Tomás Saraceno – ANIMA∞LE
Pinksummer is pleased to announce the new exhibition by Tomás Saraceno – ANIMA∞LE
The opening will be on November 30, 2024, 6-9 pm, and will be on view until 01.03.2025
Opening hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 3 – 7.30 pm
Press release
In the beautiful text that Tomás Saraceno wrote for the catalogue of the exhibition held at the Serpentine in 2022, Web(s) of Life, after stating that the Aerocene Foundation since 2015 directly supports activities that neither the artist’s galleries nor the Studio Saraceno with their art productions can support, with respect to solidarity and real activism against water-consuming lithium mining in places in the ‘Global South’ where the element is precious for the sustenance of the peoples and creatures of those latitudes: “An agreement with my galleries also means that any revenue from artworks that connect to Aerocene is distributed three-fold: one third to the studio, one to the galleries, and another to the communities of Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc via a local NGO in Argentina called FARN” and continues: “We also have to ask where our guests come from. Who are they? What happens when a museum takes non-human visitors into account? Who has the power to decide this? We welcomed dogs to our exhibition and they count as visitors in our statistics. Would all the birds and spiders stay after the exhibition? Will some of the bird houses become standard? While I cannot remunerate the spider/web, whose authorship and wisdom finds a central place in Web(s) of Life, we continue to seek non-extractive and sensitive ways to support the research and practice of those in the Arachnophilia community; […] whose practice of Ŋgam dù divination reveals a true interspecies dialogue. […] As well, we have discussed how the Cloud Cities sculptures, when they are occupied by birds, should remain in place, and that the ownership of such an artwork would be extended to instantiate its flying guests as co-owners together with future collectors. Degrowing ownership… regrowing stewardship… we have called this a certificate of authenticity, that states: if a collector purchases the sculpture, they will co-own it together with the bird, and will not be allowed to ship or move it so long as the birds continue nesting inside of it.” and finally Saraceno states: “With the image of a dormant seed, in a latent state of hope, myself and many others have tried to make a small contribution to the movement of degrowth, by appending to it the notion of re-growth – a marker of regeneration rather than negation. This project is an imperfect, slow and sometimes bumpy attempt to take steps towards a less extractive and more eco-social transition; not only a transition in flows of energy, but in the movement and exchange of knowledge and the ways in which different forms of knowing are respected, supported and valued.”
Anima∞le exhibition will present a form of Cloud Cities, if we want to be less austere, theoretical and elegant, but also welcoming to non-human visitors: spiders, insects, birds, dogs and in Genoa at Pinksummer even cats. A declination of Cloud Cities that focuses even more on the theory that the universe has no borders and that it also belongs to non-humans of all species to whom we share the same destiny, especially in the face of the awareness of the ecological threat.
That dormant seed of hope of which Saraceno writes, with respect to finding the step towards less extractive and more eco-social behaviour, is also manifesting itself with the changing relationship of our complex human society towards animals. As an article in ‘Wired’ by Marco Grieco discusses, ‘Do animals have a soul? Now even the Church wonders’: in the hyper-extractive executive period of the economic boom, the cinema staged Alfred Hitchcock’s Birds (1963), Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), accurately framing the conflictual relationship between man and the rest of the animal kingdom, an attitude faithful to a boundless modern fairy tale tradition. In 2019, the Netflix series Hands Off Cats: Hunt for an Online Killer reverses the perspective. Inspired by a true story, the series begins with two internet nerds who do not know each other and met online because they were both shocked by a video of someone killing two kittens. Together with others, they decided to find the killer, working as investigators without leaving home. Using the technology they unearth clues, connect the dots to find places, times and a face, that finally of Luka Magnotta, the cat killer who will also turn out to be the murderer of Chinese student Jun Lin in Montréal.
Those who are ferocious towards non-human animals are often ferocious towards those of their own kind. In Bret Eston Ellis’ latest novel The Shards, the serial killer named in the book Trawler, just before killing his human victim, kidnaps and tortures his pets and those in the neighbourhood. Reading the novel each time the young protagonist, Bret, returns to his wealthy home on Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles, bereft of parents perpetually on holiday in Europe, a dense anxiety assails us until the little dog, Shingy, shows up.
