munus II : Immunity and Community for Contemporary Healing

In Latin, “munus” is the common root of both immunity and community, signifying both gift and responsibility. This duality of the term perfectly mirrors the complex entanglements in contemporary knowledge production and community building. The munus project explores the unfinished territories of solidarity and healing, aspiring to create spaces for examining and discussing the addictive and inflammatory states within our collective culture.

Over the past two years, citing bar has attempted to build infrastructure for alternative knowledge and fluid communities, deliberately positioning itself in the wilderness beyond mainstream academic systems, exploring nomadic landscapes and ecosystems. We hope this exile from the center represents a return to everyday practice and grounded social reality. Through reading groups and various gatherings that blur the line between the private and the public spheres, through rest, poetry, science fiction, delirium, and wandering, we shed standardized modes of thinking and our addictive dependence on rationality and certainty, practicing the embrace of multiple possibilities in feeling, narrative, sharing, and documentation.

In this context, the “immunity” we seek is a capacity to face unease and disease—not only confronting the discomfort and self-doubt that comes from ambiguity and absence of a clear path, but also identifying profit-driven, cognitive capitalist modes of knowledge production and the thorny moral negotiations within them. How do we avoid appropriating “medicines” distilled from others’ suffering and claiming we can heal society with them?

As James C. Scott observed, “Only within relationships can we contemplate their implicit exclusions and contrasts.” If hardships, seen from another angle, are also gifts, how does privilege become the debt that binds us? How does selfishness become the tragedy of the weak, and collective responsibility devolve into empty rhetoric from the fortunate? When apocalyptic crises already lurk in the everyday, when body and mind always carry unnamed symptoms, how can we face the complexity of “collective” and “immunity” coexisting? 

Perhaps true solidarity is not about positing a monolithic consensus, but maintaining relationships even in moments of dispersal and separation, even in the midst of turbulence and precarious survival (*1)—still being able to gather our hearts together through tacit, serendipitous and intuitive means, so that when facing impact, we can break open and not apart. (*2) It is precisely in this mutual bearing of uncertainty that the allegory of munus reveals itself—not escaping responsibility, but redefining the boundaries of responsibility and “our” relationships.

munus is about learning to look at the uncomfortable zones of knowledge and relationships, re-examining the world through translucent lenses.(*3) We choose to take the longer route, or maintain a certain distance to contemplate those ideals that always seem to shine so easily when spoken of, while attempting to establish relationships with the world that are both distanced and interdependent. We draw inspiration from dis-ease, chaos, and friction. This exhibition is by no means a direct route to healing, but an invitation to transform encounters with each work and each passage of text into sessions of deep massage—in the awakening of soreness, the pushing through stiffness, in the process of loosening inflamed fascia, we seek possibilities for shifting impasses, discovering new vitality at the intersection of pain and pleasure.

Collaborator｜Driftting Curriculm
Sponsors｜National Culture and Arts Foundation, Department of Cultural Affairs, Taipei City Government
Equipment Sponsor｜Hung Foundation, Panasonic Taiwan

*1 Inspired by the conversation with The School of Mutants during an interview
*2 “collectivize your heart so it breaks open and not apart” quoting from Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism, written by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, 2021
*3 On Translucency by artist and writer Himali Singh Soin