Deadweight
Tarquin Charlesworth and Margarita Kontev
TCB Gallery, Melbourne
12.10.22 - 30.10.22
Give me 175 meters and I’ll give you fury. Heaps upon heaps, but the jawbone of an ass is out of reach this time. Let an 8-Ball roll in the hands of a Mystic and a Mathematician, loaded with 20 bleak consequences.
Outcome looks good, ask again tomorrow. I want to smite, all I need is 175 meters.
An earnest siege engine, a weapon that invents speed and secrecy. At the break of a dawnless day the monster is erected and prepared for battle, boasting its complacent stature.
The axioms provided by Deleuze and Guattari in Nomadology: The War Machine (1986) interpret the production of a war machine as a ubiquitous site for archaic, or nomadic, technology1. The revivalist undercurrent of medieval technology flows through the cracks of subreddits, podcasts, youtube comments and wiki fan pages in order to prompt a mindset of resurgence. Return to Tradition. Tradition in this sense was a period of dummy heuristic studies during a scientific and technological stalemate. So why recoil into obsolete feudalism? Labouring serfs were plagued by war and disease; they were superstitious. Twisted people fixated on the Iron Maiden. The boredom, ignotum per ignotius. Clergy mystics of the Dark Ages could have never foreseen English Renaissance nerd, Colin Fruze, broadcasting a fridge being launched by a mega trebuchet to 11.9 million people.
There is a shell of moral obsession covering the pros of death, war and pillage. During Ghenkis Khan’s empirical invasion of Eurasia in 1203, the Mongolian trebuchet (the mangonel) assisted in the liquidation of over 40 million civilians2. One of the first cases of practiced biological warfare, wherein infectious agents such as human cadavers and animals were catapulted over city walls to infect the population, occurred during the Siege of Kaffa in 1347. It is believed that the Black Death entered Europe by virtue of the Mongol’s germy trebuchet tactics, causing the most fatal pandemic in history.
Nevertheless one account of absolute foolery occurred late in the Siege of Tenochtitlan. A reminder that war engines are a chaotic vice for dishonourable men. Hernán Cortés and his allied armies besieged Tenochtitlan (modern day Mexico City) for 93 days in 1521. When gunpowder ran low, the Conquistadors improvised. One specific occasion is referenced in two separate narratives, one by Hernán Cortés himself3 and the second from a native ethnographer. In Cortés’ version, he writes of a loud Italian soldier who boasted knowledge of a stone throwing machine, so for two weeks a group of carpenters began working in accordance to the soldier’s orders. The trebuchet simply didn’t work, in Cortés’ eyes it was an embarrassment. In order to retain his directorial reputation, Cortés details that by being moved to compassion he was unwilling to kill all the Tenochtitlan civilians - a cover up for the failed trebuchet. Interestingly one priest and ethnographer on the Mexica side retells the construction of the machine in a different light4.The Spaniards installed a machine atop an altar platform, “when they had it ready and were about to shoot it off, they gathered around it, vigorously pointing their fingers, pointing at the people, pointing to where all the people were assembled at Amaxac”, the priest continues in judging their cockyness. In the end, the Spaniards wound up the machine in preparation to hurl the stone and when it was set off all the ballistic did was rise above the trebuchet and land straight back down, self destruction.
written by Margarita Kontev and Tarquin Charlesworth
Gallery 1:
Wrath, 2022, wood, metal, sisal rope, polyester rope
Targe 1, 2022, plywood, plaster, sugar cane mulch
Deadweight, 2022, granite, leather
Flayed Man 2, 2022, cowhide
Nomadology: The War Machine (1986) is a postmodern text written by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. They redefine the relation between the state and its war machine, here the warriors (the nomads) infiltrate the authority of the state. Deleuze and Guattari uproot military strategy, anthropology, aesthetics and history in order to devise a postmodern definition of a nomad’s war machine
Postdoctoral researchers at Stanford University conducted a scientific study on the environmental effects of Ghenkis Khan’s reign. The study estimated that the empire eradicated enough carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to offset a year's worth of the world's gasoline demand today
The Third letter of Hernán Cortés to the Emperor Charles V published in 1523 by Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro Altamirano, 1st Marquess of the Valley of Oaxaca. This text informed the Holy Roman Emperor of the territories discovered and their conquests in South America, where Hernán Cortés and his armies led an expedition that caused the fall of the Aztec Empire
Bernardino de Sahagún was a Franciscan friar, missionary priest and ethnographer. We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico (1993) collects texts from the perspective of native Nahua peoples during the the Spaniard colonisation