This text is a modest attempt to answer questions I ask myself daily: What am I doing? What is this? How does it work? How does it relate to everything else? Not a theory arrived at in advance. A cartography drawn after the fact — perhaps because of my age, perhaps because new projects demand it.

Schwebezustand — the trembling suspension — is a perceptual and ontological condition in which an object or being simultaneously inhabits more than one state of existence without resolving into either, and without abandoning what it primarily is. It occurs within an entity, in its own place — a contact without passage, without destination, without force.

Schwebezustand is not produced by art alone — but without a coherent artistic form it remains only a perception, an anecdote, or a curiosity. Art is the operation that makes the condition legible: it gives duration, form, and necessity to the simultaneity already present. And yet the condition precedes the work. It is discovered, not invented. What art does is make it impossible to look away.

Schwebezustand is held, timeless, unlinear — as a compound-existence entity, it does not "pass", it does not "resolve", it does not "become". A careful reader could feel this suspension and reach, almost intuitively, for familiar concepts: ambiguity, metaphor, metamorphosis, the middle point. The four of them will fail:

Not ambiguity.

Ambiguity implies instability — a meaning that wavers, weakens, refuses to settle. A condition that cannot make up its mind. Schwebezustand: two or more states tremble within the same entity with equal ontological weight, neither canceling the other nor producing a third, hybrid entity. Schwebezustand is density, not uncertainty.

Not a metaphor.

"En la cadera clara de la costa" — "in the clear hip of the coast".

A metaphor operates through the transfer of semes — the minimal units of meaning that constitute a semantic field. Neruda gives the coastline a body. The coast becomes bodied, present in a way geography alone cannot produce. The reader holds both simultaneously — the coast and the hip — and something opens between them. But neither the coast nor the hip become the other. No new existence is added. It is just a permutation of meaning. A metaphor asks what else a thing can mean. Before Schwebezustand, one can only ask what else a thing can be.

Not the middle point.

Unlike "liminal space", "border", or "in-between" — concepts that imply transit, negotiation, or passage from one condition to another — Schwebezustand requires no displacement. It occurs within an entity, in its own place, without passage and without destination. You are not standing in the doorway between your kitchen and your living room. They come to you, to conform you. You are fully in both — and neither.

Not a metamorphosis.

The caterpillar — A — becomes the butterfly — B. The process has a direction because B is already determined before the transformation begins. Remove B and you do not have an "interrupted metamorphosis". You have no metamorphosis at all — metamorphosis is defined by destination, not movement. A stuck transformation between A and an unknown B is not a "paused metamorphosis". The stuck element is not even a chrysalis. You get a semi-seed, a dry leaf, a capsule that does not announce what it contains — or whether it contains anything at all.

My dog lives entirely in the present. She does not know she is within a fatal metamorphosis — not because she is unaware of her final destiny B, but because her mode of existence does not include B as a known category. She is within an absolute A — present time. She is not in a process. She is in a condition. And yet I can see both — the A she inhabits completely, and the B, her death, she will reach without knowing it. Two perceived simultaneous existences — between a metamorphosis and living in the present — occupy the same being. In this case, she is a Lost Soul, in a Schwebezustand. But the Schwebezustand lives in me, not hers. Even if she fully perceives me Present-Time, she remains, fully and only, in Present-Time too. I am the one trembling between what she is and what she does not know she will become.

Accomplices

Perceiving an entity with two simultaneous existences comes from very far away, and from a long time ago. Across many geographies and many centuries — in the Nahua nahualli, in the Mexica Teotl, in Sufi thought, in Yoruba cosmology, in Buddhist interdependence, in the Western phenomenological tradition — different cultures arrived, independently and without coordination, at the same recognition: that beings are not singular, that existence is relational, that what a thing is cannot be separated from what it is in relation to everything else. None of these traditions borrowed from the others. All of them were describing the same perception. These are cultures where an entity with two simultaneous existences is not a paradox, not a metaphor, not an exception — but a normal feature of how reality works. They are the ground on which this perception became possible, long before it had a name.

THERIANTHROPIC FIGURE, ROCK ART

This is an attractor field — elements without contact, without coordination, converging toward the same condition from different directions. These traditions operate the same way: no contact between them, no coordination, the same perception arriving independently. An attractor field without a center.

Two trees. The Maya ceiba stands at the center of the village because it stands at the center of the cosmos — roots drinking in Xibalbá, the underworld, crown holding up the sky, trunk among the living, where the dead climb through on their way up. It was not planted as a symbol. The town was founded around it. One being inhabiting three worlds at once, belonging fully to none — and still standing in the plaza, still in service. And Yggdrasil: gnawed from below, watered daily, rotting and regenerating without ever resolving into death or health, sustaining the nine worlds precisely because it never resolves. Mesoamerica and Scandinavia never met. They did not arrive at similar doctrines. They arrived at the same image.