Porphyry of Tyre (3rd century A.D.), whose writing from the fragments hints at a kind of contemporary publicist, as a good neo-Platonist takes up the Pythagoreans and in his treatise De Abstinentia states that he who loves animate nature will hate no class of innocent beings, and the more he loves the whole, the more he will cultivate justice.
Porphyry also states that the vegetarian diet makes one better off than the carnivorous diet because it provides a sense of peace of reason.
Konrad Lorenz, for his narrative essay on the behavioural language of non-human animals, King Solomon’s Ring, moves from the legend that the king possessed a ring that gave him the power to talk to animals, suggesting that the mythical ruler’s wisdom derived from this very practice.
With respect to Leonardo da Vinci, Vasari states: ‘Truly admirable and celestial was Leonardo…. And since he owned almost nothing, and little work, he continually kept servants and horses, of which he took great delight, and particularly of all the other animals, which he governed with great love and patience. And he often showed him that when he passed by places where birds were sold, he would often take them out of their cages by hand and pay the seller the price that was required, and then he would throw them into the air in flight, restoring their lost freedom’. It is said that Leonardo did not eat meat. On the other hand, even in Genesis God invites humans to eat the fruit of trees and not animals, and it seems that primitive Christians adhered to this precept, as did Francis of Assisi later.
In the same article on the soul of animals in ‘Wired’, we read based on precise statistics that in Italy in 2020, the year of the pandemic, there was a boom in the adoption of dogs and cats for a total of 17,600 pets, 15% more than the previous year, and that even at the table Italy is changing, despite being the fourth largest producer of beef in Europe, consumption has fallen by a third in the last ten years.
Assuming that humans does or does not possess an immortal soul, it is indeed difficult or somewhat irrational to think that the breath of animals is more reluctant to some metaphysical ascension. On the other hand, there have been times in History when women were also said to lack divine breath, like other human species considered inferior. The patriarchal culture is still unreasonable, even from the capitalist point of view of finance, disengaged from any form of production, other than money for money’s sake, even the new digital over-performing one.
We want to believe that these Cloud Cities sculptures by Tomás Saraceno to welcome the ‘zóa’ contain the seed of hope that leads to the manifestation of a renewed and more evolved world in which heifer/calf and lioness/lion will graze together with a little girl/boy, to quote the Isaiah of the Bible.
Welcome will be your non-human animals in this exhibition by Tomás Saraceno, and welcome too will be those that we hope will come unaccompanied by humans to take possession of the Cloud Cities sculptures for birds and insects placed in the Cortile Maggiore of Palazzo Ducale, in Genoa.
We would like to conclude with Aesopo’s fable The Spider and the Podagra, but it does not seem appropriate, Cloud Cities fighting borders and specism, wants to go beyond divisive forms of classism. As if to say that everyone would benefit from a certain kind of degrowth that implies the necessary return of Welfare, which has been swallowed up by the insane capitals of neo-liberalism of individual matrix induced by globality in fact a bit of papier-mâché, like a theatrical backdrop hiding the backstage.
Rather, we leave space to Alberto Pesavento – founding collaborator of the Museo Aero Solar community with Saraceno; a community whose vision also contributed to the formation of the Aerocene Foundation – and today beekeeper, who will tell us about a special artwork that will be presented in the exhibition.
Title “Out-of-cell time”
Series of natural honey combs built by honeybees inside a beehive crown board, placed upside down over the nest by the beekeeper.
The beekeeper: “Sometimes the bees go for a walk nearby and bring everything they need with them: wax and honey. It seems that the bees prefer to occupy this empty space rather than the one we usually provide them with: a human-sized hive.”
All proceedings of this art work will be used to preserve small scale sustainable beekeeping and educational projects about honeybees.
In collaboration with âseméil
www.asemeil.it
