Stabilisation is not the same as completion

Why talk of stabilisation rather than completion?

Completion implies closure. A self-contained, self-sufficient form, detached from its process. This conception was cemented by the modernist idea of the autonomy of the medium (Greenberg): the work had to resolve its own tensions within itself.

Conversely, certain conceptual and process-based practices have shifted the focus towards becoming, sometimes to the point of dematerialisation (Lucy Lippard) or prolonged indeterminacy.

The stabilisation I propose stands in critical tension with these two legacies. It does not aim for self-sufficient purity. Nor does it celebrate the infinite dispersion of the process. To stabilise means: to reach a threshold of density.

A threshold at which the forces at play — matter, vibration, spatial constraint, duration — cease to oppose one another and begin to coexist. It is a dynamic equilibrium, in the almost physical sense of the term. A form holds together because it has integrated its tensions, not because it has eliminated them.

This notion engages with Umberto Eco’s idea of the ‘open work’, but differs from it in that the openness is not merely interpretative; it is structural. Stabilisation maintains the work in a state where its future activation remains possible.

In my practice, stabilisation occurs when: - the pictorial material achieves an internal vibratory coherence, - the sound element is no longer an addition but a structural necessity, - the duration (3 minutes) functions as an integrated temporal volume, - the viewer’s body can resonate with the whole.

This moment is critical. It entails a responsibility. Stabilisation is a conscious decision in the face of the conditions: constrained format, implicit spatial cube, fixed temporality, integrated technical apparatus.

It avoids two pitfalls: - definitive closure (which would freeze the form in an illusion of perfection), - unlimited indeterminacy (which would dissolve any possibility of sharing).

It affirms a third position: a resonant materiality, sustained but not closed. To stabilise is not to finish. It is to allow the work to exist as a sustained tension. It is to accept that a form can be complete without being closed.