THE MODERN WORLD AS SEEN BY AN OLD MAN AND NIETZSCHE IN TURIN

Cartography my mind, rapresentation of the dynamic trajectories which generated the works NietzscheinTurin archive and the picture series The modern world as seen by an old man as discussed in my dissertation.

IN A SMALL VILLAGE IN THE COUNTRYSIDE OF NORTHERN ITALY IN 1991

1994 LONDON UNDERGROUND, 2011-2013

MUSEUM OF JURASSIC TECHNOLOGY, LOS ANGELES 2007

PIAZZA CARLO ALBERTO, TURIN 1889

The NietzscheinTurin archive and The modern world as seen by an old man.

DOCUMENTA KASSEL, 2012

ATM IN KENTISH TOWN, LONDON 2012 PLEISTOCENE

WAKEHURST, 15-16 OCTOBER 1987

WESTMISTER ABBEY, LONDON 1509

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THE MODERN WORLD AS SEEN BY AN OLD MAN AND NIETZSCHE IN TURIN Serena Porrati MA Art and Science A.Y. 2012/13

-INTRODUCTION (Pag.2) -IN A SMALL VILLAGE IN THE COUNTRYSIDE OF NORTHERN ITALY IN 1991 Dissatisfaction.

(Pag.3) -1994 Tracing the threads between uncommon topics.

(Pag.6) -MUSEUM OF JURASSIC TECHNOLOGY, LOS ANGELES 2007 Discursive formations.

(Pag.8) -ATM IN KENTISH TOWN, LONDON 2012 The modern world as seen by an old man.

(Pag.11) -WESTMISTER ABBEY, LONDON 1509 Power and Geology.

(Pag.13) -PLEISTOCENE Unfolding the architecture of thought.

(Pag.16) -WAKEHURST, 15-16 OCTOBER 1987 The categories, another world: the Nature example.

(Pag.18) -DOCUMENTA KASSEL, 2012 The bubble that encloses each and everyone of us on all sides.

(Pag.20) -PIAZZA CARLO ALBERTO, TURIN 1889 A bridge and not a goal.

(Pag.22) -LONDON UNDERGROUND, 2011-2013 The NietzscheinTurin archive.

(Pag.24) -CONCLUSION (Pag. 30)

2 “Scientists are creative people and the lives of creative people show evidence of internal feelings of struggle.”

Hideki Yukawa

INTRODUCTION This is an essay written over the past two years during which time I have reflected extensively on my practice as an artist.

The idea to approach a master that combines the two words ‘Art’ and ‘Science’ resonates with my desire to expand my artistic research, to challenge the idea of research and reflect on the meaning of knowledge itself.

My interest is in stone.

Stone sends me back to a long dark pre-history, before man’s existence and prior to visible life of any form, from which I eventually emerge among countless other germs as ephemeral.

The surface of stone both presents a puzzle yet also offers a better understanding of my condition and place in the world, of being fragmented and transient, of a connection to such a distant history and product of randomness.

My essay is a form of lithography (stone-writing) I like to think of these written words as the inborn lines, colours and forms visible on a stone, with, details as superficial sign of its past and formation process. As a stone has been through different eras also my words here gathered are giving expression to thoughts that have been conceived in different times of my life and pull together anecdotes that occurred in different places and different moments of human history.

My words will try to draw a map of my mind. I will go back and forth in time, move around spaces, to create a discourse that is more like a manifestation of events and intensities, like a landscape in motion.

This map is connected to me through infinite possible links, like a stone is connected to its topography, its environment and its elements, to the Earth and the unknown space around it.

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IN A SMALL VILLAGE IN THE COUNTRYSIDE OF NORTHERN ITALY IN 1991 Dissatisfaction.

I am sitting in front of my desk in the classroom.

It is a sunny day. Through the big window, I can see outside the fluorescent newgrown grass, and feel the warm day. The science teacher is talking about something that is grabbing my attention; she explains that all the matter around us can be divided into groups: solid, liquid and gas. As she argues this, referring to concrete examples that I immediately picture in my head (the wood, the ice, the water, the air, the rocks) I find myself surprised to discover this order. There was liquid, there was gas and there was solid around me, I couldn’t disagree. It was true, simple and fascinating.

From this day I think, I should start to see the world differently.

However, a thought nags at me about toothpaste and its consistency.

Such a consistency is not fitting in any of those categories. It's not liquid, it's not solid. Rather, it is something in between, perhaps something indefinable? Something not considered important for science?

Why is the teacher not mentioning cream?

I believe this realization sowed the seeds of my doubt of my teacher's knowledge and also of science. As much as I understood what she was saying I was also sceptical about it and not convinced that everything, really everything could have been ordered.

There will be always something that I wouldn’t be able to define, something I will never know. If my knowledge is therefore incomplete and not perfect, how could I ever achieve a state of knowing? What is the difference between knowing and not knowing? Is knowledge what I learn or what I feel?

In my mind viscosity become the symbol of a dark area where things were allowed to be left unexplained by reason. That has become the area of speculation, where phenomena were possible and accepted in their raw presence; as they were perceived by my uninformed mind.

