And then an insurmountable tension, to the level of an incommensurability, installation view.

And then an insurmountable tension, to the level of an incommensurability

And then an insurmountable tension, to the level of an incommensurability

Isaac Lythgoe, Petros Moris, Giulia Essyad, Nicolas Lamas, Jaana-Kristiina Alakoski, Grace Woodcock, Susi Gelb, Jennifer West, Daniela Corbascio, Yein Lee, Adham Faramawy, Dorota Gawęda & Eglė Kulbokaitė, Lucia Cristiani, Cyril Debon, Agnese Guido, Leilei Wu, Mariantonietta Bagliato, Pauline Julier, Ludovica Gugliotta, Pinar Marul, Pedro Barateiro, Élie Autin, Elena Eugeni, Bruno Giacchetti

Curated by Like A Little Disaster

18 March / 10 June 2023 @Palazzo San Giuseppe, Polignano a Mare

Like A Little Disaster is honored to present “And then an insurmountable tension, to the level of an incommensurability” a collective exhibition involving twenty-six artists (Isaac Lythgoe, Petros Moris, Giulia Essyad, Nicolas Lamas, Jaana-Kristiina Alakoski, Grace Woodcock. Susi Gelb, Jennifer West, Daniela Corbascio, Yein Lee, Adham Faramawy, Dorota Gawęda & Eglė Kulbokaitė, Lucia Cristiani, Cyril Debon, Agnese Guido, Leilei Wu, Mariantonietta Bagliato, Pauline Julier, Ludovica Gugliotta, Pinar Marul, Pedro Barateiro, Élie Autin, Elena Eugeni, Bruno Giacchetti), gathered to create a scenario decolonized by humans, inhabited by hybrid objects/subjects, rebellious to any classification or definitive definition, nodes of network proliferating chimeras that question concepts of subjectivation, objectification and subjection, the classification of beings and the hierarchy of actors and values. The project takes the form of a panorama structured by multiple sprawling connections that are never completely closed, capable of setting unexpected consequences in motion.

The artists have created works that are not just the end or purpose of a production process, but means, or tools that enhance the ability to imagine a space of multiform co-evolution, through which seeking culture in nature and vice versa, the contingent in the permanent, identity in difference and in which experimenting with new alliances and secondary paths that may not always lead to distant places but shift our point of view, allowing us to consider other possibilities.

The works in the show question the binarism separating humans and their cultures, nature and non-humans, phylogeny and ontogeny, genetic heritage, and technological alterations. A confusion caused by the impossibility of recognizing the identity signs of these paradoxical objects: without contours, without antithetical terms, without residues. Objects such that they can no longer simply be given in opposition to the human subject, but among which the human is involved and with which they share the same mesh and the same destiny. These viscous, matted, tentacled, and rhizomatic systems question the relationship between humans and non-humans by bringing them into a circular system of reciprocity. A mesh made of liquid, decentralized, gradual and intersubjective entities, in which each organism can only be defined in relation (although not the relation itself).

Instrumental reductionism finds fertile ground in the bio-capitalist mud in which we are enmeshed, it is based on the notion of is based on a notion of “human exceptionalism”, ethnocentric and speciesist and, from here, to the erection of a system founded on the opposition between nature and history, human and machine, male and female, identity and otherness, ecology and production, algorithms and neural connections, genetic heritage and technological alteration, rationality and instinct, mind and body, spirit and matter, real and virtual, true and false, organic and inorganic, biotic and abiotic, between a sense of responsibility and the idea of play, the environment in which we grow up and the genetic code, sharing and the sense of self, imagination and economy. In this game of doubles, each component of the “cognitive couple” is always dominated by its other, repressed and submissive half. The project thus offers itself as a space intended for the harmony that is in the meeting of opposites, as a device through which experiencing a conception of the individual and his way of relating to reality no longer characterized by an excluding logic, but which on the contrary tends to include all modes of expression and areas of action.

Within these formal and mental paths there is also a critical dimension towards internalised, acquired and consolidated cognitive models; criticism that allows you to radically redefine the rules of any functional system, in order to use the rules in a different way, ignoring their original purpose.

(x)morphism

The metamorphic dynamics occupy the agents and subjects of technological networks are nonhumans as well as humans, which then may both be termed, if circumstances warrant, hybrids, quasi-objects, or quasi-subjects. The x factor being the play of indifference between “subjects” and “objects” when it comes to the construction of socio-technological networks such as scientific laboratories, engineering projects, and the human and natural communities that now depend on them. Through the observation of quasi-objects, one recovers not a human/nonhuman stand-off but a “variable-ontology world […] the result of the inter definition of the actors. The highly mobile concepts describe a neocybernetic vision of the necessary hybridity of symbiotic networks and system/environment couplings, and they describe equally well the daemonic landscapes of metamorphic narratives. The quasi-objects materialize and actualize the formal mediations that hold nature and society together.

“The quasi-objects raise what had been only a distinction, then a separation, then a contradiction, then an insurmountable tension, to the level of an incommensurability”

 

We can call the ontological condition of medial transformativity “morphism,” arriving at that term by deleting from “anthropomorphism” the humanist idealization of anthropos. If the human does not possess a stable form, it is not formless for all that. If, instead of attaching it to one constitutional pole or the other, we move it closer to the middle, it becomes the mediator and even the intersection of the two… The expression “anthropomorphic” considerably underestimates our humanity. We should be talking about morphism. Morphism is the place where technomorphisms, zoomorphisms, phusimorphisms, ideomorphisms, theomorphisms, sociomorphisms, psychomorphisms, all come together. Their alliance and their exchanges, taken together, are what define the anthropos. A weaver of morphisms —isn’t that enough of a definition?

To accept this definition is to allow the distinction between the human and the non-human to lapse: non-human metamorphosis always was a self-reflexive projection of the human. It is to see that the non-human situation of medial contingency remains a real allegory of the human, and that this allegory has now been heightened by the proliferation of scientific powers and informatic technologies. Transcendence without a contrary: or, society is maintained only through communication; we communicate only through media; therefore, we maintain without surpassing the medial contingencies of the construction of the human —and narrative systems perform this maintenance. The human is in the delegation itself, in the pass, in the sending, in the continuous exchange of forms, and this status is distributable to everything we touch or that touches us: human nature is the set of its delegates and its representatives, its figures and its messengers. In this post-Darwinian world, the human form is as unknown to us as the nonhuman; thus, it is better to speak of (x)-morphism instead of becoming indignant when humans are treated as nonhumans or vice versa.

The metamorphic transformations of bodies —both fictive and artefactual mixings of the human and the nonhuman— recur from archaic to contemporary times, taking daemonic shapes ranging from the magical to the technological. Textual metamorphs and technoscientific quasi-objects are both mediating transformers performing sociomythic sorting operations, negotiating the relations not of heaven and earth, but of nature and society. Quasi-objects, then, participate in a continuous production of ancient and current cultural mediators whose common attribute is a propensity to the metamorphic transformation of given and normative forms. Viewed through the lens of Latour’s network concepts, the recursive imageries of literary metamorphoses resonate with the operational evolutions, the mutations and occasional catastrophes, of natural and social systems.

If one allows the extension of sociality beyond human conversations to the communications of other living things —all of whom signal to their own in order to survive, and to the nonliving things that get swept up and redefined by natural

and social systems, then life and its evolution, including the emergence and networking of minds and societies across the living spectrum, is as much a social as a natural phenomenon. So neither nature nor society could remain in being without the translational mediations that course between them: All durability, all solidity, all permanence will have to be paid for by its mediators.

When the real and the daemonic are observed to emerge and merge in both technological and narrative constructions, classical human persons —the extra-environmental essences of selves, souls maintained by ideal bodily stabilities— become at once nonmodern and posthumanist, relativized actors performing operational functions and metamorphic transformations within natural/social networks and systems. This is not a demotion of the human but an elevation of the nonhuman into proper discursive representation.

IN/ANIMISM

One of the controversial issues in the discourse on climate change is the problem of material or bodily agency. Until recently, agency has been the privilege of human consciousness. We have seen ourselves as being ontologically different from nature, as spirit from matter. Such an ontological distinction justified people to use nature as a resource to satisfy their desires. Earth was nothing more than a mere background for human actions and prosperity; however, global warming and climate change, which has grown bad enough to threaten our very existence, has forced us to acknowledge that earth is agential in its own right. What is more alive and active than such a global catastrophe? If we bear in mind the current ecological crisis, then we must devise a new theory of agency for recognizing the active role of nonhumans.

It is one thing to decouple agency from consciousness; it is quite another to decouple agency from intentionality. We have to acknowledge that there is a nonconscious form of intentionality. Latour’s mistake is in imagining intentionality in terms of consciousness. More original than our conscious intentionality is bodily intentionality that joins us to the world in our relationship with things around us. The body itself is intentional in that it directs at and affects others, associating or dissociating with them. At the background of conscious intentionality lies bodily intentionality. How can we think of animism without such corporeal intentionality?

The body is not inert matter but is the power to affect others and to be affected by them. Without such affectivity, a body would not have any agency (the power to act). To act is to “do” things. We should not confuse “do” with “function. If function is neutral and mechanical, then doing implies some form of desire, purpose, and intentionality. Spinoza named it conatus—an endeavor to persist in its being, whether human or nonhuman. But the agency should be decoupled from the criteria of intentionality, subjectivity, and freewill. To prevent such a human monopoly of agency, he proposed that agency is not a given quality but is that which modifies other actors through the course of action. We should not ask whether agency is human or nonhuman. Such a question is not only irrelevant but also detrimental to our understanding of the exact nature of the agency. An attempt to explain agency in conjunction with intentionality is to presuppose the problem solved. It is necessary to think we do not know anything and to exclude all human preconceptions and start from ignorance. Even to imagine an intention behind a phenomenon interferes with our otherwise neutral and indifferent investigation. It seems that we have no reason to disprove his plea to decouple agency from intentionality. The only problem is that he betrays his methodological demand to begin our investigation without preconception. Agency, which can be defined as the body’s capacity to affect or modify other bodies, neither distinguishes humans from nonhumans nor is in need of intentionality for its action.

