It all starts with a red line
"The treasure of human unity is human diversity, but the treasure of human diversity is human unity"
Edgar Morin1
"Ecosystems must be seen as networks of interaction in which each living being evolves together with the others"
Tomás Saraceno2
Chiharu Shiota (Osaka 1972, Japan, lives and works in Berlin since 1996), Light as a trace environmental installation. In 2015, he represented Japan at the 56th Venice Biennale with the project The Key in The Hand.
Antidote to the effects of casualty in life: The insurance company
Network, humanity, thought and art are interconnected along a red thread. Does a path of metaphors begin? As in Kafka, metaphor is a poetics of metamorphosis. A thread of air to breathe, a thread of water to hydrate the human being, a material/immaterial thread to extend, to stretch a net in evolution towards the other, the elsewhere, to create community, horizontal cohesion. But also the thread of language that never stops weaving, in space and time, its history, its myths, to point to the thread of light that illuminates the beauty of the multicoloured mosaic of humanity. An iridescent mosaic of which each one of us, together with those who live next to us or those who come from afar, is a living piece, aimed at consciously, responsibly, cognitively, ethically nourishing the durability of human life in the environment of Planet Earth that hosts it. Even artists know, between one oracle and another, that insurance means to comprehensively analyse the effects of the accident in life, especially in the context of a desirable ecological transition that goes from green vegetables to blue water, through environmental, social and governance factors.
The image of the net - the icon of The Human Safety Net - in the human consortium communion, starting from early childhood and leading to the fulfilment of a technical, humanistic, scientific, socio-political, confessional, artistic profession, represents the setting of new inter/infra/relational, mental, empathic paradigms, as a response to the projections of desire, to the search and practice of solid existential vaues on the ethical, critical, cultural field. In this regard, the lesson of the philosopher-sociologist Zygmunt Bauman3 is symbolic and it is aimed at understanding his well-known metaphors of solid Modernity which in the past produced those steady values that, with the arrival of liquid Postmodernity, marked by a frenzy of consumption, have irreparably dissolved on a global scale, producing the spread of those insecurities that only an interstitial protective action can prevent. An authentic industry of fear of disaster, both natural and man-made, seems to lead - writes Bauman - to a social redistribution rather than a quantitative reduction.
Federica Marangoni (Padua, 1940, lives and works in Venice, international multimedia artist and designer) Wake up, red laser wire, Piazza San Marco Procuratie Vecchie, 7 April 2022.
At the centre of a questioning question is man - a man of the world and in the world - an integral part of the cosmos in its chaos and order, an entity within a community moving outwards as well as inwards - in the double lacanian shift of Extimité4 - by a dynamic of desire always stretching out, as Georges Didi-Huberman5 would have it, towards the reality and imagination of the other, towards a knowledge that includes a conscience. We speak of a social body, an extended, rhizomatic social body, as Gilles Deleuze6, the French thinker and philosopher for whom Michel Foucault has imagined a century bearing his name, a Deleuzian century, would want it to be.
In the volume Mille Plateaux/Millepiani Deleuze, with the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari7, theorised a de-territorialising vitalism that re-territorialises itself by taking part in the becoming of other living beings, as when he writes of that wasp that, at the point of contact with an orchid, turns imperceptibly into an orchid, and of that orchid that, at the point of contact with a wasp, turns imperceptibly into a wasp.
Hovering between logic and transgression, sign and aura, knowing and not knowing, technique and invention, reality and dream, singularity and community, artists are the most sensitive seismographs of reality, a reality, however, that participates in the virtual as another reality, commonly defined as digital, numerical. Artists, as agents of the imaginary, become moving references, a kind of haruspices, who never stop making oracles, questioning the sky and the earth, the sea and the air, questioning themselves on behalf of all of us when we look at works of art that are related to us, that reflect us. In this context, between the West and the East, there are, for example, three paradigmatic names, from different generations and different genders, working in the present expanding network. In the artistic context, women have never ceased, throughout history, to seek the protection of their rights of authorship, regardless of the predominantly masculine power of signs, in whose reflective light they have been operating for too long. It is therefore worth noting that Generali is the first insurance company in Italy to be awarded the Gender Equality Certification, which attests to its commitment to the implementation of gender equality policies and the empowerment of women in various fields, including culture and the arts.
