This is nowhere and its forever...
Revolution doesn't exist. I don't say this lightly, as someone who has spent many thoughts over the ways in which my life and my affect might influence revolution in some form or another. To reiterate, revolution is illusionary. It's boring. It's a fallacy bred into us like any myth of old, inspiring verve into minds dedicated to a way of being that authenticates their Being. Everything that has happened and will happen is revolution in a sense. Even those people one knows and considers to be exceptionally talented (insofar as you are even slightly envious of them), whom I posit are potentially closest to revolution in their nature, know it's bleakness. It is like a relief eroded from the breath of time; its bleached surface translates an attitude brokenly. However, the pursuit of it I do not take to be illusionary, it is indeed important. Yet, it seems that the temperament of today is one that seems to reject the notion of the New for the New. It collapses in on itself in paradox. There still exists an innate compulsion for people to replace the old with the new: something which provides their existence, that time is passing and they are seeing history be done. Nothing catches the modern imagination more than the idea of step change.
An exhibition in an abandoned Brussels mall titled This is nowhere and it’s forever toyed with this potential pointlessness of the new, and further with the absence of a world at all. Paradoxical, I know. Yet, we see in this exhibition how an authentic synthesis of situ, scenography, artwork and curation is able to project the potentials of Contemporary art. In This is nowhere and it’s forever we see a shadow of joy and hope within this cynical and existential state of things. The exhibition itself was sparse, with ample space in order to invite audiences to wander and seek out what might lie in the skeleton of a space. The space was a shell of its former self, and as one walked into the capacious still and silent mall this much is immediately understood. In this way the driving notions of this exhibition is tacitly felt once you enter the space. Namely, Mark Fisher’s ‘lost futures’ and by relation Derrida’s notion of ‘hantology’ both concepts which I find incredibly interesting but I won’t speak on here.
I’d like to present this exhibition as one which recognised the illusory nature of the future. There is some kind of nonsense in the notion that the future might be able to be planned from the present. If the future has been lost to the present via the past, it seems to me that the projection of the future itself is somewhat futile. To consider too heavily the design or direction of projection is contrary to the flow of life. It considers the future with disregard to its fundamental human element. This way of considering the future, could be compared to a historically popular lot of land, one which is broken down and rebuilt over and over by whatever wealthy person owns it at the time. Projection of the future then, in this way, is the precise opposite of storytelling, in which the story and the life of which it tells are oriented in the same direction. To live the story is not to pivot on the present but, at every moment, to follow the thread of the future’s past. It means acknowledging that we are ever behind where we will be, and where others have already been. There is no stacking upon, rebuilding or ‘fixing’.
It is precisely this acknowledgement which I felt was imbued in this exhibition through its art in situ. The exhibition was housed in a disused commercial lot within a mall in the centre of Brussels (just down the road from the UN building). The space, as both place and non-place, used and unused, old architecture with new technocapitalism features, is a way for the artists and curators alike to make obvious to viewers a certain social malaise – which does not reveal itself to people in ways we can instantly recognise. In reusing this place as a situation for artworks to be observed and placed in, the space and place is reactivated in such a way that it can reiterate or critique the structures inherent to it. However, this exhibition sought to infuse a relevance and genuine relationship between the space and its respective works – contrary to the white cube format.
It was a bleak yet considered curation with intense care thrusting sincerity into each dusty and run down corner of the rooms. I'd like to try and identify what exactly it was that was special through the works, the space, place and curation. First and foremost, there was a recognition of place – of which I have outlined above – but also an acknowledgement of space. It is this acknowledgement that is traditionally ascribed to the curator, however, what is important to understand is the coercion of space and place. What I mean to say is that they are not distinct. But in actuality, in a lived experience, the two are one. In existential space for example, the particular taken-for-granted environmental and spatial constitution of one’s everyday world grounded in culture and social structure, can be experienced in a highly self-conscious way as when one is overwhelmed by the beauty and sacredness of a Gothic cathedral; or in a tacit, unself-conscious way as one sits in the office day after day paying little attention to his or her surrounding. Celebrating and preserving this old idea directs us to experience space and place in a way that contains more concern and intimacy. I would like to submit that this exhibition curated a space through place in a way which facilitated this constitution. Indeed, the works and its placements were all considered in a way that focused on experience, human intention and action. In this way it gave audiences a very authentic experience of place and space (terms borrowed from phenomenological and existential philosophy).
An authentic sense of place is as Edward Relph might put it, “a genuine experience of the complexity of the identity of places – not mediated and distorted through a series of quote arbitrary social and intellectual fashions about how that experience should be, nor following stereotyped conventions.” Relph argues that, in our modern era, an authentic sense of place is being gradually overshadowed by a less authentic attitude that he called placelessness. Relph further suggests that, in general, placelessness arises from kitsch—an uncritical acceptance of mass values, or technique—the overriding concern with efficiency as an end in itself. As the curatorial prompt indicates: “The shopping mall was conceived as a space of mass consumption, a place where individuals do not meet and are content to feed the economic flows that support the capitalist system.” Whereby the impact of both place and placelessness, which becomes manifest through processes such as mass communication, and a homogenisation of culture, might be repaired through making spaces individual and importantly distinguishable. To be human is to live in a world of significance. To be a human is to care and find things to matter about around you, in places. Heidegger declares that, “‘place’ places man in such a way that it reveals the external bonds of his existence and at the same time the depths of his freedom and reality.” It is fundamental to human existence.
So, despite not reaching for revolution this exhibition has spurred (at least for me) revelation. To have the intricacies of a generational feeling of anxious dread splayed out in front of you in an intelligent and careful manner is uncanny. This new depressive state of nostalgia that we experience in our everyday life is haunting and was expressed eloquently and carefully in this exhibition and its works. Yet at the same time it had hope. Where the space gave way, between works and in the winding absent weird corridors which mapped the exhibition, there seemed to be a place for meditation. Watching the works unfold and present themselves in agreement and in opposition to the space taught patience and forgiveness for the misreads of the humans who had mistreated the space, and to that end, induced the very state of the world as it is. In that way, I was moved by the works of this exhibition, its curation, and its succinct execution. I hope to see more like it in the future.
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