Climate change demonstrates that the earth, which we defined as inert, is more alive than anything else. What agent is more animated, energetic, and unpredictable than, global warming, and sea level rise? The Earth is quaking! Now it has a subject once again. The agentic power of the earth is an undeniable reality, not a theoretical construction. We hit upon the Real of the earth really hard. The earth, which humans believed they de-animated and tamed, is animated again with more force than before. Animism is, then, not just an alternative to the modern worldview but is the only legitimate theory that can explain a phenomenon such as earthquakes.

Animism is a worldview that does not discriminate between animate and inanimate matter. We could define animism as a belief in personal souls animating even what we call inanimate bodies. All bodies, whether human or nonhuman, have life and will. Trought embracing such a vital vision of nature, we intend to substitute the concept of “thing” with “thing-power”: because things have propensities or tendencies of their own. They do not passively succumb to human desire for control but resist subjugation. Animals, plants, and stones are bodies as energetic and intentional as humans, though in different ways. Whether human or nonhuman, animate or inanimate, all bodies endeavor to preserve their being.

All bodies, humans or nonhumans, are conatus in their essence. Conatus signifies the power of the body to act alone or in conjunction with other things to persist in its being. All bodies with capacities to affect or be affected tend to associate with or disassociate from one another to increase and intensify their conatus Such embodied intention is not very different from the concept of plant and animal souls: a plant has a vegetative soul and an animal a sensitive soul. Their souls aspire to grow and propagate.

What all bodies do, affecting and being affected in alliance with others, has meaning in that it concerns their survival or extinction. Life or death is inseparable from their agency: the body with more connections to other bodies is more real and agentic than bodies with fewer connections or assemblages. The body is not an entity but a process of becoming more or less effective. As there is no individual body without assembly, so there is no assembly without the individual body. The body is not self-enclosed but porous and dynamic, and its boundaries can be crossed.

We do not know how to account for the animism present in an inorganic matter such as stones and machines. However, we need to take note that there is a significant difference in material intentionality between stones and animals. Although all bodies without exception equally strive to exist, there is a broad spectrum of differences in their conatus, and they are singular in their ways.

But can there be animism without bodily intentionality?

Bodily intentionality is one of many hybrids. The body is not only animated but intentional as well. It would be unthinkable to envisage animism without corporal struggles. Isn’t it enough to dehumanize agency by decoupling it from consciousness? We do not need to decouple animism from intentionality: to do so would be to conflate it with mechanism.

Excerpt from a conversation between Like A Little Disaster, Bruno Latour and ChatGPT.

The exhibition is produced by Like A Little Disaster with the contribution of Romano Exhibit and the Austrian Federal Ministry of Arts and Culture. It benefits from the partnership of the Pino Pascali Foundation.

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Controra Ep. IV, Installation view.

Controra Ep. IV and V

Controra Ep. IV and V

IV: Luca Bertolo, Paul Branca, Lula Broglio, Chiara Camoni, Daniela Corbascio, Roberto de Pinto, Giorgia Garzilli, Lucia Leuci, Agostino Quaranta, Marta Ravasi, Alessandra Spranzi
V: Johanna Billing, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Giulia Essyad, Derek Jarman

Curated by Like A Little Disaster

5 November – 31 December 2022 @Palazzo San Giuseppe, Polignano a Mare

The “controra” is a space-time suspended in the sunny early afternoon of Southern Italy – from noon to 4 pm approximately.
It is the time of day when the sun casts its shadow straight and the body disappears, leaving room for poetry, mythology, and the fear of meridian demons.
These are the “heavy hours” dedicated to dreams and nightmares, hallucinations and “Fata Morganas”, the hours of idle indolence, experienced and performed in anarchist opposition to the efficiency of the production flow dictated by chrono-capitalism.

One must refrain from going to open and public places and it is appropriate to exile oneself in one’s own home, shutters closed, in dim light and in silence. One may doze or sleep, but it is not the only expected activity; indeed, thinking, reading even just a few pages and meditating on them, taking notes, caring for, loving oneself and devoting oneself to active idleness. The controra is an oxymoron, where otium proposes a reflective inversion to the course of our thoughts.

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Daniele Milvio, Altro Frontale, 2022, Synthetic clay, metal, wood, plaster, gauze, acrylic, beeswax, stearin, aniline, epoxy resin, watercolor, Indian ink on paper - 27 x 20 x 5 cm; Frontale, 2022, Synthetic clay, metal, wood, plaster, gauze, acrylic, beeswax, stearin, aniline, epoxy resin, watercolor, Indian ink on paper - 27 x 20 x 5 cm.

Controra Ep. III

Controra Ep. III

Leo Gabin, Daniele Milvio, Lucy Raven

Curated by Like A Little Disaster

16 October / 20 November 2022 @Chiesa San Giuseppe and Palazzo San Giuseppe, Polignano a Mare

The “controra” is a space-time suspended in the sunny early afternoon of Southern Italy – from noon to 4pm approximately.

It is the time of day when the sun casts its shadow straight and the body disappears, leaving room for poetry, mythology, and the fear of meridian demons.

These are the “heavy hours” dedicated to dreams and nightmares, hallucinations and “Fata Morganas”, the hours of idle indolence, experienced and performed in anarchist opposition to the efficiency of the production flow dictated by chrono-capitalism.

One must refrain from going to open and public places and it is appropriate to exile oneself in one’s own home, shutters closed, in dim light and in silence. One may doze or sleep, but it is not the only expected activity; indeed, thinking, reading even just a few pages and meditating on them, taking notes. Caring for, loving oneself and devoting oneself to active idleness. The controra is an oxymoron, where otium proposes a reflective inversion to the course of our thoughts.

Ecotoni 02, Installation view

Ecotoni II

Ecotoni II

Daniela Corbascio, Jumana Manna, Nguyễn Trinh Thi.

Curated by Like A Little Disaster

2 September / 30 November 2022 @Foothold, Polignano a Mare

One year after Ecotoni I, with Laurie Anderson, Ericka Beckman, Jenny Holzer, Joan Jonas, Agnieszka Polska and Jenna Sutela, Like A Little Disaster is proud to present the second chapter of the series which involves three new artists: Daniela Corbascio, Jumana Manna and Nguyễn Trinh Thi.

 

A transition between two adjacent but different ecosystems, the ecotones appear as both gradual shifts and abrupt demarcations. But more than just a marker of separation or even a marker of connection (although importantly both of these things), an ecotone is also a zone of fecundity, creativity, transformation; of becoming assembling, multiplying; of diverging, differentiating, relinquishing.

The inhabitants of an ecotone are zones for brave pioneers.

An ecotone is simultaneously an anticipated past and a remembered future.

 

Through different practices, poetics and semantic fields, the three artists on display structure territories of transition or tension between two or more heterogeneous natural-cultural community ecosystems. The ecotone thus becomes the most effective strategy and method for reflecting on the interlaced relationships between nature and culture.

 

“Something happens.

Estuaries, tidal zones, wetlands: these are all liminal spaces where “two complex systems meet, embrace, clash, and transform one another.”
Eco: home. Tone: tension.
We must learn to be at home in the quivering tension of the in-between. No other home is available. In-between nature and culture, in-between biology and philosophy, in-between the human and everything we ram ourselves up against, everything we desperately shield ourselves from, everything we throw ourselves into, wrecked and recklessly, watching, amazed, as our skins become thinner”.

 

It is hard to find a comprehensive definition for Daniela Corbascio‘s work. Her research phagocytises languages, follows a personal stream of consciousness, regulates and orchestrates the forms of their memory, making them co-exist in balancing acts. Her primary approach is that of an independent researcher who takes an original, anti-academic method, identifying a starting point and then following an evolution dictated by the alternation of modular strictness and random coincidences. Daniela has an extraordinary ability to appropriating of a space in which organizes strictly forms and materials ambivalent between what she creates with her hands and what she found, gathered, collected, and preserved. The material and immaterial logic of this theatre offers philosophical insight into the relationship between signs, things, language and perception. Her installations operate as phenomenological staging grounds which are highly tuned to their surrounding architectural spaces. Daniela’s interventions are a memory that turns into a landscape – not intended as a scene but as a contingent space through in time – is accompanied by a memory made of forms; the minimalism with its basic forms and their positioning in the gallery, the post-minimalism with the corruption of these same forms, the conceptual, while not adhering to the dematerialisation of the work, the land art, the arte povera, etc.. A memory of forms involved in a number of sculptural practices or semi-practices inherent in the recent generations of artists with whom Corbascio also shares the practice of “collecting” as one of the tools to reach a state of authorship and in this poetic assembly, the transformation; divergent and differentiated multiplication become fertile territories for new mysticisms.
Appropriation, alteration and rethinking of objects, elements and forms of phenomenal reality marks their action and through these steps, allowing us to think of reality as a game of differences, while we normally think of it in terms of similarity, analogy, and identity. Her practice investigates the possibilities of giving new purpose to everyday life elements, intentionally removing them from the dominion of automatic perception and making them abstract in order to place those elements and their relationships, using connotations on show.
Through the dissociation of objects and concepts, the artifice of the works on the show makes the perception slow and permanent, generating a strange contradiction because the same concepts and objects are fragmented or separated from their mechanical use, in order to support a closer and lasting gaze. Like paradoxes, her interventions have the unique ability to amplify contradictions, speaking out through their confusion, so that the viewer must pause and think about what might be their connections and developments. What “confuses” in the exhibition’s works is that they present us a comment through the attribution of new intentions, offering at the same time a branch of sensations allowing various interpretations cause they activate a chain reaction of reflections.
These premises implicate complex issues such as the relation between copy and original, seen and interpreted by the artist as mutually constitutive of the thing and its double, the thing and the shadow. Through a continuous process of calling into question the logic of representation the artist suggests repetitions, “doubles”, estranged objects and subjects that host multiple realities within them or fall apart, disconnected and become whole. This process alters in countless ways the logic of the original and the copy, so as to deny any ruling image of thought and to emancipate it from the enslavement to and the hierarchy of any form-default image.