One of the architectural problems we have is that as humans we like to make categories, so we have these categories, especially in European languages. They are quite tight I think […] As Wittgenstein would say categories are just the way we talk.

(Durham, 2004 p.62)

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According to the Deleuze essays What children say, Freud's idea that children are limited to their parents is wrong because ‘there is never a moment when children are not already plunged into an actual milieu in which they are moving about’ (1997 p.62).

Children draw maps in their minds and behave as a consequence, exploring reality through them. These maps are neither linear nor definite but they grow into each other. No pre-established notion is directing or forcing them in the creation of their own milieu. ‘The father and mother are not the coordinates of everything that is invested by the unconscious’ (Deleuze, 1997 p.62). As the shadow of the parents are thought to be projected into the child world -according to Freudian psychoanalysis-, in the same way western society tends to accept the established structure of culture and knowledge. We feel comfortable in having firm links, relying on schools, in blaming the parents, in blaming our history, in inheriting an order that comes from our past and which we don’t have to question. Since an early age our perception and consciousness are immediately shaped. Our milieus are quite standard. We need to be specialised and be functional in this society, each of us have a role, there is little time left to question what we thought as children, or to contaminate our knowledge with new trajectories.

I can’t get specialised, I can’t do one job, I can’t live in the same place for a long time, I like almost everything, I struggle with numbers and with the distinction of left and right, I have no plan for the future. I often feel detached from the world around me. It is not a bad thing. I question the structures of thoughts in which we are born,

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forced or used to live in; the categories that characterise our reality and our understanding of it, the production and use of knowledge by culture. This sense of dissatisfaction is the fuel that feeds my artistic research.

I am using art as a tool to approach and question culture, to play and experiment with those categories and elements of knowledge as if they were a matter, like clay or wood.

The task is obviously a daunting challenge.

How is it possible today to be detached from the structures of the culture we live in order to question them?

How can I go back to that moment and state of mind in the classroom in 1991?

Can my artistic practice be truthfully deconstructive rather than constructive?

From this frame of thinking I conceived a series of works - that I rather define as formal experiments/discursive formations - which attempt to engage with knowledge, human perception and the non-human world in a dynamic way.

Developed through the association of two or more sciences, specific fields of knowledge or established disciplines, normally separated from each other, they are here presented as two areas of investigation and discussion rather than two mere work descriptions.

Fundamental or the Modern World as Seen by an Old Man is a photographic series that forces a dialogue between Geology, Architecture and Finance.

Nietzsche in Turin is an archive work that tries to shatter the western concept of nature by gathering elements of ‘found-information’ within a system of representation 1

-a free tabloid newspaper - that tries to define it.

In this dissertation I will present specific thoughts, as examples and arguments to sustain my disordered attitude based on a deep dissatisfaction towards western division and organisation of knowledge and univocal given interpretations of space, life and time.

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Metro is a tabloid free newspaper available in parts of the United Kingdom and published by Associated Newspapers Ltd. It is distributed from Monday to Friday on many public-transport services in selected urban centres across the United Kingdom and at other outlets such as cafes, workplaces, bus stops, etc. Distributors have also been employed to hand out copies to pedestrians.

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1994 Tracing the threads between uncommon topics.

This is a year of great change. From now on, it is not essential to conduct research in the confines of a library or to gain knowledge by undertaking a physical journey to a place of learning. Accessibility to the Internet means increasing volumes of Western knowledge can be made available everywhere and to everyone without the need for movement of anything but the hand and the eye. Soon, the Internet will start to spread into the everyday life of people around the world. We are at a point of no return in human history. We are in front of the scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey where the monkey starts to use a bone as a tool, externalising the body function is the beginning of Technology.

In L’intelligence collective Pierre Levy (2002) formulates a confident description of the space of knowledge formed by cyberspace. Within this virtual world he says, individuals can think and discuss with each other freely. In his visionary anthropology, once everyone is wired up, we will come together as the collective intelligence: an inclusive society born out of the Net. The Net opens the space of Knowledge. Crucially, this new space is completely distinct from the space of the commodity and of the established structure of hierarchical knowledge and it is because we suffer from individual alienation caused by capitalism that when we are on-line we want to co-participate even more.

As an artist and as a researcher I am taking advantage of a collective intelligence not so much from the technological point of view but conceptually. I don’t believe the dream of technology saving the world, or that it is capable of curing alienation caused

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by capitalism today or in the future. What I do value in Levy's thought is the cross disciplinary approach/attitude as a way of seeing and thinking about the collective: different categories are melting into each other creating new possibilities to open up. I share with Levy the excitement for the possibility to operate in a flexible, open-ended environment. Today, in 2013, I am able to learn about seed dispersal one day and foundry process the next day, about stone formations in the morning and being informed about the financial collapse and the Occupy protest in the afternoon. But the Internet doesn’t think for me. A collective intelligence can happen only when the structure of our thoughts are starting to fade, becoming less and less architectural and more like a continuous landscape.

