going underground....

There is supposedly a (not so) new kind of cultural pop-up fad, in case you have been wondering where we've been. It's the slow pop-up -- like a restaurant that takes a very long time to emerge, has a limited life span, and then disappears again without trace. 

Being under the blog radar is nothing quite as sophisticated or measured. It's more like a combination of inaugural project aftermath combined with the realities that put pro bono cultural forays on hold until momentum gathers anew and a workable resurgence aligns.

This shapeshifting and entirely ad hoc nature is of course part of guerilla gallery's ethos. It by definition morphs as it goes into new and considered inflections: a flexible curatorial platform that has no physical structure of its own and fits instead literally into other spaces and conceptually with other projects. It does so when the necessary vectors line up. 

In this, it takes inspiration from Rosi Braidotti's 'Transpositions' (2006), a book title partly inspired by music and partly by genetics and hence material embodiment. She writes about this 'intertextual, cross-boundary or transversal transfer' as a leap from one code, field or axis to another in terms of complex multiplicities: 'As a term in music, transposition indicates variations and shifts of scale in a discontinuous but harmonious pattern. It is thus created as an in-between space of zigzagging and of crossing: non-linear, but not chaotic; nomadic, yet accountable and committed; creative but also cognitively valid; discursive and also materially embedded -- it is coherent without falling into instrumental rationality' (2006, 5).  

The good news is guerilla gallery's second zigzag is on the horizon -- this time hopefully in Cape Town, where its management has relocated. Stay tuned. We are going underground....