In early December 2013 Snejanka Mihaylova led a three-day seminar for a group of participants. The seminar followed a residency period with the art initiative Beirut in Cairo, Egypt, as part of Snejanka's current commission Inner Stage with If I Can't Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution. This report attempts to describe what happened from the vantage point of my own participation.

We were a group composed of about twelve participants, each with our own individual investments in art or the cultural field. The gatherings took place at different locations every day, which meant that each time we had to establish a familiarity with the place and find our sense of comfort as a group. Snejanka offered her developing research as material to work with, and during the first two days guest speakers were invited to talk about their work in relation to the seminar contents. This way, a set of ideas could extend from Snejanka's interests in the nature of the thinking process and her understanding of knowledge, to the significance of voicing and listening, and the meaning of faith. I will try to explain this first with a descriptive report of the events of the three-days, and then by offering some further indications of its contents.

Day 1

The first day of the Inner Stage seminar takes place at the Coptic Museum that houses Egyptian Christian artifacts and keeps the Nag Hammadi library.I We meet outside and sit down in a circle on the ground in the courtyard, enclosed by the museum walls and several columns and objects that are on display there. Although we are being monitored by the museum's guards, we manage almost from the beginning to envelope ourselves in the material with such concentration, that for most of the time we are left undisturbed. In this courtyard Snejanka speaks about her interest in the early Christian period when conflicting religious ideas co-existed with each other, for instance about the nature of Christ as human or divine, the meaning of suffering and the figure of the woman. Surrounding us are several signs of the fertile spirit of that time: the ornaments on the facade of the building and the artifacts next to us testify to a complex intermingling and development of beliefs. During a tour of the museum Snejanka points out other pieces to us that, for example, display Greek deities alongside pharaonic ones within a single relief or tombstone, or involve motifs such as the shell, the grapevine and the cross, that later take on distinct meanings in Christian symbolism.

Guest speaker and Anthropologist of Religion, Fouad Halbouni, tells us more about this period of religious thought and practice that is known as 'gnosticism'.II He also tells us the story of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi papers and what happened to them after they were found. From there we return to Snejanka's research, which has focused on a book included in the Nag Hammadi library; the Gospel of Thomas. This is a gospel that has no narrative, but consists of 114 sayings of Jesus Christ written down by Thomas. Over the ensuing days we will continue to study these sayings and their meanings.

Day 2

The second day takes place in one of the exhibition spaces of Beirut, in a room that invokes associations with a chapel due to its arched entrance, the big window at the back, and the echo we hear when we speak. Snejanka begins the day by showing some photographs taken of icons in the Coptic churches of Cairo, figures with open arms that signify a gesture of praying. For her this gesture connects to a state of reception, a notion she introduced the previous day and will return to in the seminar. She also asks the group to think about what we can identify with in the Gospel of Thomas, apart from the religious and historical frameworks it exists in.

This day is constructed around voicing and the act of pronouncing. Composer and choreographer, Adham Hafez, presents his study into sound and utterances, symbols and transcripts. He talks about  levels of symbolic meaning, linguistic meaning, and the meaning of sound in a text, and how writing can keep or obscure information. One of his examples pertains to an alternative notation system for music that leaves a lot of room for doubt. He talks about the role of improvisation in the Arab musical tradition, and the practice of 'sultana' – a moment of improvisation within the scale of the song, when the performer 'rules' the music. It is a fleeting moment of enjoyment or self-indulgence that creates a shared experience of ecstasy with the listener.

Adham leads us into voicing exercises. As a group we try to sing different vowels that settle on a tone. In another exercise we pair up to face another participant and attune to a single pitch. When the same pitch is reached by two persons, the sound seems to dissolve. At this point a tenuous excitement to voicing is felt in the group, though we are certainly not completely at ease. Snejanka then introduces a music recording of one of the sayings from the Gospel of Thomas, arranged by her collaborator Lisa Holmqvist. We sing along with the music together.

Day 3

The third day of the seminar we gather on the balcony of one of the apartments next to Beirut, overlooking its garden. The day opens with a reading from an essay of Martin Buber on the double meaning of faith. Though Snejanka goes over more of the sayings of Thomas, this day is entirely open for the participants to speak and respond to the material covered in the previous days. We discuss several points from the text, concerning the renunciation of power, layers of reality, the divided self and self-discovery, the figures of childhood and nudity, among other things. We all contribute with questions or comments that relate to our own beliefs and backgrounds. We don't resolve anything and don't come to any conclusions. At the end of the day the overwhelming impression is one of a shared process that we have gone through as a group.

Reflections

Over the days I began to understand Snejanka's research into the Gospel of Thomas as more of a pretext, an opening into the matter that she wanted to discuss with us, and while it is important to be precise and specific about what this research is, it is also something that we can see as a particular form that contains her interest, but in fact does not fully contain it.