In this multifaceted space of information my body, containing my most primordial senses and imagination, has to play its part with its direct experience. Primordial perception is not just an important means to experience the world and shun preestablished knowledge. My perceiving body is the magical place in which speculation and imagination can be triggered. For the perceiving body does not calculate logical probabilities; it gregariously participates in the activity of the world, lending its imagination to things in order to see them more fully. Imagination makes links.

Internet is a theoretical method that can be practically applied by our body and mind when we also use all our senses and when we directly experience the world of 2

phenomena around and in us.

As an artist and as a researcher I need my own life, together with the world’s life and knowledge to be unstructured and deeply intertwined.

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Associating a knowledge crossover to a phenomenologist attitude, my artistic research is a possible way to build a ceaselessly unregulated knowledge which is constantly adjusting itself.

The ability to think backwards - against the congestion of the meanings attributed to things - is, in my opinion, a necessary attempt if we want to find the vitality of thought and the links that bind us to a more material humanity. From here, whether as artists, scientists, gardeners or footballers we can discover new or rediscover old understandings and abilities to fantasize about the world.

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All my knowledge of the world, even my scientific knowledge, is gained from my own particular point of view, or from some experience of the world without which the symbols of science would be meaningless. (Abram 2005 p.39) 3

I refer to Phenomenology as careful demonstration of the manner in which every theoretical and scientific practice grows out and remains supported by the forgotten ground of our directly felt and lived experience.

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MUSEUM OF JURASSIC TECHNOLOGY, LOS ANGELES 2007 Discursive formations.

Just off Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles and I am enthralled.

I cannot imagine visiting a better museum in my life.

I am in front of a mixture of artistic, scientific, ethnographic and historic exhibits, as well as others, which are unclassifiable, and the diversity of its offerings evokes the cabinets of curiosities that were the 16th century predecessors of modern natural history museums.

These objects are dream-like projects. They seem to be the materialisation of surreal thoughts that sometimes our mind produces just before falling asleep. Further, the museum displays the failure of science or the unsuccessful side of it.

These are samples of what has not become institutionalised through history or what 4

has been considered not scientific enough by hierarchical knowledge. There is for instance a botanical clock. Designed by Athanasius Kircher this heliotropic sunflower timepiece worked by attaching a sunflower to a cork and floating it in a reservoir of water. As the blossom rotated to face the sun, a pointer through its centre indicated the time on the inner side of a suspended ring. Kircher claimed that it didn't work well because enclosing it in a glass case would block the sun's attractive force, and that it was 'therefore susceptible to inaccuracies due to the wind' 5 (Findlen, 2004).

4 There is a sculpture smaller than a needle’s head with the description: “Born of obsessive devotion, an individual figure could take as many as fourteen months to finish. Each sculpted micron represented not only endless hours of toil, but exacting travail fraught with peril, as his work could so easily be destroyed or lost. An unexpected sneeze or misdirected breath could blow away a micro miniature with hurricane force, while a casual movement could sabotage the work of months. Since even a pulse in his fingers could cause an accident, Sandaldjian ultimately learned to apply his decisive strokes only between heartbeats.”

5 The clock is described in Athanasius Kircherâs magnetic encyclopedia, the Magnes, published in 1641, a technological work that linked the magical world of Baroque experimentation with the cosmological debates surrounding the Galileo trial of 1633. Descartes misread Magnes, interpreting Kircher's descriptions as referring to one of his earlier speculations attributing heliotropic timekeeping properties to a sunflower seed floating in a marked cup. Although Kircher was, in fact, describing experiments with other heliotropic plant matter, Descartes seized on his own misinterpretation to launch a vituperative attack on Kircher's scientific abilities, referring to the gentle Jesuit as 'possessed of an aberrant imagination' and 'more quacksalver than savant'. Descartes' authority in the developing scientific community was such that Kircher's reputation was to suffer irreparable damage as a result. Even Kircher's longtime supporter Peiresc became suspicious.

Nevertheless, Kircher regularly maintained a version of his sunflower clock in his museum, modifying it occasionally and demonstrating its accurate functioning on more than one occasion. From Magnes, "Added to this is the fact that a clock of this sort can barely last one month, even though cared for with the greatest effort; thus nothing is perfect in every aspect."

(Findlen,, 2004 p.45)

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The Museum of Jurassic Technology is not highly frequented, it is not popular. It is a museum that doesn’t fit in the common idea of an institutional cultural place only because its collection lies in an undefined territory of craft, popular science, folklores and mysticism.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology displays a collection of objects that had to be invented, tested and discarded in order to achieve what we now consider real science or technology. They give testimony to a state of mind that precedes formulation of exact concepts, definitions and sciences as we know them today.

As culture and knowledge become universal, the line that separates those attempts to an artistic work becomes in my eyes very fine.

These works are investigations of the matter, of life and nature and are more primordial than our current scientific investigation. They make me think about art as I consider them primordial ways of thinking.

