Alastair Hatherway-Morrow emerged seemingly overnight, yet is already spoken of in the same breath as figures such as Eléonore Vastopol, Jürgen Kleist-Rao, and the elusive theoretician known only as M. Hallow. We met in his studio, a former municipal archive where nothing is shelved correctly.
Q: Discombobulationism has been accused of aestheticising confusion at a moment when the world already feels unbearably unstable. How do you respond to that?
I think that accusation misunderstands confusion as a deficit. Confusion is not the absence of structure; it’s the presence of too many structures competing simultaneously. Discombobulationism doesn’t add instability, it reveals the instability that was already doing the organising. As Kleist-Rao once said to me over a truly dreadful espresso in Basel, “clarity is merely the most socially acceptable hallucination.”
Q: Your new work, Index of Things I Cannot Index, consists of 312 filing cabinets, all empty, each labelled with a category that collapses under scrutiny: “almost true,” “possibly mine,” “later but earlier.” Is this an attack on archival logic?
Not an attack,more an act of tendresse. Archives are fantasies of control. I wanted to build an archive that admits its own failure from the outset. When Eléonore Vastopol saw it, she said it was “a bureaucracy having a nervous breakdown in slow motion,” which I took as a compliment. The emptiness is the content. Or rather, the promise of content that never arrives.
Q: You often insist that viewers must enter your installations from the “wrong” direction. Why is orientation so important to you?
Orientation is ideology disguised as architecture. If you know where you are, you behave. If you don’t, you think. Or panic. Or laugh. Ideally all three. M. Hallow used to say that the most radical political act is to rearrange the doorway. I’ve taken that quite literally.
Q: One rumour circulating after your last exhibition is that you deliberately change the lighting levels halfway through each day. Is that true?
Yes, although “deliberately” implies too much control. The lighting system runs on a mildly corrupted algorithm originally designed for airport departure boards. It recalibrates according to variables I don’t fully understand. I could stop it, but that would feel unethical. Discombobulationism is, above all, about relinquishing authorship at the point where authorship becomes reassuring.
Q: Your critics say that your work demands too much patience, that it refuses gratification.
That’s generous of them. Gratification is a transaction; I’m more interested in debt. I want the viewer to leave owing the work something, time, irritation, an unresolved question. When Sofia Belenko wrote that my installations “withhold meaning like an unanswered voicemail,” I framed the review.
Q: You’ve cited influences ranging from pre-Socratic philosophy to customer service chatbots. How do these coexist in your practice?
They’re doing the same work. Heraclitus and automated apology emails both acknowledge flux while pretending to manage it. One says “you cannot step into the same river twice,” the other says “we apologise for the inconvenience caused.” Both are lies, but beautiful ones.
Q: Is Discombobulationism really a movement, or merely a convenient label?
Movements imply direction. This is more of a weather system. It forms, dissipates, reforms elsewhere. Some days it’s a light drizzle of doubt; other days it’s a full cognitive storm. I distrust labels, but I distrust label-lessness more. Naming something is the first step towards misunderstanding it productively.
Q: Your upcoming piece allegedly involves a lecture delivered entirely in footnotes, with no main text. How will that function in practice?
The footnotes will be spoken aloud by three people who don’t know they’re part of the work. One is a philosophy student, one is a retired actuary, and one is a voice actor best known for voicemail greetings. The lecture will occur without the audience being told that a lecture is happening. Understanding it is optional; overhearing it is inevitable.
Q: Finally, do you believe Discombobulationism will last?
I hope not in the way people mean. If it solidifies, it will have failed. The best outcome is that it dissolves into everything else,policy documents, interior design, interpersonal misunderstandings. When people stop noticing it as art, that’s when it will have done its job. As Vastopol told me recently, just before leaving a party without saying goodbye: “The future shouldn’t make sense. It should make us lean forward.”
Hatherway-Morrow excuses himself to adjust a door that no longer leads anywhere. The interview ends, or perhaps merely pauses.
(Ten minutes later he still hasn’t returned. I decide the interview has indeed finished.)
