How to get on with this? I start with a basic statement by Gene Ray talking in Greece about how modernity is questioned by the coming biospheric meltdown (and nearly continued on josh fox’s Gasland. but didn’t have time for the whole now) I step back and try to get some definitions: Are we now in the anthropocene?
This gives a kind of horizon. Well it seems to at least. But then there is the twist. The thing that comes back in very unsettling way. There is no safe point of view. It’s bound to be collective at some point. I got interested in traumas, especially of war. Since Benjamin talking about the non-experience of war. I just watched this now (in german or french, but you can hear the o-voices in english in the background): Suicidistan – The war coming home. Bringing peace and meaning in an army …
The question of the trauma, the way our minds and bodies integrate the damage appears to be a central loci to explicit and adress as far as art is concerned with experience. How do we relate to these traumas and give them way out as much as ourselves. It’s a global concern in the most material and tangible way.
On April 26th, 8pm, Mettler and Negarestani will have a public conversation via video-conference at the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne. The conversation will focus on how our most intimate corporeal and psychological constitutions have vertiginous proximities with the Earth’s cosmological history, and how we are bound through backdoor narratives and subtle complicities to the most liveless materials.
As the exhibition of the reconstruction of an exploratory oil rig in 1929 in Switzerland is heading toward its end, the installation is now covered with printed sheets, each representing a diverging narrative of the rig accumulated over time. Every two weeks a new session was published, a transcript of an analysis of Patient O by The Rig, further immersing the legacy of the rig and the modern landscape of the Pays de Vaud into more convoluted depths. The analysis ended with session VII, published on April 19th.
a gutter psychological thriller – Teaser
The fictitious dialogue is a collaboration between philosopher Reza Negarestani and artist Yves Mettler, whose architectonic sound installations focus on our built environment, bringing into light ruins, memories and fragmented narratives left on the roadside of our heterogeneous cultural history.
the drilling rig from Arnex, 1929, rebuilt on the Place Riponne, Lausanne, for the festival Les Urbaines, migrated in the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, and found a new form.
The opening of the groupshow 9=10 is Thursday, February 9th, 6.30pm.
On Thursday, April 26th, 8pm a performance / lecture will be held by Yves Mettler and Reza Negarestani (via video-conference) as the closing event for their writing collaboration.
Written as a serial publication since the beginning of Mettler’s installation, the text ‘Arnex-1: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Asphalt’ unfolds a psychoanalytical dialogue between the analyst Rig and the mysterious Patient O. Over seven psychoanalytical sessions schematizing the seven circles of hell, the dialogue unravels an aetiological examination of the memory of geological time as the twisted sum of traumatic scars left by the cosmological shock and contingent mobilization of capital. Art’s meticulous attention to the surface (landscape) parallels psychoanalysis’ dedicated focus on superficial phenomena as a means of dramatically bringing into focus transversal dynamics of depths otherwise invisible to the keenest of eyes.
Maria Nordman à Castillo Corales, cet après-midi. Quelle aubaine. Je vois des sculptures, des livres. Je rentre – et je peux les lire aussi, avec des gants. Soins et accessibilité. Je me rappelle la pièce en “dépôt” à Genève et l’effet que m’a fait cette pièce. Et puis cette histoire, pour une commande public, où elle demande de mesurer un terrain avec la portée de la voix.
Elle est là, je peux revenir pour la conférence de 15h. Je reviens, j’attends. Elle parle avec un couple, son public. Je les rejoins, je deviens aussi public. Accueil. Quelqu’un téléphone, on se resserre pour s’entendre. Et puis elle lit à haute voix avec son public les textes co-écrits de son intervention à Chartres. Spontanèment. Elle nous raconte des histoires: “It’s your christmas gift”. – comment une lettre a eu de l’effet … 20 ans après.
Le sérieux et l’enthousiasme me laisse penser à une piece en cours, elle s’appellera matter considered over suspended matter. Et puis je pense à la performance Soins Esthétiques, sur laquelle je dois revenir. La notion de public délimité y est au coeur.