 

Jumana Manna is a Palestinian artist working primarily with film and sculpture. Her work explores how power is articulated through relationships, often focusing on the body and materiality in relation to narratives of state-building, and histories of place.
Through sculptures, films and texts, Manna questions the paradoxes of conservation practices, particularly in the fields of archeology, science and law. His research takes into account the tension between the modernist traditions of categorization and conservation and the potential “recklessness” of ruins as an integral part of life and its regeneration.

Wild Relatives, 2018
64min, HD video

Deep in the earth beneath the Arctic permafrost, seeds from all over the world are stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to provide a backup should disaster strike. Wild Relatives starts from an event that has sparked media interest worldwide: in 2012 an international agricultural research center was forced to relocate from Aleppo to Lebanon due to the Syrian Revolution turned war, and began a laborious process of planting their seed collection from the Svalbard back-ups. Following the path of this transaction of seeds between the Arctic and Lebanon, a series of encounters unfold a matrix of human and non-human lives between these two distant spots of the earth. It captures the articulation between this large-scale international initiative and its local implementation in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, carried out primarily by young migrant women. The meditative pace patiently teases out tensions between state and individual, industrial and organic approaches to seed saving, climate change and biodiversity, witnessed through the journey of these seeds.

 

NGUYEN Trinh Thi is an independent video/media artist and director based in Hanoi. In her practice, she explores the power of sound and listening, and the multiple relationships between image, sound and space, with continuous interests in memory, representation, landscape, indigenousness and ecology. Her work investigates the role of memory in complex cultural histories.
Nguyen studied journalism, photography, international relations and ethnographic cinema in the United States. In 2009 she founded Hanoi DOCLAB, an independent center for documentary cinema and the art of moving images in Hanoi.
She is known for her layered, personal, and poetic approach to contentious histories and current events through experiments with the moving image. Regarded as one of the pioneers of her home country Vietnam’s independent cinema, Thi is seen as the most notable video artist in Vietnam’s contemporary art scene.
Inspired by her heritage, her pieces are powerful and haunting, and they focus on social and cultural issues, especially the complex, traumatic history of Vietnam and its after-effects in the present. In her longer documentary films, she employs calm and quiet visuals while eschewing voiceovers in order to let the people of her country speak directly to the camera. Her diverse practice has consistently investigated the role of memory in the necessary unveiling of hidden, displaced, or misinterpreted histories, and she has examined the position of artists in Vietnamese society.

How to Improve the World (2021)
Single-channel video, colour and B&W, sound, 47 minutes

Set in the Central Highlands of Vietnam where a large concentration of groups of indigenous people live, How to Improve the World is a film about listening. The film reflects on the differences in how memory is processed between the culture of the eye and that of the ear, while observing the loss of land, forests, and the way of life of the indigenous people in this part of the world. ‘Do you trust sounds or images better?’ Nguyễn, off screen, asks her daughter, who replies ‘images, mum’. Of the cultural dominance of images and looking at the expense of other sensory modes, Nguyen has said: ‘As our globalised and westernised cultures have come to be dominated by visual media, I feel the need and responsibility as a filmmaker to resist this narrative power of the visual imagery, and look for a more balanced and sensitive approach in perceiving the world by paying more attention to aural landscapes, in line with my interests in the unknown, the invisible, the inaccessible, and in potentialities’.

Letters from Panduranga (2015)
Single-channel video, colour and b&w, sound, 35:00

The essay film, made in the form of a letter exchange between a man and a woman, was inspired by the fact that the government of Vietnam plans to build the country’s first two nuclear power plants in Ninh Thuan (formerly known as Panduranga), right at the spiritual heart of the Cham indigenous people, threatening the survival of this ancient matriarchal Hindu culture that stretches back almost two thousand years.
At the border between documentary and fiction, the film shifts audience attention between foreground and background, between intimate portraits and distant landscapes, offering reflections around fieldwork, ethnography, art, and the role of the artist.
Intertwining circumstances of the past, present, and future, the film also unfolds a multi-faceted historical and on-going experience of colonialisms, and looks into the central ideas of power and ideology in our everyday.

Fifth Cinema (2018)
Single-channel video, color and B&W, sound, 56 minutes

With text by Barry Barclay (“Celebrating the Fourth Cinema”, 2003)

Fifth Cinema begins with a quiet statement “I am a filmmaker, as you know.” That text and what follows, by Maori filmmaker Barry Barclay, who coined the term ‘Fourth Cinema’ to distinguish Indigenous cinema from the established ‘First, Second, and Third Cinema’ framework, provides structure to Nguyen’s hybrid essay film that moves on multiple cinematic and topical terrains. Eschewing voice in favor of the written word and juxtaposing moving images of the filmmaker’s own daughter with archival images of Vietnamese women seen through the lens of the “ship’s officers”, the film slowly leads the viewer through a narrative of colonialism, indigeneity and cinematic limitations in representation.

Statement
I make this film as a citizen – of Vietnam, and of the world – as a filmmaker, an artist, a woman, a mother. There are multiple identities. I’m interested in merging my identities with those of Barry Barclay’s, to be able to see things with broader senses and perspectives. I’m speaking from the point of view that any one of us can potentially be the oppressed; and the oppressor.
I make films that engage with local and national identity, history and memories, but at the same time address something that is universal. I seek to find the underlying rules that govern our lives, worlds and realities. The way we look at things.
I’m interested also in the unknown, the invisible, the inaccessible, in potentialities. As Barclay said, “But I believe that in Fourth Cinema ― at its best ― something else is being asserted which is not easy to access.”

In this film I think Fourth Cinema and Indigeneity function more on a metaphorical level, standing for the beauty and wisdom in the world that require respect. A metaphor for all things oppressed — women, minorities, the colonized.
I like to travel across space and time and genders to find all these connections and identify the underlying structures. I think we’re unfortunately governed universally by structures of power, dominance, and patriarchy.

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Luca Francesconi, Installation view (Five Cafoni and Capurale), Hand crafted stainless steel, Vegetables, Variable dimensions.

Controra Ep. I

Controra Ep. I

Luca Francesconi, Jon Rafman, Sara Sadik, Amalia Ulman

Curated by Like A Little Disaster

7 June / 25 June 2022 @Palazzo San Giuseppe and Chiesa di San Giuseppe, Polignano a Mare

The “controra” is a space-time suspended in the sunny early afternoon of Southern Italy – from noon to 4pm approximately.
It is the time of day when the sun casts its shadow straight and the body disappears, leaving room for poetry, mythology, and the fear of meridian demons.
These are the “heavy hours” dedicated to dreams and nightmares, hallucinations and “Fata Morganas”, the hours of idle indolence, experienced and performed in anarchist opposition to the efficiency of the production flow dictated by chrono-capitalism.
One must refrain from going to open and public places and it is appropriate to exile oneself in one’s own home, shutters closed, in dim light and in silence. One may doze or sleep, but it is not the only expected activity; indeed, thinking, reading even just a few pages and meditating on them, taking notes. Caring for, loving oneself and devoting oneself to active idleness. The controra is an oxymoron, where otium proposes a reflective inversion to the course of our thoughts.

 

——

 

LUCA FRANCESCONI

In his work Luca Francesconi analyzes the links between human and nature, space and time, works of art and materials, as well as the dynamics in the exhibition space. He often took primordial references such as rivers, lunar cycles, fields and agriculture as a starting point. In his exhibitions these themes become the concrete and symbolic cornerstone of a group of works that involve space explorations, physics and its relationship with time. The exhibition display itself, as an aesthetic object, is a central component of his speculations.
Through his research Francesconi examines the natural processes present in the supply chain and production system of food, its distribution, its consumption and the human implications that this entails. The theme of (natural) transformation, such as decomposition, the various fermentation processes and their symbolic value, serve as a starting point for examining contemporary modes of production and consumption. Linked to the medium of sculpture and sculptural installation, Francesconi brings together various types of natural elements, which echo the formal aspects and functioning of the human body, while emphasizing our dissolving relationship with nature and its ecosystems. By proposing new alternatives of environmentally sustainable production and consumption, Francesconi aims to revive our relationship with the earth and the environment in general.

The group of sculptures in the show (five “Cafoni” and the “Capurale”) are stylized anthropomorphic figures with interchangeable vegetable heads. These laborers are inserted in a temporal and productive reality in which professional and personal identity has been lost, so even the body loses shape and substance to become a simple tool for large-scale production.
The sculptures investigate the boundary between essentiality and overproduction, between a world in which the relationship between man and nature was still 1 to 1, when what governed was the cyclical nature of natural laws to which man adapted for a production destined for simple sustenance, without affecting the balance of the food chain, and that of contemporaneity, a time of aseptic monodirectional surpluses.

