Attentive Curiosity of notUnderstandingness

Denis Esakov, curator, writer, and multimedia artist. Master of Arts in Spatial Strategies, Weißensee Art Academy, Berlin. Author of the book “Attentive Curiosity of notUnderstandingness” (2022) about decolonial thinking and the research on knowledge production. Denis was born in Karakol, Kyrgyzstan, and his main research focus are decolonial thinking, knowledge and its sources.

This book is the result of my master’s work at the Weissensee Kunsthochschule. I did two years of decolonial research with the help of Bonaventure Ndikung (HKW, SAVVY), Nasan Tur (artist), Paz Guerra (HKW), and others. This book is a philosophical-poetic dialogue between me and a wide range of decolonial, feminist thinkers. It is not academic, but rather poetic and polemical. It manifests the position of misunderstanding as curiosity about the Other, about someone who perceives the world differently. From different points of view: what is the Other future? How does the Other's memory work? What is a glitch and what possibilities does the body have as a tool of cognition? One of the ideas I developed in this book is the idea of relations, which refers back to the thought of the Caribbean philosopher and poet Edouard Glissant - ‘there is no need to understand to build relations’.

I proposed to articulate the state of ‘not understanding’ as productive for the relations making in-between space of knowledge and unknown. I have already presented parts of this research in a self-published book, as a performative lecture in Citizens Art-Lab (Ateni, Georgia), and some chapters of the book on the streets in the form of a guided tour. The text was printed as posters and placed in Berlin streets that linked to it. For example, the chapter “The Right to Give a Name” was published on the Mohrenstrasse. This is the street around which the protesting community was gathered, demanding that the colonial name of the street be changed. I led several guided tours along the publication route, with readings and discussions.

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“Esakov called his final thesis “Attentive Curiosity of notUnderstandingness”. This is an eleven-chapter book in which Denis explores the current sociopolitical landscape through global phenomena such as images of the future, the apparatus of perspective, memory, images of the Other, consumerism, and others. His observations lead to the discovery of cracks in these phenomena, filled with obscurity, which produces hope for change. He calls it a glitch. The way Esakov constructs a dialogue between his text and the texts of other thinkers creates a space of togetherness. And, in my opinion, one of the important things about this book is the language. Denis writes poetically but also works with philosophical contexts and concepts. Between chapters, he inserts his poetry. He uses language itself as a glitch, as an opportunity to move beyond the limitations of that medium. His critical perspective on language, knowledge, power and social processes contributes to deepening this discourse”. – Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung (curator, author, co-founder of SAVVY Contemporary, and director at HKW, Berlin)

“Denis Esakov researches himself, a post-soviet human, through poetry. He looks at his existence from different times and spaces in an attempt to open the layers of recent history and psychology by sometimes breaking down and other times by inseparableness of Personal and impersonal, which often requires awkwardly stripping the closest people and oneself. Poet with such sincerity and broad view gives new registers to contemporary poetry and affirms the social role of poetry in our century. Denis’s texts are free from aimless sentimentalism and romanticism imposed on poets. Every page of his is saturated with the responsibility, thoughts, and feelings of a poet and a citizen of the world”. – Andro Dadiani (artist and poet, Tbilisi, Georgia)