n-1

We call n-1 an operation of subtraction (1) from a given set (n).

As a method that removes a piece, an element, a room, a function, or a protagonist from a given context to reset its relations and structures, we think of n-1 as a politics of form. n-1 are minor interventions that, yet, allow for new connections and potentially more open social, political, and aesthetic concepts and spaces.

In our artistic, architectural, and curatorial work that reflects and produces space through various media, n-1 constitutes a fundament; “The house Alice Built” (2018) directly reflects on it in an archival installation.“Köçek Pisti” (2016) produces a dance floor, while subtracting its main figure, the dancer/köçek. “Here and Where” (2019) develops the concept for an exhibition without objects.

n-1 is a crucial method in our work as it opposes minimal difference to maximal destruction and therefore creates an alternative to modernity’s “destructive character” (Walter Benjamin): those utopian aspirations of total reduction and the tabula rasa that have been regarded as bound up with paternalistic, colonial, and totalitarian attitudes. n-1, for us, has the potential to find a gap in “the history we live, the history that has been imposed on us, [that] is nothing other than the result of the other histories that this very history had to oust in order to affirm itself.” (Carmelo Bene)

Among others, we have been looking at two particular cases that apply the n-1 method:
the kitchenless house (1915) by Alice Constance Austin (1862–1955) and the antirepresentational theater by Carmelo Bene (1932–2002).

The kitchenless house (1915) is an architectural project by architect Alice Constance Austin (1862–1955) that eliminates the kitchen from the apartment.
It is set up for the cooperative community Llano del Rio near Palmdale, California, together with a socialist communal government advocating economy of labor, materials, and space against land privatization and speculation.

The whole community is structured around the kitchenless house that should be connected to a central kitchen through underground tunnels.
Railway cars from the center of the city are to bring cooked food and laundry to the basement of each house.

Beyond its feminist intention to communalize and professionalize invisible and unpaid reproductive work, the kitchenless house implies other (utopian) and more open social relations: between the family and the community, between the private and the public.

The commons should not just be the central element of an alternative economy, but also the medium through which the social is translated.

The adaption of Shakespeare’s Richard III (1977) by Carmelo Bene subtracts the male authority figures from the play: The amputation that leaves Richard and the female characters on the stage is an activity directed against the original text and the power that resides within it.

In Bene’s version, the female becomes a creature who does not cease to appear as child, mother, wife, seductress, victim, and warrior in an endless series of transformations. She silences Richard in his famous opening line “for at least fifteen minutes.”

Deleuze describes Bene’s method of subtraction with Romeo and Juliet:
“He does not proceed by addition, but by subtraction, by amputation. […] he amputates Romeo, he neutralizes Romeo in the original play. So the whole play, because it now lacks a part chosen nonarbitrarily, will perhaps tip over, turn around on itself, land on another side.“

Subtraction is, in both cases, a vitalist, not a negative, form: the operations of elimination and amputation, activates “potentialities of becoming.” It is capable of creating spaces of independence and autonomy from the dominant laws of the situation.

While Romeo is eliminated from the scene, the minor figure Mercutio, who dies quickly in Shakespeare, undergoes an immense development. When the kitchen is removed from the house, the space of the inner patio turns into an open zone free of any fixed function, use and connection to social roles. In both cases there are created independent spaces, where elements of power are destabilized and resistance seems possible.