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SINKING ISLANDS
 
 This publication was edited and printed on the occasion o the exhibition
Sinking Islands 
 (LABOR, Mexico City, July 14th - August 31st, 2012).
 
Sinking islands. Like the unseen part o the buildings made o ctions that orm the airbornecontinents on which we stand. Like that day when reading happened without spelling or writing  without singing—that day when text slipped inside the body o things.
The Oceanic Feeling (bits o Man)
 This text consists o notes jotted down while preparing the
Sinking Islands 
exhibit. It does not aimto explain the show, but rather, it seeks to old-out its gures in the space o writing, as does thisentire publication. Both the writing o this text and the editing o this publication are no more andno less than the work o the exhibition itsel. The moti o the island, be it deserted or inhabited, is not original in and o itsel. An island isan isolated punctuation on a map, a conned topographical object dened by its borders. Onecould even reduce its denition to its coordinates, to a hasty drawing o a circle, or, zooming inurther, to the creases o its contours. By pushing the resolution to the perceptive limits o thehuman, representing an island could resemble the task o the Empire’s cartographers in JorgeLuis Borges’s
 Del rigor en la ciencia
(
On Exactitude in Science 
, 1946), who were so precise that onlya map as large as the empire itsel would suce to condense their science. I we ollowed thesecartographers in their enterprise, while exceeding its logic and granting the map a resolution thatgoes beyond the abilities o the human eye, mapping an island would mean to produce a map thatis much larger than the island appears to our naked eye. The map o the island would begin tospread out and cover the ocean, reaching the shores o continents rom which tectonic shits hadtorn it. Finally, the map would envelop the world itsel. From embedded microscopes to alignedtelescopes, the representation o the island would enold the universe, breaking down whatever theisland could have incarnated o the “outside,” leaving its isolation behind to become the
biggest  possible thing 
.Pinpointing an island seems to placate our measuring drives and mapping anxieties. Better yet,in the discourses related to the production o knowledge today, the lexicon o the archipelago orthe semantic eld o the island orm a
topos 
: not a place, but rather a commonplace. Islands arenot the result o disorientation, but rather a landmark or thought—the locus o an orientationtechnique—a repository transormed into the reassuring promise o a lighthouse. In act, theconcept o island lends itsel to all sorts o applications that simultaneously veriy its coherenceand elasticity. Conceptually contained in its precise boundaries, the island would constitutea remedy against the anxiety stemming rom abrupt changes in scale and measurement thatcoexist in the world in which we foat: a liqueed world, the total world o an epidemic o things.Perhaps even the insular gure (and what it suggests o a possibility o a “araway land”) serves asconsolation—a consolation that our thought does not only use to sober itsel up, but to conditionits orm as much as its economy, as it was with Utopia once upon a time. The island’s popularitytoday is not unrelated to its signicance at the time o Utopia, in the instances o the rst oceaniccrossings and Great Discoveries, when the world solidied into the shape o a globe centeredaround Man, and looped its own tune around itsel, halway between the music o the spheres andthe chants rom araway islands. The island was already becoming the vertiginous vanishing pointthat tore modernity between two antithetical orces, one centripetal and unitary, penetrated by itsown hegemony; and the other centriugal and lacerated by the categories o modern science, preyto the vertigo and constantly worried about its own splintering, its loss.Nothing is new in the insular hypothesis. As a modern vanishing point, it has been so well workedin by discourse that it has been integrated as the template o the post-historical condition, theavorite gure o contemporary disjointed Man. The island has become the model o humans in
THE SUNKEN WORLD AND THE DESIRE FOR THE SHORE
 Vincent Normand
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