The philosophical tradition that runs from Descartes through Locke through Kant placed the individual as the primary unit of reality — a self that exists prior to its relations, prior to the world it then enters. From that starting point, an entity with two simultaneous existences can only appear as a paradox, a contradiction, or a metaphor.

The traditions listed above begin from the opposite premise: the self is constituted by its relations, being is always already multiple, existence is relational before it is individual. From that ground, simultaneity is not a problem to be solved. It is simply what reality looks like.

The scientific Western tradition that produced Newton and Einstein pursued a different impulse: the search for a general law that would rule everything from outside, a single framework capable of rendering reality fully intelligible and administrable. A Cartesian impulse at full power. Einstein himself never accepted that indeterminacy or simultaneous conditions could be fundamental features of reality; for him, they signaled an incomplete description awaiting an unquestionable structure.

We now have atomic-scale microscopes to confirm what quantum mechanics found and what "the rulers" could not predict: reality does not comply. Indeterminacy is not a technical problem pending resolution. It is the condition. The nahuallies — my name for those who perceived existence as relational and simultaneous — had been describing that condition for centuries, not as correction, but as a way to understand complexity intuitively, as an ontology of simultaneous existences. Certainly, Schwebezustand does not have such a beautiful history, but it definitely has a place under this umbrella, trembling, unsure, with a wet copy of Pedro Páramo under its arm.

Lost Souls

A lost soul is not a biological category. It is a perceptual one. What matters is not whether a being is alive or dead, animate or inanimate, real or represented. What matters is how it is perceived — as simultaneously inhabiting two existences without knowing anything about it.

Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo is one of the most powerful novels written yet. The dead speak. The dead walk. The dead remain in Comala — their bodies embodied in the mind of the reader. They exist as bodies only there, in that private interior space. Voices overlap. Time feels dizzy. Rulfo withholds what the rest of literature usually grants — the simple knowledge of who is alive and who is dead. The lost soul in Pedro Páramo is not Susana San Juan. She is a ghost — a presence defined by what she cannot stop missing. It is not Pedro Páramo — he is a force that simply crumbles, collapses into the earth, even while remaining completely conscious of his own power. It is not Juan Preciado — he arrives with a destination already formed, a father he expects to find. Expectation is not the lost soul condition; it is a neurotic impulse. Rulfo holds his readers as Lost Souls through narrative technique alone. That is the most precise literary production of the condition ever.

Films live after the cinema. Scenes surface in the middle of an afternoon. A face appears in a stranger on the street. A line of dialogue arrives unbidden while you are doing something entirely unrelated. And sometimes we even have the impression of living inside a film. It enters our thread of living like a super-elastic transparent white thread, holding its far-away yolk. Yes, film and life, each maintaining its own nature, neither dissolving into the other, inseparable and yet distinct. Our hormones are reacting to both.

Even here, in this dual demiurge, they exist: the lost souls. Both the extras in the film and the real people commuting in that bus, or that biker on screen passing by — they are outside the story — they play no role, they carry no dramaturgical function. Even if they are the ontological ground of believability, they exist independently of the story's intention and our current life. If the film needs them to be believed, they do not need the film, or us, in real life, at all. The Lost Soul is where film and reality meet without seam. They are fully present in the world of that film or that reality, and fully outside its logic — simultaneously, without knowing, without resolving. The spectator perceives them. They perceive nothing back. They are lost souls. They don't know where they are going. They don't have an origin. Because again: a lost soul is an entity floating between two conditions without knowing anything about it.

In 1932, Henri Cartier-Bresson photographed a man leaping over a puddle behind the Gare Saint-Lazare. The leap is famous — the geometry celebrated, the reflection perfect, the foot one micron from the water. But there is another figure in the image, standing at the back, facing away, beside the fence, slightly out of focus. He is not inside, nor outside the fenced area. The fence runs through his presence, placing him on neither side. He plays no role — not even yet — in the composition's geometry, no role in the captured action, at least until he becomes one of those truncated columns toward which he seems to be heading. He did not know he was being photographed. His condition is spatial, temporal, and existential, simultaneously — undefined in all three at once, and permanent. The celebrated Bressonian precise moment resolves: the foot lands and it is over. This figure resolves nothing. He is the lost soul. The leap is the subject. He is the double condition.

HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON, BEHIND THE GARE SAINT-LAZARE, PARIS, 1932.
THE LEAP IS THE SUBJECT. HE IS THE CONDITION.

At Kottbusser Tor in Berlin, a small man in black stands far back in the frame, almost imperceptible, almost looking at the photographer — not fully, but not turned away either. It seems simple, but this places him simultaneously inside and outside awareness, inside and outside the image's intention, inside and outside his own afternoon. He carries no compositional function, no place in the image's pretension — if there is one. Neither do the three Bressonian feet about to touch the ground, though not quite as refined. Three accidental precise moments, impossibly simultaneous, in a photograph that was not taken to capture any of them. The lost soul, for his part, stands at the same distance from the camera as the cylindrical column beside him — both inert, vertical, indifferent to the square's movement around them. He is not a person accompanying the cylinder's space. He is its existential shadow, its aura briefly condensed into a figure. The column has no biography, and though he does, in this frame they are the same. He will never know he is here. The spectator perceives him. He perceives almost nothing back. His condition is also spatial, temporal, and existential — undefined across all three, and at the same time permanent. And in that almost lies his entire condition.

C.S. BERLIN KOTTBUSSER TOR.
THE COLUMN HAS NO BIOGRAPHY. HE DOES.
OTHERWISE, IN THIS FRAME, THEY ARE THE SAME.

 

A long time ago, one figure, nevertheless, entered the condition on purpose — not like this one in Kottbusser Tor. Odin hung himself from Yggdrasil, the world tree, for nine nights, pierced by his own spear, without bread, without water, sacrificed by himself to himself — because the Runes would be delivered only in a condition of Trembling Suspension. On the ninth night he looked down, took up the Runes, and fell. He was not a Lost Soul.

ODIN HANGIN FROM YGGDRASIL, WHERE TO GO FROM HERE?
REDDIT USER, R/OILPAINTING

Examples of Schwebezustand

Mach

Ernst Mach drew himself from the left eye in 1886 — two years before Van Gogh stood at that café terrace, just as quiet, just as unaware. The arc on the right side of the drawing is the edge of his own visual field — his legs, the sofa, the floor, the window, the light outside, all seen from inside himself, like an eternal trembling spiral, a standing wave between the landscape and the artist. This kind of "fractal spiral" could easily be nested, beyond the paper, to add the spectator — looking at the drawing, that is the author, that is the landscape. Two nested, trembling conditions.

ERNST MACH, THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE, 1900

J. J. GIBSON, THE PERCEPTION OF THE VISUAL WORLD, 1950

ERNST MACH, PICTURING THE VISUAL FIELD, 1886

Van Gogh, Kahlo, Bacon

Have you experienced, dear reader, seeing the life and drama of a painter imbued in the paint itself — in Van Gogh, in Kahlo, in Bacon? Like a second existence in front of you?

Galleries, museums, and mainstream art markets know that drama sells. Severed ears, asylums, shattered spines, violent parents, betrayals, suicides, poverties — repeated in wall texts, documentaries, gift-shop books, until the story installs itself in the room before the viewer does.

An Amplified Schwebezustand, as I have decided to call it, is a trembling taken up by markets and repetition, and made louder than the work alone would produce, if any. What is added is volume, but also drama and emotional pornography. The trembling felt in front of the canvas is real, the Amplified Schwebezustand is there and is global — an amplified scale, often false, triggering real emotions.

A café terrace, lit by a single lantern, on a street corner at night. A handful of people sit at small tables, others walk past on the cobblestones. Above, the buildings, a section of sky, dark, adorned by the Milky Way, as visible as the lantern. Just as the insects are as loud as the town itself. The landscape appears almost as a still life, with an absent painter not touched by it. "On the terrace there are tiny figures of drinkers. [...] The gables of the houses on a street that leads away under the blue sky studded with stars are dark blue or violet, with a green tree."

VINCENT VAN GOGH, TERRASSE DU CAFÉ LE SOIR, 1888.

"In white, Jesus stands at the center, long hair, surrounded by the Twelve apostles. The obscure presence in the doorway should be Judas, and the lantern is a halo. Crosses everywhere — in the awning, in the street, and far away, almost imperceptible, a suffering horse. The left side is just joy. The dark right is sadness. The empty chairs are an empty past. For the big poster of the Last Supper and the tortured genius I paid eighty dollars — but if the original sold for a hundred and fifty million, that's nothing!"

This is an Amplified Schwebezustand, an amplified trembling suspension. And this is how the machine works: the distortion and the real paint, simultaneous existences, triggering real emotions.