 

JON RAFMAN

Jon Rafman (*1981) is acclaimed for a multifaceted oeuvre that encompasses video, animation, photography, sculpture and installation. His quasi-anthropological works—often incorporating internet-sourced images and narrative material—investigate digital technologies and the communities they create, focusing on the losses, longings and fantasies that shape our technology-infused lives today. The Montreal-based artist turns an empathic but critical eye on the internet age, investigating experiences of alienation, nostalgia, loneliness and grief.

Rafman’s complex take on internet technologies is implicit even in his earliest work. The Nine Eyes of Google Street View (2007–present), an ever-growing collection of photographic images and frequently updated website, finds him rummaging the panoramic street view feature of Google Maps for unusual images. Like a cyber flâneur he stumbles upon surprising moments of humanity, vulnerability and sometimes beauty; his discoveries include pictures of children playing in run-down neighborhoods, horses and reindeer roaming the streets, poetic landscapes, grumbling prostitutes and police arrests. By showing these automatically captured images in a new light, Rafman reveals the visual grammar and blind spots of Google’s technology.
Many of Rafman’s later videos explore lesser-known facets of the digital world. A case in point is Codes of Honor (2011), a docu-fiction short that combines real film footage with images from the online platform Second Life to tell the story of a video gamer’s life. Another is the film essay trilogy consisting of Still Life (Betamale) (2013), Mainsqueeze (2014) and ERYSICHTON (2015), a visual study of niche internet cultures including cosplayers, hentai pornography enthusiasts or people who pursue obscure sexual fetishes.

Not all of the artist’s works use found images. While the bust-like objects of his series New Age Demanded (2012–present) evoke classical modernist sculptures, they were actually created using digital imaging techniques and technologies including 3D printing or 3D model-based carving. A series of large-scale photographs titled You Are Standing in an Open Field (2015) juxtaposes grimy computer keyboards and trash-heaped desks with pastoral landscape painting backgrounds. Sticky Drama (2015), a short about the loss of digitally stored memories, is Rafman’s first live-action film.

Many of the artist’s most recent works use 3D animation. Examples include his Dream Journal 2016–2019, for which Rafman documents his daily dreams before mixing them with found narratives from mythology, video games and TV series. The animated video essays Legendary Reality (2017), SHADOWBANNED (2018) and Disasters under the Sun (2019) offer a serious look at the current human condition with a visual language reminiscent of science fiction films.

Rafman’s films and videos are often set to hypnotic, experimental-electro music soundtracks by artists including Oneohtrix Point Never or James Ferraro. Although available online, they are most effectively experienced in specially-designed sculptural installations. These emphatically physical installations squeeze viewers into booths, transport them to the bedroom of a typical North American teenager, invite them to lie on polyurethane foam seating or in pools of plastic balls.

All of Jon Rafman’s works explore the vicissitudes of self-formation in the digital age. They ask what it means to live in a time when technologies structure our every waking hour, or when the price of easy fulfillment of our needs is loneliness in front of a computer screen.  They explore the ever-present experience of living in a world where nothing is permanent, but nothing is forgotten.

Disasters Under the Sun (2019)
Poor Magic (2017)

Jon Rafman stages computer-generated dystopian worlds in which horror has become part of everyday life.

Disasters Under the Sun (2019) and Poor Magic (2017), which form a diptych in Rafman’s mind, resonate in uncanny and frightening ways with the current crisis we are living. The first, which was presented at the Venice Biennale in 2019, was recently acquired by the MAC (Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal). Both films are darker in tone than his earlier works, delving as they do into the murkier corners of the Web. While his installations, photographs and videos of recent years proposed a melancholic and ironic view of social conventions and virtual communities, these two works offer a more critical perspective. The films portray a post-human dystopia featuring faceless 3-D avatars continuously tortured in abstract digital space. In what is essentially a poetic lament, Rafman addresses the fragmented consciousness of a post-physical existence. The films show a terrifying image of a future where all humanity is uploaded to a virtual purgatory and endlessly abused. Or is it also a brutal representation of the present moment and the effect that a world dominated by algorithms has on our flesh and psyche?

Rafman shows us the alienation that separates people through digital and technological means and dissolves any sense of community. In contrast to the utopian visions of the future that characterized early modernity, Rafman designs post-human scenarios in which humans exist only as digital avatars. He demonstrates the harmful effects that a world ruled by algorithms has on the body and mind.

Poor Magic and Disaster Under the Sun effect a beautiful yet terrifying rendition of contemporary consciousness, gesturing towards civilisation’s listless drift beyond the corporeal, and technology’s infinite desire to penetrate and artificially replicate human essence. Computer-generated crowd simulations run berserk in dreamlike repetition, while a 3D endoscopic journey takes us through the body’s most intimate passages.

 

SARA SADIK

Through filmed or performed fictitious narratives, ranging from documentaries to science fiction through to reality TV and a massive use of chromakey, 3D modulations and other CGI post-production techniques, Sara Sadik notably addresses issues related to adolescence and masculinity, documenting their mysteries and deconstructing their social mythologies.
Sara Sadik’s work is rooted in what she terms “beurcore”: the essence of the youth culture arising from French working-class members of the Maghrebi diaspora, whose specificities she captures and analyses, to translate them into visual and material concepts. Her work combines video, performance, installation and photography, in order to explore beurcore’s manifestations, while her references span music, language, fashion, social networks and science fiction. Starting from the semiological and sociological analysis of “beurness”, Sadik implements a process of hijacking these social clichés by deconstructing and reintegrating them into fiction.
Sadik reengages, reconnects and re-problematizes the social symbols, the visual aesthetics, the economic systems as well as the languages used and/or created by this community, in order to create fictional and surreal situations which take place either in the present or in the near future.
Although rooted in a local perspective, her scripts, films, and performances tackle wider issues, such as the politics of identities and behaviours that lack media representation.
Through her computer-generated images and gamified references to pop culture items including Capri Sun, Dragon Ball, and Kalenji clothing, Sadik builds her imaginary scenarios, evading the colonialism(s) that have usurped physical and virtual territories.
Sadik’s tactical use of new technologies and social media creates new spaces for fairer representations.

Khtobtogone, 2021, 16′
Khtobtogone (2021) depicts young French-Maghrebi working-class members’ daily life and their emotional and political rollercoasters by exploring the possibilities of the cinema mode of the Grand Theft Auto V video game — notorious for its violence, misogyny, and racism —.
The film’s narrative takes place in Marseille and chronicles the life of a young man named Zine, and his battles to regain self-love and to become a better man. But in the introspective narrative, Zine is faced with the agonising and contradictory expectations that shape his future, battles and struggles he has to go through in order to regain self-confidence and self-love, as well as his coming of age in Marseille’s Maghrebi community. Sadik’s portrayal of Zine focuses on the tensions exerted by racial, class-based and gendered norms, and how these norms differ at the same time. The love that Zine feels for his male friends is incompatible with the love he feels for the woman Bulma, although the words he uses to describe his feelings are similar in both cases.
The graphics of Grand Theft Auto V have an impersonal quality that makes Zine’s vulnerability seem transferable to other identifications, in spite of the specificity of the language, the cultural markers and his personal relationships. The slight glitches in the imagery skip over the hypermasculine behaviour and machoistic violence of typical GTA narratives, as Zine describes hours weeping over heartbreak and his imperative to be better, wanting to be seen by others in a positive light and becoming “the best version of himself”.

Khtobtogone is an emotional film, which uses futuristic  technology as a vector to visualise the real struggles and dreams of a young man who represents a prototype with an intimate voice able to immerse us in the daily introspection and emotional tensions he has to face.
Zines goes to the gym, but feels he is a heartless body “Sometimes I feel like I’m nothing like a body. And that’s it. An empty deshumanised body. A body that has no right to feel. That only exist to suffer and remains silent.” Behind Zine’s hulking frame, clad in designer tracksuit and fashionable midriff bag, is an emotional guy trying to “become a man”. He is filled with love – for his friends and for his new girlfriend – but he is plagued by inner demons and a fear of not having a purpose in life. While delivering food on his motorbike, Zine pretends he is in a GTA game, as he hurtles through the beautiful coastal scenery, but customers’ condescending looks and comments bring him down. Through her sensitive portrayal and inventive juxtapositions, Sadik compellingly depicts the predicaments of contemporary masculinity and provides an acute and, at the same time, empathic analysis of the social pressures and the burden of expectations on the shoulders of young adults in a post-migrant society.

 

AMALIA ULMAN

Amalia Ulman is an Argentinian-born artist living and working in L.A., shook up the Instagram IT Girl community in 2014. Her meticulously curated Instagram account detailing her life as a vapid but increasingly troubled fashionista turned out to be a hoax, perpetuated for the sake of her performative series Excellences and Perfections.

*The Future Ahead, Improvements for the further Masculinization of Prepubescent Boys*, 2014

The Future Ahead, similar to other video essays by the artist, uses the format of powerpoint presentations to collage found footage (among others images from the ironic LESBIANS WHO LOOK LIKE JUSTIN BIEBER Tumblr blog), animated gifs and cheap sound effects. Narrating a fictional story about the protagonist Justin Bieber with an over sexualised and infantilised voice using faux medical data, the video explores polarising online trends prevalent in 2014 when young boys accentuated their forehead lines on social media. Teenage girls, on the other hand, would get botox to prevent forehead lines even before their appearance. Absurdist from beginning to end, The Future Ahead is a rollercoaster of rumors, office humor and conspiracy theories about gender roles and plastic surgery.

