under which the work can make and unmake itself, and and as each other, in an explicit yet undetermined collaborative form. To not place the work but let the work find its place – to, as it might be suggested, see a distance, closely. Perhaps, as someone else once said, “I do not want to speak about, only speak nearby.”
David Hall & Lara Schoorl
CLOSE DISTANCE 