From my catalogue

Two petroleum barrels, a century later, a continent away — a standard unit of measure in the oil industry, and a common object on construction sites — contain steel rods suspended from their top cover. After a single pull, the rods collapse against each other — like a traditional bamboo mobile. The barrels sound by themselves, for a long time, from gravity alone. No mechanism, no intervention, no intention, no wind. An industrial object producing sound through the most impersonal physical force that exists is perceived as a sounding being with a temporary sense of time. Neither condition cancels the other. The barrels occupy both simultaneously, without resolving. This is a mother-cell piece in my catalogue, the involuntary Schwebezustand in its simplest, unquestionable form.

HUGE MOBILES, TEMIXCO, 1987. PROMPTEDAnalogue F1, color, 35mm, C45, 50mm, f5.6 Temixco, Mexico. A typical low class suburban house, low class, not finished but occupied. Around 16:00. The sun to the left. Photographer seated. The garden was a garden, but now different local plants grow. Two old oil barrels under a tree, with suspended construction rods inside. Prompted reconstruction; no documentation available., NO DOCUMENTATION AVAILABLE.

The same absence of wind appeared in 2001, again, in my garden in Mexico. A living mandarin tree is manipulated by a thin black thread, invisible to the camera. When pulled, the tree moves as it would move in wind. Conceptually, trees are not marionettes of the wind — they are simply trees moved by the wind. In the home video, someone invisible moves this mandarin tree, without compromising the slightest part of its ontology as a tree, while adding the ontology of a marionette. This is the clearest case of all, for its simplicity: a being that remains completely itself while becoming, at the same time, something completely different. Neither condition borrowed from the other. Both are true. This is also a mother-cell piece. As the only involuntary cases, they remain here, suspended by the text itself.

SANDOVAL, MANDARINO-MARIONETA, HUITZILAC, 2001 (PROMPTEDCanon, MiniDV from 2001, small camera, handheld, 4:3. Cropped, 90 degree corners, not curved corners. Midday. Video texture. Garden, outside, ca 17:00. Small citrus, kumquat tree about 1.5 meter high, with some fruits visible. The tree about 6 meter away from the camera. Well maintained garden, but not perfect. The tree has a tree ring, with small wild plants in there chaotic, also a bit grass around. The grass in the garden is not homogeneous, different tone of green and yellows. One branch right side of the tree is in gentle movement, but not the rest. The moving branch has to be part of the tree, not distant. You can see the leaves, but a bit movement-blurred, not so much. The camera guy, apart from holding the camera, is pulling the tree with one thin black sewing thread. The geometry of the thread: departs from the center of the frame, taped on the camera lens, very out of focus because it is too near, a bit focus later, to disappear near the tree. No parts of the body of the camera man is visible. Behind, a wall covered with cement and some plants. Behind the wall 2 or 3 huge cold-forest trees, and behind them, more trees like them, in the shadow.; NO DOCUMENTATION AVAILABLE)

Máquina Latina (2013). A live performer follows a metronome built from his own inaccuracies, previously recorded as performance. Before the audience, the recording runs with him, as a stop-motion double, on screen: the same body, compressed in such a way that it no longer looks entirely human. This failure-based machine now governs the human, who nevertheless, unsuccessfully, tries not to fail.

The Body of Ligia (2007–2020). Ligia Lewis is simultaneously a body, a sonic cartography, an instrument, and a dancer. None of these conditions cancels the others — four simultaneous conditions coexisting without hierarchy. Ligia's bestial nudity struggles for attention, and that too is another form of simultaneous existence.

Monas (2025). An automaton built from crude mechanics — an off-center weight, irregular cams — that captures exactly what a perfect mechanism was designed to eliminate: hesitation, vulnerability, the constant tremor of a living organism. The Monas are simultaneously machines and self-portraits. The question is not whether this machine feels. It is why such simple motion makes us feel seen.

Tent Visions Series (2025). Ink drawings made at night, in the forest — not what my eyes see, but attempts to translate what my dog sees. I follow her gaze closely, her gestures of attention, her doubtful sharpness at the edge of attack, and fleeting presences begin to appear. Each piece is simultaneously a drawing and an act of attention to another species' world.

TENT VISIONS 08, 2025

These four pieces were not created in sequence. Each one is a separate attempt — a different entry into the same condition, from a different direction. For instance, Máquina Latina could have generated an entire catalogue of ensemble pieces, each one a variation on inherited failure. Or The Body of Ligia could have become a systematic exploration of the body as sonic cartography. But no: the practice does not install itself in a zone of sequential comfort. What reins the work is drive — a natural thirst. The Schwebezustand is not a methodology, not a style, not a school — it is a condition I return to, each time from a different place, requiring a different response.

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