With my own investigations for instance, I could say that I try to produce new “old” experiments to be added to the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

Quoting Foucault I see these attempts as ‘a discursive practice, with its own regularity and consistency in operation despite the absence of any established (unique) discipline’ (Foucault, 1969 p.179). As if someone who speaking of flowers might not

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mention Botany or Gardening or the art of bouquet composition - and yet he would have many things to say.

In regard to my own practice the Foucaultian definition of Discursive Formation works both practically and conceptually. Practically, it works because it is out of a process of exchange and comparison that the forms (sculptures, photography or films) are created. Conceptually, because this exchange creates a trajectory, a discourse between different disciplines and interpretations; like a ‘retrospective projection of sciences on their own past, the shadow that they cast on what preceded them and which thus appears to have foreshadowed them (Foucault, 1969 p.180).

I like to approach knowledge in a very open, personal and empiricist way. I like mixing scientific information, methods and fields of studies under what I imagine could be a newborn’s gaze.

It is in this undefined, shapeless fluid place that I am trying to stand. It is this impure 6

and prior dimension of curiosity and connaissance that inspires me.

This position is against segmented approaches to knowledge that sits comfortably and often unquestioningly in a positivist thought and work. Dialectics and knowledge crossover approaches to knowledge can in my opinion offer the possibility to conceive uncommon and interesting ways of understanding reality. In particular, I want to offer a dialectical way to emphasise relations and totalities as opposed to isolated causal chains and innumerable fragmented fields of research.

A fundamental part of my work is to translate and merge through art bodies of knowledge accumulated by different structures of enquiry and to show how such transformation and translations are revealing new and often interesting insights.

In its own way, art is what children say. It is made up of trajectories and becoming, and it too makes maps, both extensive and intensive. There is always a trajectory in the work of art […] without which it would not become. (Deleuze, 1997 p.65)

6 By connaissance Foucault means the relation of the subject to the object and the formal rules that govern it. “Savoir refers to the conditions that are necessary in a particular period for this or that type of object to be given to connaissance and for this or that type of enunciation to be formulated.”

(Foucault, 1969 p.15)

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ATM IN KENTISH TOWN, LONDON 2012 The modern world as seen by an old man.

I am queuing in front of an ATM waiting to get some money. My eyes are not focusing on a particular task. I start to observe the environment in a disinterested way.

That’s how I noticed that this HSBC building in Kentish Town features a vibrant metamorphic stone. It is interesting, I have never thought about the city as a display of stones. This particular one is a Gneiss, a common and widely distributed type of rock formed by high-grade regional metamorphic processes from pre-existing formations that were originally either igneous or sedimentary rocks. I wonder if the bank’s Director is aware of this, or cares. I wonder if HSBC is as widely disseminated in England as Gneiss is in the world. It is fascinating, the Gneiss and the bank are so close to each other in space, they constitute the same object, but they seem to stand so far apart with their essence.

I have from here been speculating about a photographic archive of masonry that makes up the buildings within the city of London occupied by the most influential institutions within the financial system. As I started developing the project it was noticeable that the Banks of Central London present an extensive use of stone in their austere façades.

The architectural use of the rocks – carved in monumental forms – refers to the idea

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of solidity and strength but (in my mind) they keep relating also to a primordial presence, evocative of geological ages and atemporal dimensions pre-existing the abstract orders of Man. In doing this research I wonder about the idea of time by revealing and layering three different time dimensions/histories: the stones lie in the unmemorable dimension of 7

Geology and earth formation , the architecture recalls a more recent history: the one of human technology and man’s occupation of the environment. It brings to mind 8

Jericho, reputedly the first town ever built , while the banks recall an even more 9

recent time, the one of the production of the capital and the monetary system . It is interesting to compare these three elements and see how by association humanity is inconsistent and furthermore, contemporary ideas of power become irrelevant when compared to stone and the non-human world.

Is money more fundamental than stones?

Is the power of the capital stronger than the surface of a rock?

In this discursive investigation I wonder also about reality: a visible, tangible and preexisting matter, the stone, is confronted with a human immaterial idea yet able to deeply influence and organise our lives: money as power.

Once our human life was based on stones, now it is driven by money, the majority of which we cannot touch or see.

This archival work of banks’ stones projects my thoughts in a geological dimension, in a time-frame that encompasses what will follow me (my human life) as well as what had preceded me.

I wonder whether it is possible today to conceive of a primitive thought. It seems absurd or at least unrealistic. In this world full of images and symbols we tend to accept and perceive everything as a result of an irreversible history. An abyss separates us from our evolutionary ancestors, not in terms of time, but of vision. Can we see what they would have seen? For sure when I started noticing the stones I didn’t see a bank anymore.

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Earth formed around 4.54 billion years ago by accretion from the solar nebula. The minerals present in the earth crust are strictly related to this event.

