Cocky Eek: Pneumatology

When confronted with contemporary environmental questions, one thing became very clear to me: out of fear, or guilt, we can’t create anything. Therefore, as a topic of my research residency, I chose the quality of lightness. Italo Calvino underlines this quality as one of his ‘Six Memos for the Next Millennium’, where he describes a scene from Cernavantes’ novel, in which Don Quixote drives his lance through the sail of a windmill and is hoisted up into the air. I wonder whether we could begin to construct our worlds from this lightness. I'd like to imagine a life that is lighter, more mobile, flexible, portable, organic, closely related to the natural surroundings and the elements. My dream is to be able to create our homes and shelters wherever our heart is, with no fixed form, no clear beginnings or ends, neither spatially, nor temporally. The question guiding my research is: how can we construct our worlds from air, the lightest element around us?

In progress: http://libarynth.org/research_report_cocky_eek