User’s Manual for Run-Ups

Notes for a preliminary study aimed at creating a practical guide to what might be useful to know beforehand

It can happen that you get lost.

It can happen that you get lost even before you start getting lost.

It can happen that you get lost between saying and doing.

The run-up is that moment of standing on the threshold before the impact, before an event, a regime change or a shift in opinion regarding wine or aubergines.

It is about taking a step back: to see the horizon, space and time more clearly.

It is about seeking the whole, by isolating oneself, only to then be able to run into or through it.

It is the analysis of that suspended moment: before a “before” and before an “after”, perhaps even after an “after”, though this is neither assured nor advisable.

These notes, gathered during an unspecified period of research, focus on that act of withdrawing and stepping back from common dynamics, in order to realign oneself through an inner evolutionary shift; perhaps seemingly invisible, or perhaps sparkling, gigantic, cumbersome, or light, but always involving a shift.

The active preparation that leads up to a departure point is therefore taken into consideration. It need not necessarily be a specific number (the starting point), nor does it have to be clear and defined.

[fig. 1] (Readers on mobile phones should be aware that the images have landed at the bottom of the page. They are precisely where they want to be. Readers on computers should keep in mind that the images can: keep you company, distract from stopwatches and foreshadow digressions. They are precisely what they want to be)

CONTEXT

The compilation of a guidebook proved to be a useful way of keeping track of what had been learned and collecting all the information gathered during the exploration of the run-up profession.

This research, in fact, is part of a larger orchestration of a highly serious, fictitious PhD project set in the context of subjectivity and work; it explores human identity as a precarious entity in a system obsessed with productivity. The project shifts the focus away from work performance as a measure of personal worth and instead turns its attention to aspects often considered trivial, such as error, distraction, curiosity and breaks, viewing them as aesthetic and cognitive material. The research explores a constellation of “anonymous professions”, imaginary and marginal occupations conceived as poetic-performative devices that bring to light hidden dimensions of the relationship between identity and work. These investigations give rise to transmedia and analytical practices (performative activities involving photography, video, installations, web pages, digital archives and participatory events) combining theoretical research with artistic production.

The research adopts a meta-critical perspective on the doctoral framework, based on Derrida's deconstruction and a post-qualitative approach, in order to examine academic protocols and metrics. The doctoral candidate maintains a positional stance [1], becoming both the subject and object of the study [2]. Artistic practice is adopted as a vehicle for knowledge [3], a way of rethinking the relationship between identity and work, highlighting inactivity, play and failure as fundamental aspects of subjectivity. The following article, written in January 2025 for the Root§Routes magazine, provides a more detailed account of the research behind this aleatory doctorate:

Root§Routes Magazine - Relazione sull'avanzamento di Relazione sull’avanzamento di ricerca della coesistenza tra l’effimero e l’umano attraverso il suo riconoscimento per mezzo di quella condizione identificativa chiamata lavoro

(it is not necessary to read this; it is simply to give readers the opportunity to torture themselves a little further with other crystallised imaginings of mine)

Anonymous professions question not only human labour, but also its centrality within hierarchies of gender, class and background, challenging established roles and performance standards, drawing on what “still is” a potential and transcending the myth of immediate productivity.

The run-up is not universally recognised as productive; on the contrary, it is often taken for granted; it frequently risks not being properly safeguarded, and people are unprepared to be part of it (the run-up), being pulled in different directions by various hyper-performative pressures.

METHODOLOGY

So far, the research has produced partial results (and nothing more), several dead ends and no definite conclusions. This collection of findings does not represent an absolute truth, but merely a set of notes on what has been observed during a period of sporadic research. The information may prove useful; it can certainly be expanded and improved. For the time being, this preliminary study is being offered carefree.

A run-up is a common practice. The doctorate itself is a run-up. Looking back in order to move forward, gathering energy, becoming aware of the horizon of one’s feelings and of past and inner ambitions, as well as of other landscapes (which inevitably surround every run-up, whether one likes it or not). One set of things that will not be analyzed here concerns what is and is not a run-up; that is personal business and it’s is better not to go there.

This is only a preliminary study for designing a user’s manual for what anyone may recognize as a run-up. Manuals usually come with rules and conventions meant to reduce friction in reading, but friction also needs protecting (friction), because it is precisely that thing that charges the leap at the end of the run-up (still talking about the friction).

The sections into which the following notes are divided are therefore meant to guide, vaguely, the interpretation of the indomitability of run-ups.