Irgendwie ist Theorie und Abstraktion sehr gebunden, wenn man sie etymologische wieder zusammenstellt, was “beobachten” und “herausziehen von” sein kann. Ich denk mir das so dass in der Wahrnehmung kollektive Veränderungen stattfinden, da Wahrnehmung auch kulturell modalisiert ist. Und wenn solche Modalisierungen sich verschieben, dann gibt es immer mehrere Menschen die versuchen diese Verschiebung zu beschreiben und die nächste Modalisierung (die an diesem Zeitpunkt nicht festgelegt ist) zu antizipieren. Da findet auch ein Kampf statt. So ist Abstraktion nicht ein individuelles Delirium, sondern Ansätze diese verschiebung in der Wahrnehmung zu kollektivisieren, daher die stumme Ansprechlikeit die die Kunst haben kann.
Ich denke dass zb die Ausstellung les Immatériaux die Lyotard, u.a., in Paris in 1985 gemacht hat, einen klaren Versuch ist, die aktuelle Verschiebung zu modalisieren, formulieren und öffentlich zu machen.
Irrelevanz findet natürlich auch, wahrscheinlich oft, statt. Jedes Mal dass das kollektive in der eigene Subjektivität nicht in betracht genommen wird und im Garten des Eigenen sich verliert.
Involution ist ein Konzept das Deleuze in seinem Kurzen Text zu Foucault (Foucault ist der Titel vom Buch) nützt, und auch mit Guattari im Kapitel des Molekular-werden (1000platos). Für Sie ist die Frage so dass es kein grosses Aussen mehr gibt, aber das man das Aussen immer wieder im Inneren produziert, und so das innere unendlich vergrössert und überlappt. Es gibt keine Evolution, sondern eine unendliche Reihe von Lappungen, die unter verschiedenen Umständen auch wieder zu Licht kommen. Das habe ich versucht zu verfolgen mit Exologismen. Exologismen sind Schnittstellen die die Beziehungen zwischen Innen und Aussen modalisieren.
Filed under: statement
I will slightly change my use of this blog. I’ll open some posts which i’ll re-edit. An open notebook as long i haven’t found an on- and offline tool that allows simple notes and hypertexting and mindmapping altogehter. voilà
- Mom, what is language?
- Language is the home where mankind lives my dear.”
jl godard, “2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle”
i’ll post soon a link of an excerpt i love love love.
But my point here is another one. It is about how this home is shared. Or language. I mean, i need the other to build my language, especially it the “big” other leaves me with an insufficient language about what is happening around me and get rid of an essentialist idea of the individual.
It is like house building: how to change the way of building without imposing another system. How to start an own economy, without wanting to destroy the other before. Tryouts in France seem not really to be accepted by the one i consider for now as obsolete, not over yet. But that’s another story.
My point is to set following hypothesis: It is impossible to find a/its language without the other.
After some years of work on the urban motive, and by extension, the city, i feel like a blow of boredom covered the topic and the trend move towards new fields, fresher and more colourful. Myself i lost some confidence about the relevance of trying to keep up with this thing called city as i moved to berlin and found it hard to make any statement that wouldn’t fit into some cheap sociology. Morevover, especially for berlin, a huge work has been done on the renewal of planning and demographic observation (the website of the hauptstadt is quite well done).
Yet i can’t slip easily away from my original topos, and while i am travelling from a europe square to the next using our extensive traffic network, i read this book by Yves Pedrazzini (french only, perhaps i could make a review or resumé of it), violence of cities. There is nothing absolutely new, but it opened to me the possibility of displacing myself and my point of view on a city’s organisation, and it had a very productive reading of benjamin’s critique of violence.
Again, nothing new with this text, as it was the root where agamben found the bare life concept that founded the last documenta. But for me there is possibly another history possible, crossing over existing paths, making the experience and the knowledge more dense. The next step will be the reading of derridas Force of law, and continuing to investigate the parallels of building city, or places to live, work and struggle, and language. Which will, of course, plunge me back in the trend…
I was in Paf for the yearly shift. Good time, we watched good movies. Also Je, tu, il, elle by akermann. Please do so. It starts like an art video and end like a love story. And all by ellipses, strange disconnections between the image and the what is told.
Elliptic is also my new year feeling. For the first time i think of it as a repetition rather than a renewal. Perhaps because also we watched La Chinoise of the peak of greek protests, having in parallel the crisis emerging in China, but also perhaps being no more so young & reckless as some might think, and salute with a letter to my friends.