An important part of the seminar was dedicated to close reading, the study of the text of the Gospel and its meaning. We were handed a copy of a selection of the sayings from the Gospel of Thomas, and were invited to read them together and on our own following the session. Each day Snejanka discussed a subject matter from the text, and quoted from it extensively. We were however not trying to interpret or even comprehend the text in terms of its religious or historical meanings, nor were we taking any poetic liberty with its contents. We were rather attempting to encounter several key ideas that are expressed in the text, and to grapple with its propositions as they appeared to us, taking our cue from Snejanka who introduced us to these ideas and was already intimate with the text.

It is perhaps helpful to understand the ideas we discussed in the seminar as 'propositions', because they indeed seemed to 'emit' something to us, like a proposal we had to consider and perhaps respond to. My account of these propositions is reliant on my personal understanding of them and I imagine each participant had a slightly different understanding.

The first proposition that Snejanka pointed out to us was that of a 'living knowledge', which she believes is presented in the Gospel through Jesus Christ as a figure of knowledge. By connecting knowledge to Jesus, a confluence of knowledge and living being occurs, with knowledge 'incarnated' or unified with being. In addition, when Thomas addresses Jesus as 'the living', this choice of phrase describes a life that is still taking place, or that is perhaps perpetually present, regardless of whether the person Jesus was still alive at the time of writing. Thomas names light and fire as 'images of the living' that are inside us, as well as all around us in the world, and that need to be seen. Snejanka emphasized this point, because it connects to the mode of knowing that has to be adopted to gain access to it. If knowledge and being are one, then we can recognize that knowledge instead of acquiring it or discovering it outside ourselves. What is necessary is to make oneself susceptible. This is not a susceptibility 'towards something', but a relation that is in and of itself.

It remains difficult for me to understand this idea of susceptibility or reception, and while the Gospel contains indications for how to 'know', they are in quite enigmatic terms. For instance, we read sayings that pertain to 'seeking' and 'finding' as one and the same thing instead of stages that follow each other. A person who seeks will find, but you need to be seeking in order to find. The Gospel also insists on the importance of looking and listening and proposes a particular manner of how to do that. It does not work to look out at something that will appear to you. You have to look at what is already there and what that is, recognizing what you see. 

Snejanka explained that there is no temporal development in the Gospel of Thomas, but rather a state of thought, a being in direct contact to a place from where it is possible to know. The Gospel suggests this thinking takes place in the whole of your being, and involves an active knowing of all the levels in which you are engaged. We struggled to understand this, but Fouad offered some helpful reflections too. He told us that the notion of 'revelation' in the Gnostic texts can be understood as a light thrown from outside, that always shows things are otherwise and cannot be taken for granted. The gospels evoke, they don't explain, and ultimately have to be 'lived'.

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It may be helpful to consider further the relationship between the seminar contents and the way the seminar was shaped. Certainly there were a couple of set ingredients: daily introductions and discussions led by Snejanka, different guest speakers, locations, etc. But with these conditions, Snejanka was also interested to allow the ideas we discussed to be explored and enacted within the meetings themselves. The key propositions we approached in the text concerning listening, speaking, singing, thinking, trusting, seeking, were all 'happening' in the seminar as well. We listened to one another, we sang together after some trust was built between us, and we pursued the ideas in our minds. Content and form could fall together to deepen one another. Although it sounds like a simple parallel to draw, it was not apparent that it would be achieved as it did.

If all of this seems obscure or like I'm talking 'around' what happened, then that is probably correct to a certain extent, and it testifies to the fact that I can't pretend to fully understand all that was proposed. It is also indicative of the difficulty of thinking through propositions located in an early Christian text that we tried to grasp in the present day, across a great deal of time and in another space – though we were geographically in the country where the text was found, it is a different place today. Sometimes we had trouble getting into the heart of the matter, since it was easier to get distracted, confused, or to hone in on a detail. The propositions seemed to belong to a different epistemology, to a theory of knowledge that most of us were not familiar with.

For me it was a struggle to think in a different way from how I am trained, to let go of certain convictions of how to understand this knowledge without the tools for learning that I know, because they are inadequate to help me understand. I think everyone found this difficult, and not without risk, because what measure do we have for knowledge if we cannot depend on the categories that we know and agree upon? How can we communicate about this with each other? And most of all, if we manage to take up the proposition of experiencing knowledge as a 'state', and we adopt this disposition with our entire being, what will we recognize? At the least it requires vulnerability and an acceptance of uncertainty.

What reverberated strongly with me is that Snejanka pointed out that the Gospel of Thomas originated in the period when Christianity was taking shape and is part of that tradition, even if it persisted as 'heresy' for a long period. That tradition still informs our present day. The knowledge that is proposed in the Gospel may appear obscure to us now, but perhaps it is a mode of knowing that we have lost touch with. If we manage to reconnect to it, adopting a welcoming state, we may  ourselves be like an abode where unexpected thoughts can reside.

Tanja Baudoin, January 2014