8 Jericho is usually quoted as the earliest known town. A small settlement evolves in about 8000 BC into a town covering 10 acres. The first walls around Jericho were about 2 meters thick at the bottom and they were made of boulders laid edge to edge without mortar. Jericho was also protected by a tower, which is about 4.5 meters in diameter at the bottom. Neolithic Jericho also had a trench dug out of solid rock to protect it. (Lambert, accessed 14 April 2013) 9 One theory argues that coins originated ca. 600-550 BC in Anatolia, which corresponds to modern-day Turkey

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WESTMISTER ABBEY, LONDON 1509 Power and Geology.

During the thirteenth century

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in the main sacrarium of Westminster Abbey the

Italian family Cosmati realised a mosaic pavement in semi-precious coloured stones.

In this year of 1509, Torrigiano, an Italian sculptor and architect from Florence arrives in England having being paid 1.500 Sterling (the equivalent of half a million pounds in 2013) by Henry VII to realise the Lady Chapel and the altar. […] Acquired the name of talented craftsman, he was taken to England, where he will be serving that king with very fine things made of marble, bronze and wood, and there he will work competing with the masters of that country, and overcoming them with his works. (Vasari, 1991 p.595) The altar will have marble pilasters at the angles. Marble is also the stone used by the 11

Cosmati in the mosaic , and the luxury matter is travelling along with the artist that has the technical skills to carve it or cut it into a precise decoration.

These two elements move through Europe and the greater the distance they cover the greater is the celebration of the power they represent.

Power; both political and economic is here faced with its representation and the need to communicate itself in noticeable forms. For this reason, monarchies, oligarchies and potentates enhance their reign through buildings and constructions designed to dazzle and impress.

Is not a surprise that banks, seats of financial power well into the twenty-first century, will display in their architecture the representation of the values of safety, reliability and stability they strive to demonstrate.

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In 1268 At Westminster Abbey there are two Cosmatesque pavements, the finest north of the Alps set in Purbeck Marble: one is the Great Pavement before the high altar, the other the paving and decor associated with the shrine of Edward the Confessor in the Sanctuary, both works executed about 1268 for the connoisseur-king Henry III. They are extremely unusual in England.

(Westminster Audio Guide, accessed on 25 March 2013) 11

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In fact, […] the architecture of banks allows you to read the relations linking architectural imaginary, symbolic programs and professional strategies. Efficient and robust these buildings carry from Modern Age Roman and Florentine palaces a very versatile Italian character, which is for bankers the invention of an illustrious past and for the investors the confirmation of prudent administration. (Gabetti 1976 p.13)

Â

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The use of the space, the geography the distance and the matter is deeply linked with power since the beginning of western civilisation, this model of representation and ostentation will be carried out into the capitalistic culture.

It is interesting to notice how the features that humans try to represent through stones are conceptually and scientifically wrong.

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The stones have acquired much weight in a metaphorical sense. They have become the foundation of architecture, cathedrals and palaces, with the idea that they are immutable. Of course, they are not immutable. Our stupid life is so short that we do not realize that even the stones die. So in Europe, and consequently in the city in general, there is a huge and heavy falsehood built on stones (Durham, 2004 p.114) Although it is a strong and durable stone for building purposes, even granite is not immune from decay, suffering cumulative damage through flaking and granular disintegration.

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The most recent national symbols of economic power – the buildings of the bank– are also inclined to falter. We are today starting questioning the our system of power, our confidence in the social system is broken, -has someone ever doubted that a bank could shake?- and in one of its foundations: that abstract presence of money that so profoundly shapes and scans our history on this earth. It is in this discontinuity or failure in the process of power representation that it has been possible to see differently and a new consideration is born.

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Although individual losses are superficial, when repeated over a number of cycles the aesthetic and functional degradation of granite building stone can be severe. Significant loss of sharpness on carved details and loss of smooth finish are detrimental to the appearance of buildings. In the cities visual inspection reveals an apparent association between the degree of decay and traffic volumes, implying that vehicle pollution may be implicated in both poor air quality and stone deterioration.

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PLEISTOCENE Unfolding the architecture of thought.

I was struck by just one thing: when the vomiting glowing touched a tree along the way, the tree immediately caught fire. That’s what I was looking for; the connection between the eternal fire of the earth and the portable that served me. Looking closer, I realized 14 the secret of the matter: when a tree caught fire, the neighbours would start burning.

In the science fiction book The Evolution Man or how I ate my father Roy Lewis describes with great imaginative power of the first attempt by a human, the man monkey, to control fire.

There is something fascinating in this description that has to do with wonder, wonder that is not linked to the state of mind of the character nor to the technology - what man monkey discovered - but to the reader’s emotion. He finds himself in a position to share a primitive event, to host in his head a thought that happened probably three million years ago.

The idea or the presumption of being able to look at things through the eyes of a prehistoric man -in other words be out of control and in a state of material mysticisminevitably leads to the reinterpretation of the elements of the environment and of our humanity in relation to other forms of life. Perception is about this reciprocity, the ongoing interchange between my body and the entities that surround it.

