Continuously growing horizontal underground stems: Geopoetics in times of anthropocene

 

Anthropocene is the new geological epoch of our planet. As hinted at by its ancient Greek root of anthropos (άνθρωπος), it is the age of humans. Today, humans hold the position of the main powers shaping the Earth. According to some authors, the beginning of this era dates back to the end of the 18th century when Watt’s invention of the steam engine opened the gates of the industrial revolution and fossil fuels became the drivers of early capitalism. The aroma of burnt oil products has since then become our daily companion. Other scientists place the turning point between the Anthropocene and the preceding epoch of Holocene (which started at the close of the most recent glacial period) in the 20th century. Sometimes they even cite a very concrete date – namely July 16th 1945, when the first atomic bomb was detonated as part of tests carried out in New Mexico. The invisible, thin layer of radioactive substances which enveloped the planet after the explosion, has been forever imprinted in the future layers of the Earth’s core, which will be studied one day by geologists of the distant future in their core samples.

 

As it tends to happen with technology, new inventions generate new accidents. What Chernobyl means for nuclear energy, climate changes means for technologies driven by fossil fuels. The way we approach our future can therefore leave nothing to chance – we must plan, think, recalculate and contextualize our existence within the planetary ecosystem. That is why we need radical political and technological imagination which pulls down the ideas of what the limits and possibilities of individual human bodies are. The theoretician Benjamin H. Bratton even challenges the humankind to engage with prudence in the practice of committed geodesign to avert the impending ecological disaster. In other words – we need more daring geopoetics and less stupid geoengineering. This calls for sensible interfaces set up for the frequencies of interspecies diplomacy, which may include the use of the Sun as the supreme source of energy for human and extra-human activities, from the level of individual cells through our bodies to large collectives of heterogeneous agents.

 

The Anthropocene is a daunting epoch, anticipated and ushered in by the horrors of modernization. Modernization took many shapes and forms and we intentionally opt for a very non-Western variant – namely the modernization that China went through under Mao Zedong. By the gesture of including one of his poems in our exhibition we want to show that the brutal modernity and the no less brutal Anthropocene share the strangely delusional sense for the planet combined with a total negation of its autonomy – the Earth does not belong to us, yet we pretend that it is in fact ours.

 

With our exhibition, we want to escape from this paradox by means of patient construction of a new planetary perspective which does not differentiate between nature and society, the wild and the city, or people and plants – on the contrary, our perspective draws its energy from the radical idea of equality of all things; including people.

 

Thus, we ask: How to write the planet? That is to say: Not to straightforwardly follow its lines or fold its pages, but to genuinely co-write the planet?

 

Text: Lukáš Likavčan

Translation: Michal Spáda

Photo: Jan Trnka

Sound: Chaosdroid

Graphic design: APART

Documentation: Peter Sit, Andrej Žabkay

Video: Denis Kozerawski

Appeared on artalk.cz / plusminusnula.sk


Panphilia

Milan Adamčiak – Panphilia
curated by Daniel Grúň
guests: Matej Gavula, APART
opening 28 October 6 – 8 pm
duration until 16 December 2016
ZAHORIAN & VAN ESPEN Bratislava

Panphilia by Milan Adamčiak (1946) is a site of interaction, contact, and conjunction sounding of the relation between author and imaginary co-authors – interprets, in which visual imagination of music becomes real. Panphilia consists of various unrealized projects that exist only in form of manuals and instructions, as following: concerts for fictive orchestra, fictive music publisher and legal documents with fictive author’s heraldry. The word Panphilia actually comes from Greek language and means a state of loving or accepting all things. Panphilia in its genealogy activated by Milan Adamčiak has its root in Dada and Pataphysics. Because its source is everyday life, it becomes an alternative to any established institutions of art and it brings to light a different experience with this world. Panphilia has something very spontaneous and imminent in itself, it is a gift.

 

Milan Adamčiak is one of the first Czechoslovak artists who began systematic research into intermedia overlaps. It was principally creatively that his research was conducted, in the field of experimental poetry, action art and the so-called new music. In the second half of the 1960s he created cycles of diverse kinds of typographic grids, in which the graphic and semantic realisation overlapped with an acoustic rhythmisation of the text. Hence one part of his work has its premise in experimental poetry, taking the form of directions and instructions for various activities. Another part opens the way to visual music, with unconventional notations and graphic scores. A third links the inspirations from the two preceding parts in performative presentation: a game-playing experimentation and a non-completion of the compositional process, which significantly open up the possibility of perfecting the work using both classical and non-classical instruments and unusual settings.

 

Matej Gavula and APART collective are the guests of the exhibition. Variable installation by Matej Gavula consists of glass mosaic cladding, which formerly was used on the surface of public building and with decline of the socialist era lost its function. Gavula, inspired by creative processes introduced by Milan Adamčiak, plays with this material as with independent composition freed from former use. APART produced a publication dedicated to the artist that newly interprets work of Adamčiak and is presented as integral part of the exhibition.

Photo: Marko Horban / Courtesy of ZAHORIAN & VAN ESPEN

PUBLICATION

 


There is no place like home. East or west, home is the best

Kunsthalle Košice
11.6.2015,  18:00
curated by Vladimír Beskid
until 16.8.2015

 

On the the exhibition with the name “There is no place like home. East or west, home is the best ” at Kunsthalle/Hall of art, will present seven artists to the public – Cyril Blažo, Miroslav Csolle, Matej Gavula, Erik Janeček, Denis Kozerawski, Peter Sit, Milan Tittel, Martin Vongrej and Andrej Žabkay. Viewers can familiarize with their works from 11 th of June till 16 th of August. Together they are focused on demonstrating performance, discovering various ephemeral, banal situations of everyday reality, sometimes with a hint of analysis and sometimes from a position of observers and non-interested witnesses. Presentation of their collective work will start with the opening ceremony on 11 th of June at 6 o’clock in the evening. In connection with the mark of XYZ, artists create an specific form of collective existence and artist’s reflection of reality. More than material artifacts – objects, to them are comments of experienced and thought, discovered situations, found relations, which they often materialize and visualize with minimalistic ways forms their characteristic expression. “Original plan to present works of group XYZ (Milan Tittel, Matej Gavula) expanded into free meetings of Bratislava’s middle and younger generation artists. Their common starting points are post-conceptual approaches, short video actions and sketches, various small inputs, commentaries and interventions into public space,” said the curator Vladimir Beskid. He adds that the central projection at the exhibition will be a montage of looped videos, which capture numerous actions and interventions in urban space of Bratislava. Intuitive and parallel were the interests in certain points, places and situations in the city( Námestie Slobody, waterfront of the Danube, ArtHall etc. ). Besides that, there should be several more video projection in the space and objects, prints, archives of thematically selected photographs (solar, lunar, astronomical etc.) should be found there as well. Finally the group of artists will prepare several actions right in the city of Košice as their own video analysis of the city, capturing the unique and unrepeatable atmosphere of the east metropolis without its metro. Exhibition at Hall of Art in Košice is a collaboration sequel of group XYZ with collective of young authors, featuring under the label “APART” (Erik Janeček, Denis Kozerawski, Peter Sit and Andrej Žabkay). Together they realized such conceptual outputs as “Coast of Goofnes” , “29 th august” , in the flat of Miroslav Csolle, “Videogoulash” at Photoport Gallery, etc. This event is co-funded from grant system of Slovakian Ministry of Culture

 

 

Vladimir Beskid

 

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