Monday, May 29, 2017, 7pm
Exercises in de-growth
HEAD – Genève, Boulevard Helvétique 9, 1205 Geneva, seminar room CCC, salle 27, 2nd floor
What does it mean to rehearse, research and wish for a ‘slow institution’ in the field of contemporary art? In my presentation I would like to address my wishes and doubts how to curate a forthcoming biennial (Contour Biennial in Mechelen, Belgium), by taking literally what the anthropologist Ghassan Hage suggested, for all of us concerned about climate change, that we should ‘not analyse a missile when it is heading towards us, but act and mobilize’ ourselves immediately and rethink what we are doing and how we do it. I desire to think of artistic practice as a sustainable, socially responsible practice among citizens, rather than as an accumulation of marketable, product-oriented works. In 2011 renowned philosopher of sciences Isabelle Stengers wrote a plea for ethical research in sciences that she refers to « slow science », where she drew analogy between « the slow knowledge of a gardener to the fast one of the rational industrial agriculture”.Questions that I would like to pose are concerned with how to create artistic practices that coexist within our lived realities, and how can such practices become part of the call for economic and technological degrowth in the developed countries of the Global North, which are causing the largest amount of global-warming-causing pollution.