The Future Ahead, focuses on Justin Bieber’s coming of age as a social media celebrity. In response to a cultural fixation with Bieber’s angelic looks as a child and a decrease in his relevance around puberty, Ulman proposes that when Bieber was around 17 he developed an expression called “Office Blind Pose,” wherein he raises his eyebrows so that his forehead resembles Venetian blinds. These wrinkles in his baby face project an air of maturity, which Ulman links to the social construction of masculinity, counteracting a crude meme at the time that Bieber was secretly a lesbian. The OBP strategy seems like a punchline until Ulman compiles a few dozen photos of Bieber making this face—which, it must be said, looks ridiculous—alongside clips of teen vloggers mimicking it themselves. Ulman shuffles through them one by one in a type of obsessive, tongue-in-cheek analysis not usually directed toward masculine-presenting cis men (recall the viral GIF of Paris Hilton making the same face in dozens of photographs).

The “destruction of experience” described in the lecture—plastic surgeries intended to iron out wrinkles in women’s faces, the opposite of Bieber’s trajectory—is also a clinical complement to the omnipresent reminders of the “biological clock.” Ulman doesn’t reductively condemn these procedures; instead, she points out how they are an industry built from deeply ingrained cultural expectations. She pivots to a broader tradition of surgically combatting gender normativity by quoting Genesis P-Orridge: “Bodies are just a cheap suitcase for the consciousness.” But this post-ideological ideal collides with how well norms are upheld by an image-based culture, even when fashioning a new self. “Can we judge Justin for adapting to the sociocultural construction of gender?” Ulman asks, as though seeking a way out. It’s not impossible, but the first step is recognizing the root of the matter.

Amalia Ulman studies issues concerning gender identity in a work based on the online commotion surrounding Justin Bieber’s supposed gender transition. A fascinating research about the internet’s influence on the perception of maleness in contemporary society. A study that questions the pop star’s maleness and to address the fiction of bio-femininity.

 

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Baitball 02, installation view.

Baitball 02

Baitball 02

Projects by: 427 Gallery, Riga (LV), Acappella, Naples (IT), ADA, Rome (IT), Almanac, London (UK) / Turin (IT), AlterSide, Seoul (KR), Alyssa Davis Gallery, New York (US), Apparatus Project, Chicago (US), A.ROMY, Zurich, (CH), Artemis Fontana, Paris (FR), Baader-Meinhof, Omaha (US), Bad Water, Knoxville, (US), Berlinskej Model, Prague (CZ), Beverly’s, New York (US), Big Window, New York (US), Biquini Wax, Mexico City (MX), Brockley Gardens, London (UK), Cassata Drone, Sicily (IT), City Galerie, Wien (AT), Clima, Milan (IT), Coaxial Arts Foundation, Los Angeles (US), Cordova, Barcelona (ES), Dark Zone, New York (US), Deformal (New York, US/Online), Discordia Gallery, Melbourne (AU), Display, Berlin (DE), Dungeon, Detroit (US), eastcontemporary, Milan (IT), East Hampton Shed, New York (US), Et al., San Francisco (US), Flip project, Naples (IT), Galleria Monica De Cardenas, Milano (IT), Galeria Wschód, Warsaw (PL), Garthim, Los Angeles (US), Gern en Regalia, New York (US), Ginny on Frederick, London (UK), Giorgio Galotti, nomadic (IT), Giulietta, Basel (CH), Harlesden High Street, London (UK), haul gallery, New York (US), Interface, Berlin (DE), ISSMAG, Moscow (RU), Jargon Projects, Chicago (US), Jir Sandel, Copenhagen (DK), Like A Little Disaster, Polignano a Mare (IT), Lonesome Dove, New York (US), mcg21xoxo, Matsudo, (JP), Mery Gates, New York (US), Mouches Volantes, Köln (DE), Nero Edition + Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, Milan (IT), Nico Gallery, Bari (IT), Nights, Nomadic (IT), Nighttimestory, Los Angeles (US), No Place Gallery, Columbus, (US), No gallery, New York (US), Outo olo, Helsinki (FI), Pina, Wien, (AT), PANE project, Milan (IT), Patara Gallery, Tbilisi (GE), Peach, Rotterdam (NL), Plague Space, Krasnodar (RU), Prairie, Chicago (US), Regatta 2, Düsseldorf (DE), Rivera, Mexico City (MX), Ron Providence, New York (US), Sajetta, Online/Nomadic, Sentiment, Zurich (CH), Shore, Wien (AT), Sydney Sydney, Sydney (AU), Studiolo Project, Milan (IT), Sunny NY, New York (US), The Gallery Apart, Rome (IT), THE POOL, İstanbul (TR), The Tail, Brussels (BE), Ultrastudio, Pescara (IT), Una Galleria, Piacenza (IT), unanimous consent, Zurich, (CH), Underground Flower, Perth (AU), Uve Studios, Buenos Aires (AR), Vin Vin Gallery, Wien (AT), Window Mine, Reno (US) and many more

Powered by Like A Little Disaster

17 January / 15 March 2022 @Palazzo San Giuseppe, Polignano a Mare

Baitball is a hybrid, a crossbreed between a long-term project art fair and a collectively curated exhibition, it is a shared dimension, a way to live and co-evolve together through differences, dreaming up new worlds to become-with-others.
Baitball 02 involves 80 galleries, project spaces, artist-run spaces, collectives, curators and art institutions. Over 300 artists, activists and researchers were called to deal with the metaphorical image of a long table set for an imaginary collective lunch during which unfold speculations around the concepts of collaboration and self-organization through the act of sharing food and the practices of commensalism and conviviality.
Food, and sharing it also stimulates a string of references and connections that range from anthropology to zoology, from religion to the sacred and magic. The very idea of ​​food and nourishment raises urgent questions about the interwoven fabric that covers politics, economics, nature and the structures of power.

When you share your lunch with someone less fortunate or give your friend half of your dessert, does that act of generosity flow from the milk of human kindness, or is it a subconscious strategy to assure reciprocity should you one day find yourself on the other side of the empty plate?

The long table that seamlessly crosses the spaces of the seventeenth-century Palazzo San Giuseppe in Polignano a Mare is conceived as a long snake, a labyrinth or a gut. A single, gargantuan being, with a hive mind. The traces left by the exhibition appear both as object, narration and social bond, never reduced to a simple entity. What matters here is the plurality of the agents and the networks that connect them. 

“us and our technologies in one vast system – to include human and nonhuman agency and understanding, knowing and unknowing, within the same agential soup”.

*Baitball 02 stages an uninterrupted neural sequence that can only be experienced as part of a whole, only as a single choral installation that arises neither as an object nor as a subject, but as a relationship. 
Baitball 02 is a single plural work that works as a mediator responsible not for conveying messages, but for building, rewriting, and modifying their meanings. ​
Baitball 02 does not symbolize, does not reflect, does not reify relationships, it contributes to shaping them. 

A bait ball occurs when small organisms (fish, birds, insects) move tightly compacted in a spherical formation around a common center. It is a defensive measure adopted to escape the threat of predators, but it is also a cohesion exercise enhancing the hydro-aerodynamic functions.

A coordinated bait ball shimmers in unison, hundreds or thousands of individuals move together apparently under radio control or directed by predetermined choreography, even if there is no leader or hierarchy within them.
The “balls” are formed through that spontaneous emergence known as self-organization. It emerges from the bottom upwards, it is an a-centered and non-linear phenomenon, it is an irreversible process, which thanks to the cooperative action of subsystems lead to more complex structures in the global system.