NETWORK - Three paradigmatic examples in contemporary art
Born from the light of the mind, formalised by the gesture of the hand, Federica Marangoni’s writing becomes the emblematic thread of a life under the sign of art. Memory: The Light of Time, a site-specific mega-installation/event in the legendary setting of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice, is not an exhibition about the book, but a deployment of that chromatic arc of knowledge that is the bridge between Heaven and Earth, between The Book and Humanity as a whole. During the days of the opening, the bright rainbow, the emblem of her work, crosses the dreamy Piazza San Marco in Venice, becoming the link between the Insurance Institution, with its new head-quarters in the Procuratie Vecchie, and the cultural Institution of the Sansovino Library. Federica Marangoni, a master of metaphors, symbols and archetypes, is also the international artist who presented the monumental/ documentary sculpture Luce della Mente (Light of the Mind) at the BookCity 2023 edition in Milan: a book open to the world, from whose pages of tarnished iron sharp neon phrases of blue light emerge, evoking values and disvalues such as peace/war, tolerance/intolerance, love/hate, but also words full of humanity such as people, freedom and energy. Located in the extraordinary setting of the Cortile d’Onore of the Palazzo Reale in Milan, this work of art is a universal warning for a time darkened by world conflicts and humanitarian crises.
Tomás Saraceno, an Argentinian artist-architect and researcher, conceives of a behavioural ecosystem of shared life between the human and the non-human. His concept takes the form of a web of reticular threads, dust, wind and heat. A project that moves from art in order to connect to a natural and social world of sustainable living. Trained in Buenos Aires, he moved to Frankfurt to train a multidisciplinary team in which biologists, engineers, architects, art historians and designers cooperate. After moving to Berlin, Saraceno realised those suspended and floating structures that have made him internationally recognised. His ethical project of aerial architectures, which fully exploit the spaces in which they stand, aims to reconnect people and nature within Planet Earth, breaking down walls, geo-physical, economic-political and ethno-social barriers.
Saraceno’s complex scheme follows the reticular design of a spider’s web, where everyone’s actions are crucial to the system’s functionality.
Tomás Saraceno (San Miguel de Tucumán, 1973, Argentina, lives and works in Berlin), Aria, aerial environmental installation, based on the spider’s web as a resilient weave of very thin threads, exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi Florence, 2020, Photography © Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio. The Argentinian artist is in dialogue with scientific communities such as NASA - National Aeronautics Space Administration, MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, the Max Planck Institute, based in Munich.
When Saraceno is not presenting aerial mega-installations in open museum spaces, he exhibits micro-models in glass cases, using 3D printing technologies or laser systems of his own design, such as the Spider/Web Scan technique, which makes the three-dimensionality of a stratigraphic sample visible. The Argentinean artist’s futuristic and visionary model of sustainability in the Aerocene - a term related to air and flight, coined by rethinking the term Anthropocene - is clearly inspired by his strong arachnophilic inclination, as a form of sensitive life outside the human. The artist’s proposal advocates an existential behaviour that does not harm the climate and encourages symbiosis between different life forms rather than competition.
In the age of digital capitalism, of global warming, in which the Earth is enveloped by electromagnetic radiation, Saraceno’s utopian Cloud Cities, born from thermodynamic imagery, would inaugurate an air nomadism for a shared cosmic network, free of carbon emissions, able to fly without using fossil fuels. Knowledge, as Tomás Saraceno suggests, could also come from non-Western epistemologies, from intelligences that are not only human.
The monumental net installations of Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota - a former student of the Serbian and naturalised American performer Marina Abramovic - represent allegories of her mind, born from memories of love and pain, dream and nightmare. As she hand-knotted her endless red cotton threads, the artist moves through the space as if she was drawing freely in the air. Her airy constellations of monumental, labyrinthine, reticulated ensembles rise from the floor from a highly symbolic object and become a soft habitat with doors, windows, chairs, keys, clothes, a bed. Vintage suitcases hang in the void, swinging from long, stretched red threads anchored to the ceiling. The topos/utopos of the spider’s web acts as a web of emotional, existential entrapment on the themes of home and habit, memory and travel.
Chiharu Shiota reactivates that psycho-perceptual condition that Gaston Bachelard8 calls retentissement, a psychic state that implies a profound resonance of self-recognition in the work of art in the viewer, as if it were a mirror in which to find oneself, as if he were its author. Indeed, in the Japanese artist’s mega-projects, a Bachelardian poetics of space and everyday objects emerges, a poetics of the dwelling, in which she weaves nets during the day and draws on dreams at night. In her vision, the boat, the bed, become cradle and grave, a journey between departure and arrival. The key, endlessly multiplied, becomes a symbol of the passage from house to house.