There is also the figure of the Supervisor, invented yet invasive, whom I have tried to ignore here out of spite and rebellion after his swaggering disappearance over the past few weeks, justified by a: “…you’ll manage, just remember the third person…”.

PURPOSE – To identify the run-up

A run-up is made up of a certain number of backward steps, sometimes without turning around, in order to gather energy, momentum.

A useful figure for understanding it is a coil spring; once compressed, it converts and releases energy. The spring’s run-up allows it to exist as a “spring”.

Quite a few similarities have been observed (abstract ones too, let’s admit it, but no less true for that) with artistic research and perhaps with research in general. The idea of the spring is especially close to the PhD research that has been staged as described above (thinking about it even more carefully, the PhD research can also be part of one great run-up - exploration after exploration and rethinking after rethinking). Even if there were a desire to hand yourself over permanently to a “job” - the kind you can end up in without any run-up, by guaranteed inertia, and that can secure “adulthood” with very little effort - it has still become clear that a run-up is necessary. It is needed to make it truly credible, as fiction (that “job” as understood above). So these notes piled up here may as well be given a chance.

Within a broader spectrum, the wider basin of human culture holds the residues of every being’s run-ups. Useful pieces of information that help with orientation even when they do not offer complete answers.

A digression could be made here on the question of human legacy; a digression could indeed be made. It is not the case. It was, but it no longer is. Anyone interested should ask the leaves, great examples of generational turnover, aware of the perishability of time and of the weight they bear for one another and for the rest of the biocenosis, even after their abscission from the shrub to which they belonged (digression carried out with some success, it would seem).

For the following sections, the advice of totemic figures – people and not only people – was taken on board; suggestions and visions were absorbed from them, then reworked and arranged in the form of a list.

Advices of totemic figures - people and not only people - was taken on board, absorbing suggestions and visions along the way. In the following sections, the notes from these pieces of advice are presented as lists, in a vaguely scattered order.

[fig. 2]

RISKS AND AMBIGUITIES – To guard against the distortions of the run-up

• It is crucial to recognize when a state of run-up is taking place, because it may go unnoticed. It is precisely there, when the world moves at another rhythm, that preparation becomes necessary, using not only patience and concentration but also a slingshot, if needed (how it may prove useful will be clarified later);
• Remember that a run-up is being taken. There may be moments when it slips into second, third, or even fourth place, but there is no need to go beyond that, otherwise it gets forgotten (maximum fourth order of priority, remember: four, like those four flavours of ice cream there has never been enough courage to ask for at the gelateria);
• Know that some people are reached by death while they are taking a run-up. Better to avoid it, but it depends on what is being aimed at, in terms of being and/or having. There are also those who have death to reach by means of the run-up. Different thrusts and different temporalities;
• Avoid remaining possessed for too long by the spirit of the spinning top: that is a risk when many run-ups are being taken at the same time. For all their efforts, spinning tops remain mostly still. That alone may even be pleasing. But apparently, if more “uproar” is wanted, becoming a tornado is required. This can be achieved through a certain collaboration with weather systems (future colleagues), less solipsism, more attention to circumstance, and broad freedom to be distracted (even candidly);
• It is structural not to mistake a run-up for a run. The first one is pre-production, the second one is production. Accurate information is not yet available, but they are certainly different from each other - however much the run carries aspects of the run-up with it, develops some of them, and forgets others;
• Be aware that a run-up can be taken in order to collide. Here the bumper car may really help as an allegorical image, since it actually begins as a vehicle for “dodging” (it would be fun to have a micro-user’s-manual for the run-up to dodging, or better still for the collision run-up - for entering contexts noisily - but there is no time. The job of inertia will be explored further on, in another context);
• Take on the risk of complex run-ups because with some things <<…you can think about it later, for now this attempt will stay with you as experience, and the worst that can happen is that you enjoy yourself…>> as one of the totemic figures puts it;
• Getting rid of accessory impediments that seem liberating but actually slow things down. They are not always easy to identify, and to help (up to a point) in understanding what they might be, here are some examples encountered so far: welcoming farewells (the formulaic kind), spirited drinks stripped of sugars and caffeine and calories and dignity, one spare wheel, two spare wheels, a borrowed face, out-of-season jackets, medals for valour, asparagus, shoehorns, expired recipes, dreams of fake eco-sustainable pools, classic pool dreams, pool dreams for giving yourself an air, other people’s jobs that have already worn themselves out, other people’s jobs that have already exhausted the trade itself, informational pamphlets, clods of native soil, dysfunctional funnels, icebreakers (not the action, the ship), photos of other people’s sunsets, memories of almost having been captured by bees, a passion for files, extremely fragile coasters, and desks used like parachutes. It may be convenient to get rid of them quickly, with the exception of the asparagus, which deserves more prolonged reflection;
• Know how to reckon with post-run-up disappointment;
• Take the dangerousness of writing into account. It is a run-up, a looking-back-at-yourself in order to see better and do better. This very run-up toward the preparation of the manual, for example, is a preparation that fully assumes the risk of thinking dangerously about itself (this point may make the Supervisor angry, since it goes against his ideology concerning metalanguage, which he sees as risky and overused. He could be right, but he ghosted the entire writing of the article - there is no wish to chase him anymore, who does he think he is in the end, him and his research on peat bogs in Orbetello that nobody cares about - perhaps because in the end it turns out that he is the ghost – it will be clear later of which ghost this reference is).