WORKS BY Manuel Arturo Abreu, Torre Alain, Artjom Astrov, Mariantonietta Bagliato, Nara Bak, Balfua, Bank of Bad Habits (Johanna Kotlaris & Thomas Moor), Aaron-Amar Bhamra, Karolina Bielawska, Colleen Billing, Hannah Bohnen, Szilvia Bolla, Paul Branca, Emma Bruschi, Sam Buchanan, Clifford E. Bruckmann, Anna Budniewski, Victoria Campbell, Federico Cantale, Mikkel Carlsen, Filippo Cecconi, Ana Chaduneli, Shelby Charlesworth, Urbain Checcaroni, Mengqi Chen, Ivan Cheng, Edoardo Ciaralli, Ciriza, Pierre Clement, Gianluca Concialdi, Julia Colavita,  Nicole Colombo, Daniela Corbascio, Trent Crawford + Stanton Cornish-Ward, Alex de Roeck, José De Sancristobal, Federico Del Vecchio, Rachel Dickson, Derek Di Fabio, Michael Dikta, Anthony Discenza, Dove Perspicacius (Claire Wallois), DUNA GROUP,  Claudia Dyboski, Sessa Englund, Lara Ferrari, Julie Favreau, Ella Rose Flood, Patricia Fort, Javier Fresneda, Noah Furman, Paolo Gabriotti, Manuela Garcia, Alberto Garcia Rodriguez, Tommaso Gatti, Alizée Gazeau, Arthur Golyakov, Santiago Gomez, Hasler R. Gomez, AB Gorham, Noah Greene, Joe Greer, Maëlle Gross, Diego Gualandris, Valentina Guerrero, Rebecca Guez, Mike Hack, Alma Heikkila, Maya Hottarek, Kristin Hough, Annette Hur, Cathrin Jarema, Jason Blue Lake Medicine Eagle Martinez, Gvantsa Jishkariani, Gareth Kaye, Raza Kazmi, Baharen Khoshodee, Michaela Kisling, Stefan Knauf, John Knight, Eliska Konecna, Taka Kono, Susan Kooi, Can Küçük, Madeline Kuzak, Dasha Kuznetsova, Keith Lafuente, Dominik Lang, La Gousse (Cécile Bouffard, Roxanne Maillet, Barbara Quintin), Mandy Lee, Lucia Leuci, Kate Liebman, Aron Lodi, Abby Lloyd, Stas Lobachevskiy, George Henry Longly, Henry MacDiarmid, Taichi Machida, Fiona McElhany, Ana McKay, Maria Maea, Andrea Magnani, Antonis Magoulas, Umber Majeed, Paolo Mentasti, Umber Majeed, Lukas Malte Hoffmann, Daria Makarova, Philip Markert, Anderson Matthew, Josep Maynou, Till Megerle, Qeu Meparishvili, Ally Messer, Mia Middleton, Jimmy Milani, Mario Miron, Giacomo Montanelli, Julie Monot, MRZB, Slava Nesterov, Melissa Newbery-Welcome, Siân Newlove-Drew,  Thuy Tien Nguyen, Valerio Nicolai, Jakup Nilsson, Matthias Odin, Aniara Omann, Catalina Ouyang, Cem Örgen, Paola Paleari, Anna Luisa Petrisko, Cesar Piedra, Austin Pratt, Gianna Virginia Prein, Psychoegyptian & Michael Intile, Andy Ralph, Linus Rauch, Marta Ravasi, Jessy Razafimandimby, Kendy Rivera, Dana Robinson, Mike Sarich, Kira Scerbin, marcus scott williams, Jake Shore, Aleksandra Sidor, Anastasia Sosunova, Manuel Stehli, G. Olmo Stuppia, Kamil Sznajder + Hugo Kaszyki, Filippo Tappi, Alex the Brown, Victoria Todorov, Natasha Tontey, Federico Tosi, Philip Ullrich, Hanna Umin, Valentina Vaccarella, Julian Van Der Moere, Vanya Venmer, Dan Vogt, Karolína Voleská, Xiaowei Wang, Noemi Weber, Graham Wiebe, Tom Wixo, Valerie You, Guanyu Xu, Qianqian Ye, Malte Zander, Alice Zhuang, Julia Znoj and many more.

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Galatine, Jaana Kristiina Alakoski, Romana Drdova, Lucia Leuci, installation view

Galatine

Galatine

Jaana Kristiina Alakoski, Romana Drdova, Julie Grosche, Lucia Leuci, Katy McCarthy

Curated by Like A Little Disaster

3 September / 1 October 2021, @ Berlínskej Model for the international exhibition SUMO “The Odd Year II”, Prague, Czech Republic
With the support of the Italian Cultural Institute in Prague and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation

Like A Little Disaster text/audio/video contribution for the show “Galatine”

Audio recorded in the Castellana Caves – Length: 3,000 m
Location: Castellana Grotte (BA, Apulia, Italy)
Coordinates: 40°52′32″N 17°08′59″E

Video recorded at Port’Alga Cove
Location: Polignano a Mare (BA, Apulia Italy)
Coordinates: 40.9906408534034, 17.23803019647275

Text written in the Garden of Addolorata and Giovanni
Location: Torre Santa Susanna (BR, Apulia Italy) – Via Garibaldi, 7
Coordinates: 40.478333065020436, 17.733785258168158

The etymology of the word “milk” – “lac-lactis or glactis” in Latin and “gala-galactos” in Greek – is linked to the oldest “GLU, GLA, GAL, GAR” root that indicates the onomatopoeic sound of swallowing of an infant during breastfeeding. Galatina (Italian feminine singular) Galatine (Italian feminine plural), is the name of a famous Italian milk candy. Galatine are made with powdered milk and honey. They look like solid-dehydrated-chalky-whitish circles. They are porous like all bodies of water. They return to their “hydro-state” through the connection with any other body of water, in this case, the saliva of our mouth.1

“Galatine” is conceived as a dialogue between five artists – Jaana Kristiina Alakoski, Romana Drdova, Julie Grosche, Lucia Leuci, Katy McCarthy – whose practices and poetics trigger an hydrophonic choir questioning and reflecting the concept of milk, experienced as material metonyms of a planetary watery mesh that interpermeates and connects bodies and bathes new kinds of plural life into being. Milk is commonly connected to human and, more generally, mammalian species’ experience, to care and nursing and primary nutriment. But milk is also something that goes beyond human projects. “Galatine” triggers a non-human perspective just by emphasizing human extracorporeal implications in the bodily waters of others – human and other animal, but also oceanic, mineral, riparian, gaseous, epiphytic, estuarine, arboreal, tropical, saline, lychenic, meteorological, galactic bodies. We are all just swimming through milky streams. If adult humans manage to keep their mouths away from milk, they often substitute it through its simulacra – mostly provoking well-know disastrous ecosystem damage; coconut milk, rice milk, soy milk, hemp milk, oat milk, pea milk, peanut milk, grains milk, barley milk, fonio milk, maize milk, millet milk, oat milk, rice milk, rye milk, sorghum milk, teff milk, triticale milk, spelt milk, wheat milk. In fact, not only do mammals produce milk; some birds, such as pigeons, doves, flamingoes, and penguins produce a substance derived from epithelial cells called “crop milk,” with which they nurture their chicks. Spiders do that and also cockroaches, pseudoscorpions, discus fish and some frogs and salamanders too. Plants emit milk-s too. Latexes and milky resins are secreted both for defence, for care and healing; what’s a new branch but a little baby to take care of? Through guttation some plants secrete small milky and viscous drops guaranteeing nutrition and hydration to the smaller plants below. Stones are made of calcium, many varieties of fossils produce milky fluids. Yes, stones produce milk but, in turn, milk produces stones. And more, casein is found in a variety of objects that we use every day (including tech-stuff); but it happens to be mixed with toxic plastics and derivatives. We are surrounded by milk, it is in us, with us, above us, below us, around us. Too close, too far, from invisible molecules to “our” shining galaxy that is milky twice, because it is the Milky Way and because it is the Galaxy. When infants ask their mothers for milk, they are actually asking for “the whole” Galaxy. Besides all, isn’t it true that the Milky Way was created from Hera’s milk breast?

Stones are porous, like all bodies of water; like all wet bodies, fossils are porous, the bodies of women, and fish, and infants, and flamingo, and Tajikistan, and alocasia, and spiders, and figs, and artesian wells, and galatine, are porous too. These bodies are all caught up in one another’s currents – as they are with the whale’s body, the body of the rain cloud, and the body of the increasingly toxic sea. As bodies of water, we are all and always, at some point of the levels, implicated. If “Galatine” began with the objective of ‘describing the geography closest in’, it has soon paddled a great distance while never really leaving this body that is ‘ours’. It has also paddled in time; milk connects us directly to childhood, but also to other bodies across time and space, where the entwining of bodies might stir ‘the remembered smell of our own mother’s milk’. As a watery vector between bodies, milk gathers the heritages of the myriad porous bodies that are the condition of our perpetual hydromorphic condition. We all give ourselves up to another wet body. We all become with, or simply just become, other milky seas. While the subject-forming lineaments materialize the body very concretely, they also index its multiple belongings and anchor their subjectivity in multiple places.

The body is always multiple. Well, yes, this body is also situated as a maternal body. “Galatine” portrays the act of nursing as a vector of powerful and sometimes uncanny affect: “the act of suckling a child, like a sexual act, may be tense, physically painful, charged with cultural feelings of inadequacy and guilt; or, like a sexual act, it can be a physically delicious, elementally soothing experience”.2

“Galatine” describes the transit of waters between bodies as a matter of fact, but also as a matter of feeling, of memory, of gendered and sexual embodiment. We might try to parse out the ‘real’ biological flows of milky intercorporeality (DDT, antibodies, flame retardant, calcium) from affective ones (bonding, love, revulsion, fear), but such divisions here falter. In “Galatine” psyche and soma, biology and affect, dwell in and as our bodies in what can be seen as an immersive space for a fusion of meshed gametes, where seemingly disparate bodily factions are nonetheless communicating with each other in empathic narration.

1. Remember: Saliva and milk are always fundamental resources in order to “Spit on Hegel again and again”
2. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood As Experience and Institution, 1976

In the premises of Berlinskej Model, Like A Little Disaster presented the works of five artists from different corners of the world: Romana Drdová (CZ), Julie Grosche (FR), Lucia Leuci (IT), Jaana-Kristiina Alakoski (SE), and Katy McCarthy (US). The theme of the exhibition is femininity, with motherhood and sisterly cooperation as a connecting leitmotif. The aforementioned artists will be preparing an exhibition of paintings, sculptures, photography, and videos in harmony and mutual cooperation; works and bodies and thoughts will empathically coexist with each other.

SUMO Prague 2021 is an international gallery exchange project, the second edition of which, entitled The Odd Year II, will be taking place in Prague, Czech Republic from September 3 to October 15, 2021. Eight local galleries will be hosting exhibitions with an accompanying program curated in collaboration with partner institutions from abroad. The project aims to present the local audience with international art and artists new to the Czech context. SUMO will also help foster international cooperation in the field of contemporary art, establishing new networks and promoting exchange between artists, curators, art critics, and other art world professionals. SUMO’s opening weekend will take place September 3–5, 2021.

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Body Snatchers (The House), Installation View.