This artist, inclined to excess and monumentality, who combines the calligraphic East with the anthropo-psycho-iconographic West, has simultaneously portrayed the collective and the Lacanian overexposure of her intimacy, staging the ceremonial value of the relics of a shared humanity.
Artistic creation and act of resistance in philosophical thinking
If the aim of an artist-researcher can also be to construct and deconstruct fluid structures in order to produce forms of life with a low environmental impact and a high potential for social exchange, the aim of a thinker, philosopher or scientific researcher is certainly no less concerned with finding ethical solutions, social, political, economic categories, in order to face the unexpected, such as the pandemic - Alain Badiou9 - for example, in order to contain it, to defeat it, possibly without irreparable losses.
Question: what is the reason for presenting in the Bollettino, the historical magazine of the Generali Group, figures of artists, even if they are paradigmatic of the conditions that characterize contemporary reality? Because in the above-mentioned work called Mille Piani, Deleuze and Guattari theorize a close relationship between artistic creation and the act of resistance. While on one side, in fact, art would set the conditions for human development and the developement of a population that opts for sharing, on the other side it would produce an act of resistance against the advance of so-called societies of control, from Big Brother to the Algorithm.
As mentioned above, in 1980, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari published Mille Plateaux/ A Thousand Floors. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, which continued the discussion begun with L’Anti-Edipo, éditions de Minuit. This publication is an “event of language and thought, shocking in its capacity to strike and imperceptible in its transformative action, which continues to act on individual and collective bodies” - as Paolo Vignola, who edited its republication in 2017, Orthotes editions, said. The volume is not divided into chapters, but into bookshelves that can be read separately, except for the conclusion, which must be read at the end.
With a focus on a green and digital paradigm, devices are being developed to hybridize the natural and media worlds. Today, the adventure of knowledge consists in finding the escape lines from the rigid postulate of information, communication, connection, interaction and intervention, avoiding the acquired mobility of the system to establish itself precisely on these escape lines in order to keep it under control and feed on it, at the same time advancing by reformulating its own bio-political, micro-physical spheres of power.
Communitas, in Roberto Esposito10’s reading, can only derive etymologically from the Latin cum munus, in the sense of “with a duty that is both debt and gift”. The category of communitas, in Esposito’s hypothesis, would be the key to the whole paradigm of modernity. It is a key that revolves around the fear that the postmodern state does not want to eliminate, but to turn into the engine of its own functionality. In this regard, it is enough to question the above-mentioned Zygmunt Bauman11, who made inventories of fears, to discover that the system of a liquid state, such as the contemporary one, does not eliminate them, but multiplies them in order to spread them, precisely at a time when we enjoy unprecedented well-being. Hence the unstable state of the community itself, experienced by finite beings who renounce living together because this very inability is their munus - shared duty/obligation/gift, the basis of Communitas. They only have to share the common responsibility for their own Care. In order to achieve an equilibrium of communitas, a commitment to investigate its signs and symptoms, which, on the basis of an ethics of vulnerability, can restore its critical points in order to fully realize its potential, appears to be indispensable.
Provocatively combining cinema, noir literature, American pragmatic philosophy, the aphorism “Each of us is an insurance company” was written in front of the occurrence of risk in our existence.
Finally, it is impossible not to mention the most brilliant predictive philosopher of the technical-machine-perceptual-electronic-nuclear accident (ship/wreck, train/devastation, airplane/precipitation, acceleration/crash, nuclear power plant/reactor explosion), to whom a futuristic museum (Musée de l’Accident) has been dedicated. He is the French Paul Virilio (1932, Paris - 2018, Paris), also known as an urban planner, artist, theorist and expert on new technologies. With the exhibition Ce qui arrive/What happens (Fondation Cartier, Paris, 2002), Virilio exhibits the accident in order to exorcise the accident itself. With his characteristic ironic and provocative spirit, Virilio does not fail to add that a museum of the accident is already in place and active the moment one turns on the television.
Viviana Conti
Viana Conti, art critic, essayist and journalist, was born in Venice and lives in Genoa. Since 1972 she has been writing about the neo-avantgardes and European and American experimentalism.