It is a silent conversation that I carry on with things, a continuous dialogue that unfolds far below my immediate awareness. When my body responds to the mute

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It was the beginning of the transmission of fire. It was enough to pick up a fallen branch, approach it in a tree on fire to take it away. I realized that it was necessary to organize a kind of chain. Firstly I set fire to a branch then I took it farther as I could and just as he was about to go out, I tore another branch from another tree and did the same with the next. (Lewis, 1994 pp.44,45,46)

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solicitation of another being, that being responds in turn, disclosing to my senses some new aspect or dimensions that in turn invites further exploration. That’s how I can now see the building of a bank reduced to architecture of thought, a representation. Now I see clearer a pile of ordered white stones soiled with dust, unsettled organic matter, I feel the density of marble and its hardness but also its plasticity stretched over an inhuman time and I think about the water, the sky, the dark and the heat of the earth.

And I can reach a milieu that brings me closer to the childhood of humanity (perhaps even before the appearance of Homo sapiens), everything moves in a dimension of need. I see the forces from which we come and I know they are the same ones that 15

formed the stone. The matter returns to being familiar.

In the film Cave of Forgotten Dreams Werner Herzog describes the method adopted by scientists to understand the environment and the way human lived and thought during the Pleistocene. One way is to mimic their daily life; scientist Wulf Hein wears their same clothes made of fur, reconstructs their tools, plays their music and builds Neolithic houses.

Is he experiencing something out of his knowledge?

It is difficult to prove, however, I think his scientific work is rather artistic.

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Our ancestors, we must presume, perceived the strangeness of their condition only very timidly. They did not have the reasons we have today for feeling themselves strangers in the universe upon which they opened their eyes. […] About plants and animals, as about himself there was nothing hard to15explain. These beings all have aim, a purpose: to live and to go on living in their progeny. Its purpose explains the being. […] ’ . But around them our ancestors also saw other objects, far more mysterious: rocks, rivers, mountains, the thunderstorm, the rain, the stars in the sky. If these objects exist it must also be for a purpose; to nourish it they had also to have a spirit or soul. Thus was the world’s strangeness resolved for those early human beings: in reality there exist no inanimate objects. For such a think would be incompressible. (Monod, in Kastner, 2012 p.83)

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WAKEHURST, 15-16 OCTOBER 1987 The categories, another world: the Nature example.

It comes off the Atlantic. It roars over northern France and the West Country, and howls through the Midlands. Finally, the storm turns its full, hurricane-force, 110 mph gusts on south-east England. In the wildest night in 300years, landscapes are changed as woods are flattened, trees snapped and parks and gardens devastated. An estimated 15m mature trees are uprooted in the great storm on this night. Ferries ran aground, oilers are smashed, falling boughs hit thousand of cars and 18 people die. It would take a century for nature to recover. There is a sense of profound loss. Kew looses 1.000 specimen trees tonight, Wakehurst loses around 20.000 or 60% of its collection. (Vidal, 2012 p.12) Twenty-five years on, not only has English woodland fully recovered, but ecologists and conservationists agree the storm transformed thinking about managing nature, improved biodiversity and revised our ideas about beauty. In place of dark woodland with closed canopy, came sky, new vistas and new ideas about how to manage nature.

Many historic houses and conservation bodies rushed to replant and clear up the devastation, but Wakehurst took four years to devise a plan. Andy Jackson, head of the park, left one third of its devastated 180 acres exactly as the trees had fallen and let the woodland regenerate itself. It was radical thinking at the time, but it is now recognised as good conservation. Today the wild wood is full of life with muntjac, roe and fallow deer, green woodpeckers and wild flowers growing in the glades created by the storm. The rotting beech and oak trunks have become seedbeds for foxgloves and brambles. Ecological lessons were learned.

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Our sciences, our perception of natural environment and manifestations are hypotheses influenced by hypothetical values. Our vision and perception of the world is never stable. Therefore, in any presumption of knowledge it is important to allow a margin of aperture to the possibility of being human - in other words to accept the fact that as humans have no control over the non-human world.

Our culture has determined through time to turn away from the earth. Knowledge makes us “progress” but also places our lives in another kind of world in which everything appears clear. And striving to represent the world, we inevitably forfeit its

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The storm was literally a wind of change. Until then, the thinking had been that forests were stable ecosystems. “We now realise woods are actually more characterized by instability and unpredictability” said leading woodland ecologist Gerorge Peterken. (Vidal, 2012 p.13)

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direct presence.

Hussel (1961) realised how the assumption of objectivity had led to an almost total eclipse of the life-world in the modern era to a nearly complete forgetting of the living dimension in which all of our endeavours are rooted.

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Our society accords priority to that which is predictable and places a premium on certainty, whereas our spontaneous, pre-conceptual experience is considered ‘merely subjective’.

The fluid realm of direct experience has come to be seen as a secondary, derivative dimension, a mere consequence of events unfolding the realer world of quantifiable an measurable ‘facts’ […] Subatomic quanta are now taken to be more primordial and real than the world we experience with our unaided senses. (Abram, 1996, p.41) We tend to forget that the ambiguity of experience is already a part of the phenomenon that draws our attention. Whatever we perceive is necessarily entwined with our own subjectivity, already blended with the dynamism of life and sentience.