Digression that will turn out to be legitimate close to the end:

Another dynamic that may make the Supervisor angry is the further use of a hyperlink (it is not even the last):

Excuses to not go to war

This is a website designed in 2022 to investigate the job of apology. The run-up had probably already ended, but it was prolonged out of insecurity and fussiness. Although it once provided excellent excuses for not going to war - finely worked out, and appropriately attuned to the cultural baggage of the undersigned and of a faithful excuse-smith collaborator - they now come across as confused and tired. Technological changes and other, more urgent run-ups have blurred and distanced this run-up. In the meantime, it has become no longer quite so necessary, no longer in that form.

Too much run-up was taken. Without knowing when would have been enough. Everything fell apart before the beginning. Now the site needs to be reconsidered and another, more imposing, run-up must begin in order to realign with new questions around the job of apology.

SUGGESTIONS – To understand oneself within the run-up

• Avoid taking a run-up with your hands idle, especially if they are someone else’s;
• Think about possibilities that haven’t happened yet but are already ready to be born;
• Start from the crumbs: whatever you have can be useful and is enough to begin, whatever anyone says;
• Carve out time to sleep;
• Prepare a counter-ambush for patronage, even in open calls, even when it is called a “referral” or an “intercession,” even when it works in your favor, even when it happens by mistake, even when it has been mythologized, even when it is a matter of fashion, extractivism, favoritism, or boredom;
• Wear sunscreen;
• Let ideas precipitate, and maybe admire them while they do;
• Ask yourself which superpowers ou would want for the first 30 minutes after waking up: answer first on instinct and then thoughtfully. Those two answers, or more, will help you clarify which way the run-up is going, or would like to go. If that isn’t enough, it may help to ask the same question to other figures (more or less close, more or less human) and notice how each answer reveals necessities and discomforts to be resolved or fulfilled through their own run-ups; comparison can strengthen or annihilate the meaning of this whole manual that is being assembled here;
• Don’t justify the run-up;
• The improbable unions of apparently distant words (does distance between words really exist?);
• Compose lists of lists;
• Recognize references (even in aerial roots and in processes of geological stratification);
• Start again from the Messinian crisis, if necessary;
• Detach yourself from the label-loving passion for the run-up phases (they are shades, and it is pointless trying to name and order them, it is fine like that);
• Imagine yourself post-run-up;
• Notice which parts of the body feel social pressure and keep them in check in the most disparate ways possible (even through the dopamine released by the explosion of one or more dance-floor firecrackers);
• Refine the ideas for the de-construction of a manifesto in “perpetual errata corrige” to be carried forward with an artistic duo such as UCCI UCCI;
• Calmly put your own code forward again even if it has “expired,” defying untimeliness. This could even open a new inexhaustible breach for the creation of unprecedented codes;
• Know that, apparently, destiny does not move on tracks but through interstices and margins;
• Don’t forget that emptiness defines fullness and vice versa. They exist by drawing one another;
• Map social geographies (when and where possible);
• Equip yourself with a slingshot (if it really feels urgent) and take the run-up while also taking aim: a matryoshka of backward movements that might help the thrust and shatter the horizon;

A digression, now indispensable, on the slingshot:

A slingshot can be built by hand according to your own needs and it will not be described here, for reasons of inconvenience, ignorance, and a lack of presumption about how to assemble an object in order to launch yourself so intimately.

The slingshot helps focus on a specific target, with finer precision regarding which part of yourself you want to project elsewhere. It can therefore be used either by taking a run-up one piece of yourself at a time, or by catapulting one element ahead on reconnaissance and seeing how it reacts, in order to understand what to do next.

