“Over Yonder (The Show that Lived Twice)”

Like A Little Disaster is pleased to present “Over Yonder (The Show that Lived Twice)”, a long-term project, where the exhibition context can be experienced as an over-yonder in itself; artists and works will not share a linear and conventional space-time. Over the months the project will undergo a constant metamorphosis. The exhibition will find its strength from the persistence of transience, through a perennial process of addition-subtraction-multiplication.
The works will take on new, unpredictable and unexpected conformations, associations, contextualizations and re-problematizations, some will disappear forever, and others only last for short and unspecified periods; they will be cyclically hidden and exposed, in a continuous switch between visible and invisible, foreground and backstage.
Even the exhibition space will occasionally change state, shape and location.

The more I struggle to understand the elsewhere, the more I find that I am contaminated by it.
I dive into the “elsewhere”, it is stuck on my body.

– Polignano a Mare wastewater purifier –

As a semantic construct, the world rests on the distinction between background and foreground, or the presence of an “elsewhere” that just like the set of a play provides a setting for the actions of the protagonists. If that “elsewhere” disappears, so does the world: that is why the anxiety of the apocalypse brought about by global warming is in fact a reality of the apocalypse. The world has already ended. The ecologists’ claim to save the world has already failed at the outset, because the world is already over. The world exists only as an agglomeration of meaning; without a human subject to think about it, it “demondifies”. This demondification can be read as a collapse of the traditional order of things that sees nature as a background against which the human subject stands out in the main stage. In an age of global warming, there is no background, and consequently no foreground. It is the end of the world, since the world depends on backgrounds and foregrounds.

In this viscous world, the society we live in has built its foundation on the work of removal towards an external entity. This practice of removal is applied from both material and relational perspectives. Almost all the productive mechanisms of the capitalist system produce waste and refuse, which are illusorily disposed of in the over yonder, always outside the places where that system reproduces itself, thus outside cities, communities, and tourist destinations. The point is that there is no “elsewhere”; there is no place where humanity can take refuge to escape the problems it has created, no location beyond our gaze where we deceive ourselves into disposing of the residues of the tourist industry or the waste and radioactive materials that will always and in any case disperse radiation, which will always and in any case reach us, will pass through our bodies. We are forced to live in an ontologically flat world devoid of any waste pipe, a world in which there is no “elsewhere”.

As usual, only when a mechanism breaks down or jams do we realize that it exists and what it is really composed of.

Sometimes global warming does not warm: on the contrary, it manifests itself strangely as biting cold or in the form of violent storms. My feeling of heat on the back of my head is just a distorted representation of the warm hand of global warming. It has always been convenient for us to think that the U-shape of household drains was a convenient curvature of ontological space, capable of taking anything thrown into a hyperspace, into a completely different dimension, leaving everything clean here on the surface. Now we know how things are: instead of the land of over yonder, the waste goes into the Mediterranean Sea or a bogus sewage treatment plant.