Pinksummer is pleased to announce the new exhibition by Peter Fend – ACTIONS ON EARTH
The exhibition will open on 19 October 2024, 6 – 9 p.m., and will run until 20 November 2024
Opening hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 3 – 7.30 p.m.

 

PRESS RELEASE

 

<<The main works on display were produced in 2019-2020 for Manifesta, a European biennial for cities in crisis or change, then sited at Marseille.

Upon arrival in Marseille, in 2019, Fend was driven to meet with officials from the Port and the Marseille office of the company Interxion. The company headquarters a network of submarine telecommunications cables from Europe throughout Africa and southern Asia. The network extends from Ireland to western France to all port-cities of Africa and south Asia, on to Hong Kong.   The network includes the bulk of internet. This is a physical reality faced by China, India, Iran and all of Africa.

Now, Africa is a battleground between China, the US, Italy and the EU (“Operation Mattei)”, India, Turkey and Russia. What are the rules of the game?

As stated, Fend began his adult life with a rejection of the World Bank and Western colonialism.  That was in 1974.  Now, in the 21st century, it has become fashionable.  But in what way?  The Italian Government presented at the UN, in 2018, a proposal for organizing all the world according to the Ocean.  The UN Environment Program has started, also since 1974, a Regional Seas Program.   Fend has talked with top people at the UNEP, and at the Regional Seas Program, conceived by a Yugoslav (not Croatian , he insisted) named Stepkjan Keckes.  Throughout, all terrain is demarcated according to its drainage into salt seas.  

Thinking in a similar way, the Italian Government led a conference at the UN General Assembly, with three countries as sponsors: Italy, Monaco, Palau.  The Italian lead speaker was Andrea Orlando, who was Minister of the Environment in 2013-14.  What would he say now?  And what did he, actinag as the head of hte Ministry of Environment, say then?  and what would Giorgia Meloni say in promoting Operation Mattei throughout the Mediterranean and Africa, in line with recent EU policy directives?

The Italian government has joined the European fisheries-based programme, called Fisheries Local Action Group (with acronym “FLAG.”). Fend has produced a saltwater-basin map of EACH of the 67 FLAGS  of Italy.  He did so using the 1959 Irish (also EU member) law for organizing al of Ireland (including the UK-held part) in its saltwater bays, or “hydrometric areas.”  Fend travels next to Ireland on this practice. It coherently organises the whole world in this way.  That’s because he rejects any notion of motherland or fatherland, saying that the only territorial imperative is preservation and strength of the Mother Ocean.

Because of Italian laws and practices, Fend sees himself here as less an artist advocating something new than a midwife helping give strength and legal power to already-achieved initiatives within the Italian State.

Historical results are intended.

The results are summarized in a poster produced by Fend and Canadian collaborator Ryan Foerster for a show in NY in March 2024 called RODENTS RESTORE AMERICA, from the Antarctic to the Arctic”. 

Responding to an empire made rich by companies like Apple and Microsoft, namely the “People’s Republic of China,” Fend has built on art overtures to Documenta, various biennals and scientific conferences, that humanity should be subordinated to the needs of BIRDS, REPTILES, INSECTS, CARRION (us mammals), SEAFISH.  

The days of “peoples” are over.  Now it’s time for restoration of all the wild animals.

Such wss intended for Manifesta in Marseille.  But… but… as too often occurs, someone in some country made a big mistake.  The PRC made a mistake in Wuhan.

The mistake led to a pandemic.   The pandemic shut down the exhibition in Marseille.

What we show now comes four years delayed.

What Fend shows altogether is about forty to fifty years delayed.   Most of the blame falls on the entrenched means of production:  petroleum, nuclear, high dams, solar farms.  They fight tooth and nail, often with murder, to stay dominant.   For Fend, this was a huge surprise.  He thought the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence, and all the treaties worldwide, would give him a business chance.  Not so.  Not at a ll.

We  try for progress here in Italy.  

Every document shown is as accurate as possible.  It is a scientific record of specific places within the Eastern Hemisphere, extending from Ireland to Hong Kong.