• Weigh the power of the incommunicability of the end;
• Orchestrate a small botanical problem (the terebinth and the lentisk come into conflict easily, and they can be practised with);
• Ask the badgers <<Is this a case for a run-up?>>. They take run-ups in different directions, even vertically, even liminally, even between the world of the living and the dead, even between the conscious and the subconscious, and they always know how to identify who is in that state and when it might be useful to be there (in the run-up). They also always know how to distinguish “below” from “above” (“outside” from “inside”), which is by no means a given;
• Accept the solstices;
• Thank punctuation for everything it does (and doesn’t do);
• Take an interest in an unworthy enmity between a badger and a ghost (if the occasion arises);
• Forget the ghost and its absence-presence, and then absence again, and throw yourself blindly into the badger’s tunnels for an interview about its peaceful way of living run-ups between worlds;
• Overwrite annoying memories (there are many conflicting views on this, but for the record it is reported here);
• Put yourself in the shoes of a crepuscular Prince Sugo, forced into being such by familial chains despite being ideologically opposed to red sauces. It can help in understanding how to take run-ups when there is little room for manoeuvre and many suffocating responsibilities;
• Appropriate tragedy and wear it differently through play;
• Note down, in the form of a collaborative list, what may be harmful in certain run-ups of other people, so as not to be polluted or badly influenced by them, while paying attention not to fall into prejudice or turn the gathering of such Red Flags into a job of its own;
• Apologize;
• Notice stable changes. As with infants’ shoes, which are humanizing even though they are not used for walking in the world. Little shoes are useful even if they are extremely ephemeral; they last only the time of a sneeze before becoming tight, before dream and desire grow and show themselves again and again;
• Remember to sort out the shoes (whatever form of footwear it may be, whatever kind of bare foot may be involved, whatever kind of prosthesis, or whatever figurative or real limb feels appropriate). A good run-up should happen without thinking about shoes, with as much mental space as possible left to listen for the arrival of future dimensions of the self. It should be kept in mind that even if the foot no longer grows, freedom of passage must still be granted to new inner dreams and external stimuli;
• Forgive yourself and other people except: the overbearing, the quarrelsome, the nihilistic, and the cruel (the list is extremely long, but here it is presented in “agile” form);
• Listen to inner necessities with whatever tools are available (make them as needed if they are lacking);
• Listen with hearing too (without taking it for granted behind a pair of headphones that hide tinnitus and social masks);
• Accept the upheaval;
• Look for a game with luck. If needed, sidestep it by turning it into “bad luck” through a random draw, which might hand over those fateful unconfessable secrets of other people’s run-ups to the un-lucky people taking part in the game. Under that pretext, admire other people’s happiness (hopefully) omnisciently;
• Make room for the sedimentation of other run-ups, someone (the Supervisor) says that <<…o life is only a “peat bog” of run-ups…>> (a deposit of different kinds of vegetation from the landscape which, year after year, layer after layer, composes peat; therefore run-ups accumulate one on top of another, both the active and the inactive ones, and they identify people by guiding their actions. Final citation from the thought of the above-mentioned Supervisor);
• Do not disdain dialogue with dragons and other mythological figures. Where necessary, for the conversation, set boundaries and get help from whatever friendships there may be with the sun (the one inside and the one outside, trying to recognize its central weight and its guidance, if possible);
• Slow down when tiredness is felt;
• Feed yourself. Not only on mental spirals but also on satisfying food and concoctions, better still if socially shared;
• Consider the example offered by entrance halls, especially regarding suspension before entry into the world (useful when it is hard to trust transitions, and the more peaceful run-ups, too);
• Take care of the run-up space and clean it carefully;
• Defend the anonymity of certain seasonal run-ups too: it is possible to make sandwiches and ice cream for six months of the year and then overturn the system during the other six, creating identity-laden memories and the beginnings of new run-ups, your own and other people’s (an important suggestion when you live on a peninsula, even more so if you live on a peninsula within the peninsula, and even more so if that peninsula has been reclaimed with golden sand described as <<…highly attractive to tourists. Suitable for all peninsulas within peninsulas trying to make a name for themselves.>>);
• Open the floodgate of emotion if that song comes on in those headphones mentioned above (entirely doable even without song and headphones);
• Accept that the future already leaves traces in the present;
• Make yourself into the run-up;
• Enjoy the world upside down a little longer while stepping backwards;

[fig. 3] 