Body snatchers (The House)

Body snatchers (The House)

Jaana-Kristiina Alakoski, Benni Bosetto, Reilly Davidson, Giulia Essyad, Adham Faramawy, Cleo Fariselli, Chiara Fumai, Jason Gomez, Ellie Hunter, Uffe Isolotto, Gregory Kalliche, Lito Kattou, Lucia Leuci, Aniara Omann, Catherine Parsonage, REPLICA, Giuliana Rosso, Namsal Siedlecki, Oda Iselin Sønderland, Federico Tosi, Bruno Zhu

Curated by Like A Little Disaster and PANE Project

10 May / 30 June 2019 @Foothold, Polignano a Mare

Only one person will be allowed into the space at a time. The exhibition will be experienced in total isolation. The gallery will have no staff and no physical interaction is allowed. The exhibition experience is thus transformed: from an otherwise ordinary social event to a private dimension in which the vision becomes the space of self-reflection.

Monstrous, abnormal, deformed, hybrid, supernatural; a sign sent by the gods, an omen – according to Greek etymology (τέρας); warning (mŏnēre) and demonstration (monstrāre) of desirable behaviour, in the Latin sense (monstrum), but also prodigy, an exceptional fact happening and, in a sense, standing out, as an exception, forcing people to question what is otherwise ordinary.

In late antiquity and in the Middle Ages, a monstrosity is no longer a prodigy; it becomes associated with natural history, leaning towards the fantastic and ending up, in our time, in the realm of horror and science fiction, which outline the existence of alien and cyborg life forms. The history of the word “monster” and of the constellation of meanings that branches out from it through the succession of historical eras up to our current era, in which, once its moral undertone is accepted, we witness the “monsterrification” of objects, individuals, groups, events. The idea of diversity generally takes on a self-punishing value; bodies differing from the norm (or normality), which, by deviating from impossible standards, set up alternative ways in which corporeality presents itself, thus becoming a violation of the norm. The prohibition becomes radical because it is pervasive, crossing the fine line between the inherent antinomy between a normal and an abnormal, monstrous, grotesque body. This involves corporeality and physicality in their entirety, in the present world, in the present era – in which an invisible, parasitic microorganism becomes a threat to the survival of human beings and makes any form of bodily interaction illegal, thus radicalizing the measure of personal space and making the contamination of such space an unavoidable pretext for punishment.

Body snatchers (The House) is a super private, perhaps purely speculative and phenomenological project, which leads the visitor into a bubble which is both familiar and alien. In a scenario which is at once pre and post human, the visitor finds him/herself surrounded by numerous, presumably human (but no one can say for sure, no one can confirm it – if there’s no one else to ask) bodily presences. Bodies, their representations, their performances, their transformations, their fragmentations, and, of course, their absence, piling up. Are these bodies too made up, too dismembered, and distorted, to be human? Are these fragments too elusive to be simply skin and flesh? The visitor will be forced to see themself in other people’s “non-body”, in the trace left after they cross their boundaries and become distorted, dismembered and with multiple limbs, like real forms or materials, but improved, like a disassembled and reassembled collective and personal self. A restructuring of meaning is permeated by an outstanding pars destruens, which, in turn, imposes its own urgency. Looking away is not allowed, nor is turning away: the other side has the same characteristics and the same urgency. The possibility of staying uneasy is unwavering since, perhaps, it is not the bodies on display which are monstrous or in transformation, but rather it is the visitor’s body itself. The more we forbid ourselves to conceive of hybrids, the more possible their interbreeding becomes.

When bodies cross their own boundaries, or parts are separated from the whole, they become something disturbingly different. This forces the viewer to renegotiate the boundaries between the inside and the outside, between the bodies themselves – fragmented, “distorted” – and the source of their own anxieties and fears. Thus, the uncanny reveals its duplicity, just like an object which, while unknown and maybe unknowable, unintelligible, and therefore deadly, is at the same time somewhat familiar. The borderline between nature and the unnatural reveals its fleeting and vague character, giving rise to a disorienting effect when reading and interpreting what we perceive, which amounts to a sense of discomfort towards a body which is it not possible to immediately discern whether it is alive or dead, real or ghost; a three-dimensional and anthropomorphic body, that is, which questions the certainties reality’s categories and ambiguously mixes the opposite concepts of life and death, which are otherwise necessarily experienced as binary, together.

Body Snatchers (The House) – to be understood as a single collective work / experience – lines up together speculations on reality and fiction, on subjectivation but also on intersubjectivity, hierarchy and becoming, the encounter with otherness, the relationship (interaction) between different components / materials / realities and the negotiation between the private and the public, I and We, I and the Other (and, if it still exists, the other-body). As in Abel Ferrara’s homonymous film[1], it is difficult to state what is real: you or them – your body or theirs (and again, us or them – our body or theirs)? The human body embraces and welcomes the non-human, the otherness, within itself, harboring it and determining a presence / absence of bodies in the making, evolving or reacting to something new and unexpected, thus giving rise to a metamorphosis.

Corporeity is seen as stemming from the relationship between the body and the organic, where the organism is both a vital component and a structure, both a normal and a normative organization[2]. The aesthetics rooted in the states of change and hybridization, of permanent transition, implies a rethinking of these aporias with a view to an awareness of the arbitrariness of the purity claim, of the adherence to the rules of nature aimed at expelling and condemning diversity, of non-conform, of abnormality accused of anomaly[3].

According to Gestalt theory, the ways through which visual perception operates proceed from a sort of overview that allows grasping the entirety of what is perceived. Secondly, the original “holistic” approach is transmuted towards an analytic understanding of the perceived data, operating a sort of scanning of the single elements that compose it. Since «It is at the same time true that the world is what we see and that, nonetheless, we must learn to see it»[4], it is necessary to decline in a perspective sense our gaze on what surrounds us, learn to relativize, suspend judgment and, contextually, sharpen the critical sense. The sleep of reason generates monsters, in the same way that the torpor of emotionality generates inhumanity.

Body parts and flesh cuts not always identifiable force the viewer to a visceral encounter with both familiar and alien objects. A human corpse is not abject in itself, but the encounter with it can certainly generate aberration. But also attraction. A recalibration of one’s relationship to the object involves the body while trying to assess whether the foreign object is a source of threat or fascination, perhaps both, co-belonging elements of a toxic soup that engenders seduction and carnal interest in disgust, dystopian fantasies of voyeurism and violence, visceral and sculptural allusions, imagined narratives of bodily invasions; the rampant grotesque, with elastic, deformed or monstrous bodies. The possibility of metamorphosing one’s own flesh and image – of permeating its thresholds – is both intoxicating and anxiogenic.

 

Body Snatchers is a boundary creature that wanders between the edges of everything that is familiar and conventional. It is eager for transformation, an open mouth that invites us to descend into other worlds, into a space of new ideas and ethical riddles. A ripe ground for the rooting of perversions that push the boundaries dismissing the limits of any legitimacy, freeing narratives dealing with infection and altered states. Life is a constant change; we are eating the world, the world is eating us. We are all mortal. We are all human. We are all flesh. We cannot escape our inclinations nor our flesh and blood, their decay and putrefaction. The next generation may also evolve into cyborgs, while still remaining blood, guts and excrement… contagious and virulent…

Shit and light.

 

Like A Little Disaster & Giusi Aglieri

[1] “Body Snatchers” is a 1993 science fiction horror film directed by Abel Ferrara shown in competition at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival. Body Snatchers is the third film adaptation of the novel “The Body Snatchers”, 1955 by Jack Finney, the first being “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” in 1956 by Don Siegel, followed by a remake of the same name in 1978 by Philip Kaufman.
[2] S.K. Langer, “Living form”, in Ead., “Problems of Art. Ten philosophical lectures”, Scribner, New York 1957, pp. 44-58.
[3] The concept of hybridization refers to the co-belonging of corporeality and the grotesque, invalidating the arbitrary delimitation of the boundaries and standards defined for corporeality itself. As Bakhtin writes: «Amid the good things of this here-and-now world are also to be found false connections that distort the authentic nature of things, false associations established and reinforced by tradition and sanctioned by religious and official ideology. Objects and ideas are united by false hierarchical relationships, inimical to their nature; they are sundered and separated from one another by various other-wordly and idealistic strata that do not permit these objects to touch each other in their living corporeality. These false links are reinforced by scholastic thought, by a false theological and legalistic casuistry and ultimately by language itself – shot through with centuries and millennia of error – false links between (on the one hand) good material words, and (on the other) authentically human ideas. It is necessary to destroy and rebuild the entire false picture of the world, to sunder the false hierarchical links between objects and ideas, to abolish the divisive ideational strata. It is necessary to liberate all these objects and permit them to enter into the free unions that are organic to them, no matter how monstrous these unions might seem from the point of view of ordinary, traditional associations. These objects must be permitted to touch each other in all their living corporeality, and in the manifold diversity of the values they bear. It is necessary to device new matrices between objects and ideas that will answer to their real nature, to once again line up and join together those things that had been falsely disunified and distanced from one another – as well as to disunite those things that had been falsely brought in proximity. On the basis of this new matrix of objects, a new picture of the world necessarily opens up – a world permeated with an internal and authentic necessity» (“The dialogic imagination. Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin”, edited by M. Holquist, translated by C. Emerson and M. Holquist, University of Texas Press, Austin 1981, p. 169). Perhaps traces of the “new matrices” of which Bakhtin speaks could be found in the distorted figures that date back to the first century BC. These figures, also known as “Grotesques,” were created in the context of Roman painting as wall decoration, and then were taken up again in the fifteenth century. They depict hybrid beings and monstrous figures that blend together anthropomorphic traits, elements of the natural world and architectural components.
[4] M. Merleau-Ponty, “The visible and the invisible”, edited by C. Lefort, translated by A. Lingis, Northwestern University Press, Evanston 1968, p. 4.
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Petra Cortright, vvebkam, 2007

Body Snatchers (The Church)

Body snatchers (The Church)

Ed Atkins, Petra Cortright, Julie Grosche, Oliver Laric, Heather Phillipson, Laure Prouvost, Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca, Jala Wahid

Curated by Like A Little Disaster and PANE Project

12 April / 20 June 2021 @Church of San Giuseppe, Polignano a Mare, Italy

Like A Little Disaster and PANE project are honoured to present Body Snatchers (The Church), a new chapter of the investigation around the languages of international video art in the venue of the seventeenth-century Church of San Giuseppe in Polignano a Mare.

