NOBODY'S INDISCIPLINE For the Improper Use of Quarantine

Who knows what happened in the kitchens, showers and desks of the people who participated in Nobody's from their respective quarantines, more or less rigid, connecting occasionally to the Hang Out Room. Or doing, each in the figurative darkness of their own Dark Room, all the same thing, some in their living room, some in the bathroom, some on the sofa or on a rug. Sometimes in the literal darkness of their beds, or their balconies at night. What exactly happened at Nobody's Indiscipline is hard to say.

Even if nobody arrived in Milan, Nobody's Indiscipline 2020 was a gathering, and not so much for the possibility of connecting to a virtual room. It was a gathering made of mainly asynchronous spaces and times and about twenty people who, for a week, found themselves a little more aware of the existence of others, and the possibility that others were a little more aware of theirs.

If what happened is difficult to say, the form this took was clearer: Nobody's Indiscipline was an invitation to make shamelessly improper use of the quarantine. Intuition is indebted to Sara Ahmed, to her analysis of the apparent and buried meanings of "use" and the political implications of our way of using spaces and objects, which led her to articulate the notion of queer use. In the full text of the lecture of the same name, there is much about the possible meanings of queer use and the paths that it paves for that increasingly necessary work of change and reinvention of artistic and cultural institutions. In these lines, I borrow the concept to put it into play at a micro level: that of the people who have given body to Nobody's Indiscipline this year, creating an interference in the usual ways of gathering together, of shaping, but also of using quarantine.

The meaning of queer use as improper use develops within the semantic field of use, which includes: using for a purpose; devoting energy to a goal; taking advantage or exploiting; getting used to it. Ahmed defines use as "a relationship and activity that often indicates the function of what is used". Use, Ahmed writes, indicates "for what" a certain object is. Usage also indicates whom a certain space is for. Queer use is therefore to use something for a function other than the intended function, or to use a space intended for something or someone else. Queer use as improper use is described by Ahmed with several examples, some loaded with joy, such as birds nesting in the mailbox and interrupting their normal use, and other loaded with apprehension, such as the boy using the toy intended “for a girl" (Sara Ahmed points out that the very existence of this category is worrying), who is remarked not so much about his behavior with the toy, but rather about the way “the boy is boy”. Queer use is also revealing ourselves to us,  as we use what was not intended for us. Queer use is a light gesture that goes deep, it is a different use that exposes the norms inherent in habitual use and, by breaking them, shows for whom or what a certain activity, a certain object, a certain space is for, and whom or what they are not for, thus highlighting the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion inherent in our habitual use of spaces, objects, words.