SUCCESS CRITERIA – For noticing when the run-up is enough

• It would be healthy to understand when enough has been done for the run-up ((here the digression placed at the end of the RISKS AND AMBIGUITIES section gains legitimacy, though perhaps it loses its meaning as a digression). It is also possible to “find yourself enough” because a deadline is approaching, or because of other vicissitudes. But when is it that you realize the run-up has been successful? No satisfying epiphanic illumination has yet arrived. A matter of figures? Always the same ones? No, it is not an economic matter (in most cases).
• It may be beneficial to understand that the best situation would be to find yourself enough at the most “opportune” moment, but apparently only some people have unlocked that soft skill, and they are not always able to apply it, nor to pass it on. The data show that it requires years of training and a readiness for diagonal steps or, better put, diagonal run-ups.
• It may prove useful to some possible consequences of being unable to quantify the enoughness of a run-up:
• Ending up in the wrong place at a limp moment, without knowing how to orient yourself properly;
• Strong wind causing you to lose just enough balance to lose all the calculations you had made;
• Renewal of the starting point because of a PNRR redevelopment plan: it gets moved, making the run-up now almost useless and in need of recalculation. If the starting point has been eliminated, concreted over, disinherited, or shattered, it is better to reassess whether to take that run-up now and whether to take that run-up at all anymore (probably, though maybe not);
• If the run-up is taken with a slingshot: the elastic may snap and send the run-up backwards in the opposite direction, a whip effect that may be pleasing, or not;
• If the run-up is taken with a slingshot: muscular tension is not infinite and energies must be calibrated, otherwise the body is immobilized by cramps while the parallel planes that were meant to be flung toward disappear into the distance, or disappear close by. It does not matter where they disappear, because at that point launching is no longer possible and aim has to be taken again;
• If the run-up is taken with a bumper car: sparks are not a sign of success, not entirely at least. You are still in the run-up in that case (if what is throwing sparks is not the system feeding the thrust but a garment or something else, then perhaps yes, success in the run-up has been achieved – but at what price?);
• It is crucial to be attentive to the moment when that question - the one that originally led to stepping backwards - begins to become just barely visible, like the silhouette of a fossil tree you approach in the fog. That might be somewhere near the end of the run-up. The question does not have to be clear, the tree does not have to present itself, and for now there does not even need to be the shadow of an answer. There will be time, afterwards, to see it better (the question) and to understand whether that species is extinct or still circulating (the tree), but after the run-up.

[fig. 4]

CONCLUSIONS

This final section of the article is contradictory. It does not really come to a conclusion.

There is not enough data to declare the matter closed, to determine when a run-up is sufficient, and to begin writing a proper “User's Manual for Run-ups”.

The missing information is substantial and essential, and there is too much at stake to ignore this aspect. The manual is not yet ready to be written, and it is unclear whether it will ever be.

Therefore, readers are asked to take a closer look and contribute their own insights on the run-up, so that we can collectively gain a better understanding of when a run-up is successful (while remaining aware that there is never an end to run-ups):

[Google form for sharing your own method for seeing the end of the run-up]

Notes will continue to be collected and will remain in this form until further notice; they will never become rules or dogma. Unfortunately, and thankfully, only a few of the exact words needed to make reality clear are known.

For now, the only clear fact is that between saying and doing lies a vaguely planned run-up, so as to get lost more consciously (even at sea).

Footnotes

[1] Cimoli, A. C. e Tollari A. FARE MONDI. Tra ricerca e fabulazione. roots§routes magazine, https://www.roots routes.org/anno-15-n-47-gennaio-aprile-2025-fare-mondi/

[2] Derrida, Jaques (2002). L’università senza condizione. Raffaello Cortina

[3] Lather, P., & St. Pierre, E. A. (2013). Post-qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 629–633. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2013.788752

NOTES

a. When slingshots were mentioned, this did not refer to drugs or partisan guerrilla chants, but at most to acts of vandalism involving involving the triggering of mould spores and seeds;

b. When inner things were mentioned, what was meant were things to care for, not things to be cured from;

c. The extensive use of parentheses will provoke the Supervisor’s wrath: he cannot bear them when they are used as a manifestation of the subconscious (…);

d. The images were all conceived, photographed, post-produced and selected with the approval of all the skies featured in the backgrounds;

e. If one really wishes, given that the answers are not yet available – and perhaps never will be – question marks may be added to each point on the various lists. It is a game that may open up other perspectives; perhaps it will lift a few veils;

f. The run-up of the waves and of the sea has not been taken into consideration, so far: reference may be made to the great example of delicate irreducibility that is the white tide, protagonist of countless powerful run-ups;

g. There is a bibliography, but it is posthumous, arbitrary and brief, a sort of reading list to be consulted while preparing for a run-up. In such cases, it is best to issue a warning;

h. Goodbye, so be it;

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