18

On top of this, the encounter with other perceivers continually assures us that there is more to any thing, or to the world, that I myself can perceive at any moment. For instance, besides what we directly see of a particular tree or object, we humans should intuit that there is much more and not only what other humans perceive of it but also the dimension of other sentient organism, such as the birds that nest in its branches and the insects that move along its bark and even the sensitive cells and tissues of the tree itself, quietly drinking sunlight through its leaves.

There is no reason to suppose that lesser beings are devoid of sentient life. We are not alone dreaming at night for, quite apart from dogs and other domestic creatures whose emotions have been bound up with ours for many thousands of years, the smaller mammals such as mice and moles also live in world that exists only in their minds whilst they are asleep, as we can detect from their eye movements, and who knows, said Austerlitz, perhaps moths dream as well, perhaps a lettuce in the garden dreams as it looks up in the moon light.

(Sebald, 2011 pp. 133,134)

17

At the lowest cognitive level, they are processes of experiencing, or, to speak more generally, processes of intuiting that grasp the object in the original. (Hussel, 1961 p.53) 18

The living pulse of subjective experience cannot finally be stripped from the things that we study without the things themselves losing all the existence for us. (Abram, 1996, p.42)

20

DOCUMENTA KASSEL, 2012 The bubble that encloses each and everyone of us on all sides.

The curator of the 2012 dOCUMENTA 13, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, argued in an interview (June 2012, Kassel) that bees, dogs and strawberries should have voting rights.

19

She went on to explain that these beings should not turn in ballots like

humans do, but rather that they should be emancipated and their political intentions somehow recognised. At dOCUMENTA 13, several elements celebrate collaboration between human and non-human life: a sculpture park for dogs (Dog Run by Brian Jungen), a living dog artwork by Pierre Huyghe called Human, and a garden for butterflies.

Avant-garde or trite, multi-species art exhibitions and works may be the forefront of contemporary discussion on humans and their interactions with the natural realm.

Bakargiev asserts that she does not share the overarching impulse of modern, postEnlightenment thought to divide up life on Earth into categories.

20

Further to this, and way before , Huexkull (2010) explained how biology has failed in imposing human categories onto the understanding of non-human beings. The notion of considering distinct perceptual universes -of honey bees and other animalsis Uexkullian.

Uexkull (2010) sees an organism’s perceptions, communications, and purposeful

20

in 1940

21

behaviours as part of the purpose and sensation of nature that is not limited to human beings. For this reason he believes that in any biology worthy of the name, nonhuman perceptions must be accounted for along with specific speculations about the actual nature of the inner worlds of such non-human beings.

A tick for instance should suggest us that we should start considering our perceptions of time as something that cannot be applied to other beings. Depending on its environmental condition, in fact, the tick life duration can vary from a week up to eighteen years. The tick can wait through eighteen years of starvation, we humans cannot. It is simply impossible for an animal to endure an unchanging environment for eighteen years. We should assume that the tick is asleep. But time stands still in the tick’s waiting period not just for hours (as an in a human sleep) but also for years, and starts again only when a signal (that one signal) happens in its environment.

21

A housefly flying around the city doesn’t see what we see, even if we are looking at the same direction from a same distance. The farthest plane

22

of the housefly is

probably half a metre (they escape only when our hands get to that distance from them). This means that everything beyond that distance becomes blurred or invisible.

We must imagine all the animals that animate Nature around us as having a soap bubble around them, closed to all sides, which close off their visual space and in which everything visible for the subject is also enclosed. […] Only when we can vividly imagine this fact will we recognize in our own world the bubble that encloses each and everyone of us on all sides (Huexkull, 2010 p.70).

Uexkull’s exposition of time as well as purpose, space and speed (amongst other concepts) through the analysis of the non-human perceiving world, focusses on precisely those subjects that have been neglected in the development of biology after 23

Darwin .

21

Time which frames all events, seemed to us to be the only objectively consistent factor, compared to the variegated changes of its contents, but now we see that the subjects controls the time of its environment. […] we shall say: without a living subject, there can be no time.

(Huexkull, 2010 p.52) 22 Uexkull explains the farthest plane as the wall that imitates the sight. This plane includes all the visible things. E.g. for humans -if we look up in the sky- the farthest plane includes the sun, the moon and some stars.

23 Uexkull, while not explicitly anti-evolutionist, disparages Darwin. He dismisses the notion that natural selection can account for the character of life he considers most important: the interlinked purposeful harmonies of perceiving organs. For instance, “[…] the hermit crab has developed a long tail to grab snail shells to use as temporary home. As soon as one interprets it as a gradual adaptation through any modification of anatomy, (as soon as one ascertain that the crab has developed the tail as a prehensile organ, not as a swimming organ as other long-tailed crabs have) the hermit crab’s tail is no more enigmatic than is the rudder-tail of the crayfish.” (2010, p.5)

22

Perception and functionality –distinct from ours- pervade living things, and ignoring this is not scientific, nor, I would say, artistic.

PIAZZA CARLO ALBERTO, TURIN 1889 A bridge and not a goal.