Access to the church shall be allowed to only one person at a time. The exhibition will be experienced only in total isolation. The church will have no staff and no physical interaction shall be allowed. The exhibition experience is thus transformed: from a social and mundane event to a private dimension in which the vision becomes the space of self-reflection.

 

The projection of each video shall follow a random playlist following the order of the Canonical Hours of the Catholic Church; the hours dedicated to communal and collective prayer.

 

Liturgy of the Hours
Matins (before dawn)
Lauds (at dawn)
Prime (at 6 am)
Terce (at 9 am)
Sext (at noon)
Nones (at 3 pm)
Vespers (at sunset)
Compline (before bedtime)

 

—

 

This bower was my temple,
the fastened door my shrine,
and here I would lie outstretched
on the mossy ground,
thinking strange thoughts
and dreaming strange dreams.

 

The videos appear as visions, as frescoes that come to life on the walls of the church, as candles lit for a saint or as prayers. The projections work as large mirrors through which the visitor can compare and reflect himself (as a comparison, in the absence of any other human presence).

 

Body Snatchers (The Church) takes place at a time when the rules of isolation and physical distancing are in force, a radically self-reflective time in which the body does not necessarily have to perform or materially manifest itself to others – if not through or within an immaterial dimension. The project becomes extra meaningful given the current situation of social distancing and expansive digital communication. As the longing for physical contact with all that’s left behind, excluded from our intimate bubble, is growing, the confrontation with flat images gets more painful.
We just have to caress the screen and accept the value of the non-material being.

 

The project is set within a space intended to host the liturgical assembly, an aisle which commonly hosts people who believe in the real existence of the body and blood of Christ, but which now hosts a body forced to believe that the others, their substance, and their physical presence still actually exist. The church is also the place where the faithful believe that the body (the incarnation of the Divine) is resurrected and returned to life after death; a place of life and death, of passage between the two, and of their mutual interchange.

 

In the Gospels, the empty tomb and the resurrection are one and the same. Women and apostles never see the resurrection as the reanimation of the dead body. They only see the absence of the body and the apparitions in a new and mysterious form, open to interpretations. It is the absence, the emptiness, the substance of resurrection.

 

The dreamy, awaited, escaped and untouchable body becomes the image of a reproduction which meets the needs of desire. The lost body is really absent, loneliness becomes the place of its abstract presence. So is abstraction itself nothing but absence and pain or is it painful absence?
Waiting for others activates the manipulation of the object of desire, giving it a body, a face, a character, intentions, words, which almost never correspond to reality. The object one waits for itself, the mass-centre of this dynamic, can actually turn out to be nothing more than an imagined object: what is this body if not the product of imagination? Isn’t it an unreal, evanescent body you are actually waiting for? Is the awaited body endowed with its own objectivity or is its image linked, by its very nature, to the subjectivity of those who think it?

 

In a place whose very name indicates the space dedicated to the community, the gatherings of the faithful and the liturgical assembly, Body snatchers (The Church) speculates on the dimension of isolation, transformation, presence/absence and on passing and crossing physical boundaries, as well as on the concepts of nostalgia, loneliness, pain and grief.

 

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Hannah Black, Aeter (Jack), 2018 – Installation view.

The eye can see things the arm cannot reach

The eye can see things the arm cannot reach

Farah Al Qasimi, The Army of Love (Alexa Karolinski & Ingo Nierman), Meriem Bennani, Hannah Black, Kate Cooper, Emma Balimaka & Adrien Cruellas & Florian Sumi, Cécile B. Evans, Adham Faramawy, FCNN, Dorota Gawęda and Egle Kulbokaite, Alex Goss, Julie Grosche, Ilana Harris-Babou, The Institute of Queer Ecology, Derek G Larson, Hanne Lippard, Jen Liu, Katy McCarthy, Orla McHardy, Shala Miller, Virginia Lee Montgomery, Shana Moulton, Sondra Perry, Agnieszka Polska, Tabita Rezaire, SAGG Napoli, Stephen Vitiello.

Curated by Julie Grosce and Like A Little Disaster

12 September / 12 December 2020
@ONSITE Chiesa di San Giuseppe – Polignano a Mare Italy
@ONLINE www.sajetta.com

Sinners will be forgiven. Corrupt will not […]. Open yourself to love.i

Originally, this video project was designed for the 17th century San Giuseppe Church in Polignano a Mare, but with the pandemic and related rules on social distancing, things have changed. The project underwent a splitting process (IRL/online) which transformed it into a two-faced herma, in love with a face that cannot be touched.
The exhibition is actually set up in the church but public access will never be allowed.
It is possible to visit it only trough the online platform Sajetta – so the project exists simultaneously online and in the church where no one can experience it, except through a leap of faith.

 

Doubting is lawful. The doubt is in the game of faith,
in the game of love.
But nobody is here to check.

The works involved revolve around love (not as a subject but as an experience), conception, romance and intimacy, as well as female gaze and body. The church becomes the blasphemous frame for the projection of works that stage representations of love and sensuality.
Here, the object of faith and belief become simply love.
“The eye can see things the arm cannot reach” is an ultra-private, maybe purely speculative, project that leads us into the intimate dimension of faith. Faith in something that is definitely happening, but that no one can experience, assist or prove it, because to demonstration it is to deny it. Faith that bodies and love are not just an illusion; even during a pandemic.

 

Love is the son of Penia; poverty, need, missing, absence.

All the works involved show and invoke love for Other (lovers/friends/children/sisters/communities/comrades) but visualized in a way and in a time in which every interaction is denied. The show is set inside a vessel that generally hosts people who believe that the body of Christ really existed, but which now welcomes us, in the vortex of a historical moment that allows us only to believe that the others, their corporeity and their physical presence still really exist.
Interactions are now fantasized and the desire is at its apogee.
The dreamed, awaited, escaped body becomes the image of a reproduction responding to the dictation of desire. The lost body is truly absent; loneliness becomes the space of its abstract presence. Abstraction itself then is nothing but absence and pain, pain of absence – so perhaps love.
The condition of waiting for love-r can be defined as a mystical vocation to imagination and reverie. The lover who waits does not know more effective tools than the imagination to heal, albeit deceptively, the absence of the loved one. While waiting, the lover “manipulates” the object of love, giving it a body, a face, a character, intentions and words, which never match reality. The entity awaited, the mass centre of love dynamics, can actually prove to be nothing more than an imagined object: who, then, is this body for me, if not the fruit of my imagination? Isn’t it an unreal, evanescent body that I’m actually waiting for? Is the awaited body endowed with its own objectivity? Is its image linked, by its very nature, to the subjectivity of those who think it?

 

Corpus Domini. ii

An important aspect emerging from the processes set in motion by the alternation of the works can be found in the idea/image/representation of the body and its ownership.
Quarantine represented an intensely self-reflexive moment, a non-time in which the body did not have to exhibit itself. Consequently, it also represents the dimension of distancing, of detachment, not only from others but above all from social constructs.
Love is the exclusive space of intimacy, separated from society and the roles it imposes; it becomes an absolute (solutus ab ? absolútus), dissolved from everything, in which everyone can liberate the self that cannot be express in the roles occupied in the social sphere.

 

Canonical hours iii – of love.

The videos will appear as visions in random and unpredictable moments of the day (H24 – 7/7). This modality makes a full experience of the contents impossible, in the same way that they cannot be experienced in the church. In this way, the project, to be understood as an autonomous work of art, claims its elusive nature, just like love’s.
Faith, love, religion, all objects that we cannot fully understand, will be treated for what they are; fading, impalpabilities, evanescences, within the online display.
Between one projection and the other a soundtrack, composed for the occasion by Stephen Vitiello (with texts from Diderot, recited by Tracy Leipold and Julie Grosche), will accompany and guide the visitor in that dimension in which waiting is the time of missing itself. The soundtrack is a fundamental element of the entire project, as well as of the church; it is that which contains and connects the various videos. The soundtrack becomes the space, the space of the absent presence.

 

But the other is absent; I invoke the other inwardly to keep me on the brink of this mundane complacency, a temptation. I appeal to the other’s ”truth” (the truth of which the other gives me the sensation) against the hysteria of seduction into which I feel myself slipping. I make the other’s absence responsible for my worldliness: I invoke the other’s protection, the other’s return: let the other appear, take me away, like a mother who comes looking for her child, from this worldly brilliance, from this social infatuation, let the other restore to me” the religious intimacy, the gravity” of the lover’s world.iv

i Pope Francis, from the mass for Italian parliamentarians (28 March 2014).
ii The Feast of Corpur Domini or Corpus Christi (the “Day of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Jesus Christ the Lord”), is a Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Western Orthodox liturgical solemnity celebrating the Real Presence of the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ in the elements of the Eucharist.
iii Canonical hours are an ancient subdivision of the day developed in the Catholic Church for common prayer, also known as the “Divine Office” or Opus Dei (“work of God”). iv Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments.
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