Then logic comes from Marcel Duchamp’s main icon of our time:  the Urinal.  

Earth art is intended next, especially in the deserts now stretching from Dakar to Beijing.  

We aim, in collaborative teams, to go not “forward” but “very far backwards,” to about 6,000 years ago, when places like the Sahara and Arabia were populated by hordes of wild animals.  Doing this, we act on a request made to Ocean Earth by the Algerian Ambassador to France in 1985.  He asks, can the giant earthworks we saw with satellites of the Iran-Iraq war zone, all very similar to works by pioneering Earth Artists, be 

constructed again, in North Africa, to restore the savannah that long ago thrived?

Our aim:  REVERSE DESERTS.

Our chief mens:  restoring rodent populations in what is now desert,  with huge in-flows of migratory birds and insects, so that water inn the soil, below ground, becomes abundant again.

Not too soon could this happen.  Witness the desertification now in Sicily.

What is, as sloganed in Milan. in the 1970s, “the appropriate response to recognized conditions”? 

Do we show that in Pinksummer?

Maybe these points help.

Peter Fend is a US citizen who has always sought to be responsive to the main problems facing the world during his life.

In Milan during the 1970s, according to a Magazin Kunst article, art was seen to be “the appropriate response to recognized conditions.”

The recognized condition now, and for some decades already, has been that humanity is destroying its wildlife basis for survival.  

If humans continue to destroy the tropical rainforests, or the ocean in its fisheries splendor, or the Poles in their climate control, they will descend further into what happens now:  extreme weather, desertification, plague and war.  

Anything like an “appropriate response” has not started.  A scale of action should be in the billions of Euros.

The works that Fend shows should lead to projects on site of large, military-scale budgets.  In the billions.  

Ideas from the art of the past two centuries, when converted into technology, or means of production, can meet the present needs.

This does not happen because those now in power maneuver to stay in power, delaying needed changes, and the realm of invention, such as art, avoids the historical realities

and chooses rather to be tolerated as “harmless.”

On most everything he shows, Fend publishes in the scientific world, and in political contexts like the US Congress and United Nations, as well as think tanks about ecological and military matters.  The ideas come from art, ut the art world is only one venue.

Everything shown is meant to happen in historical and economic reality. 

Any viewer can come, see and ask questions.  All objections or debates are welcome.

About Fend’s life.  Upon graduation from college, academically qualified for top PhD or law programs, Fend traveled to California then to Washington, DC, where he was offered a job at the World Bank.  But a week of trying out the job was a shock:  he saw that the World Bank was perpetuating 19th century colonialism.  Now he thinks. the UN does this.  Away out was early conceived:  to organize all territory on Earth according to drainage into saltwater seas.  The same organizing could be done on the Moon, or Mars, or anywhere else that humans want to settle.   Most essential are means of production that preserve the diversity of huge numbers of wild animals and plants on which we depend  Thus, Fend rules out extraction of fossil fuels, or indestructible nuclear fuels, or high dams (blocking the flow of nutrients to the Sea), or solar panels over terrain.  What are the means of production all at the primary-sector level, that increase the Natural Bounty that should be surrounding us.  The soldier-poet Spenser wrote that “art is that by which Nature makes more Nature.”  Everything displayed at Pinksummer this Autumn has that purpose.>>

Peter Fend

We decided that the press release should come directly from the artist’s keyboard, written in the third person.Although Peter Fend calls himself a physiocrat and as such acts in immanence, we believe that his work is intimately connected to the American Transcendentalist movement, and in this sense we dedicate to him a few short stanzas quoted in Walking by Henry David Thoreau:

When he came to the grene wode,
In a mery mornynge,There he herde the notes small
Of byrdes mery syngynge
It is ferre gone, sayd Robyn,
That I was last here;
Me lyste a lytell for to shote
At the donne dere.*

*‘Arriving in the green wood/one bright morning/he heard the harmony/of the birds’ merry song/it is long said Robin/that I have not come here;/I would like to hunt a little/the brown deer’.
From ‘A Little Geste of Robin Hode’ see Robin Hood: A collection, London 1823, p.58.