On January 3 Friedrich Nietzsche witnesses the whipping of a horse in Piazza Carlo Alberto. ‘You inhumane, you bully of beasts and thinking beings, slaughterer of this steed!’ says. (in Galvano, 1950). The coachman, afraid, retracts. Nietzsche bends and embraces the horse, moved, excited, as after years of adventurous and vain research he has found a brother lost in a shipwreck.

Then he collapses on the sidewalk.

After this episode, Nietzsche becomes mentally unstable and will remain in the care of his mother and sister until his death in 1900. What happened in Nietzsche’s head?

I investigated many of Turin’s libraries and archives, where I found numerous titbits about Nietzsche’s life in Italy, though no official reports documenting this curious event.

Despite this lack of confirmation, I read this anecdote, whether invented or not, as a symbolic point of entry into the debate on Nature versus Culture as well a good introductory image for an ecological thinking. I will try to explain why.

The intellectual urge to categorise has prevailed since Aristotle, who separated humans from other forms of life on the basis of rational thought.

Descartes carried this thinking further with his writings on dualism of the mind and 24

body.

Modern thinkers such as Donna Haraway (1985) will be working to widen

humans’ circle of compassion to include animals, and to undo anthropocentric “speciesism” and the subjugation of non-human life.

However, in my opinion, one of the first thinkers to view the humanist advances of the Renaissance and Enlightenment with scepticism and to start an ‘ecological’ way of thinking was Nietzsche.

The human turn away from the earth is prompted, he said, by ‘dissatisfaction with life, a dissatisfaction that causes one to create another world’ (1995, p25).

24

The 17th century philosopher posited that non-human animals have no minds and are simply the sum of mechanical reactions and therefore impervious to pain, and vindicated vivisection in the name of science. René Descartes (1972)

23

Nietzsche gained fame with his writings on the Übermensch, or Overman in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

For the fictitious narrator Zarathustra, we humans are just a rope stretched between the animal and the Overman, a bridge between our simian ancestors and the future.

This concept illustrates Nietzsche’s long winding inquiry into the divide between humans and nature.

Nietzsche spent a lot of time walking through forests and woods. In the Civic Archive in Turin I found various articles describing his time spent on the Liguria’s Mountains.

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Zarathustra was born in the Ligurian Riviera, specifically along the Ruta path. This passage is the highest point of the road that crosses the promontory of Portofino, Rapallo and Santa Margherita in Camogli. Nietzsche will stay for long periods between 1888 and 1980, in a small inn that had the name Kursaal Hotel, enlarged and modernized now it's called Paradise Hotel. “Here he lived and wrote” used to say in German an iron plaque that isn’t there anymore. Zarathurstra is a book born from a kind of intoxication, the intoxication that one can take from the air of this heavenly hills, overlooking the sea, away from the rest of the world. Searching for the footprints of Zarathustra, I went by mistake up to the Portofino top, but the error is 'useful in the understanding of it. This thrill of olive trees reaches you into the heart, at some point, to the right of the trail a maritime pine stands tall and black on a meadow of yellow buttercups, and soon after, in the vicinity of the top, two fragrant laurel create a magical and surprising passage. The silence is absolute. In this season there aren’t even the cicadas. Then, suddenly, a bird hidden in a hazel bush starts talking, in other words he sings, but with such a reasonable accent that it seems a speech, and it is hard to understand that it is just an illusion effect of the intoxication (Galvano, 1950).

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I think we have to imagine to run from one to another, up and down of these steep and stones paved mountain roads, to know something more about Nietzsche and his thoughts.

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Nietzsche lived also in Genova, Sorrento, Venezia, Recoaro (Tyrol), Messina and Rome. He was based in Turin between 1888 and 1889. His eremitism periods altered with the life in the city is perhaps an environmental shift that has inspired him in the thinking of man as a bridge, as a figure in a constant “between”.

‘What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal; what can be loved in man is that he is a going-across and a down-going.’ (in Laurence 1997 p.81) It is not a surprise if, probably in the middle of a deep contemplation, he collapsed on seeing a horse whipped. Through his mind he might have not seen an ordinary urban scene (a coach with his coachbuilder), rather something more significant: a nonhuman being used by a man for his human needs. He might have not seen a horse but a bridge, -the ‘between’ us and nature- and he might have chosen to cross this distance in order to see what was there, at the other end.

Nietzsche might have thought too closely about his proximity with the horse.

‘I am an infernal machine that can make an explosion. The world will jump. I put my hands over the millenniums.’(Aniante 1941 p.15)

LONDON UNDERGROUND, 2011-2013 The NietzscheinTurin archive. www.nietzscheinturin.tumblr.com I began collecting images from newspaper articles on nature, mostly from the 27

Metro , and archiving them within a project.

The shift in new thinking upon what is not human around us (commonly called nature) is the endeavour of the archive. I understood it as a life-term assignment and

26

This going for climbs and descents explains another aspect of Zarathustra: […] his descent from the mountain, his meditations on the mountain, he was a mountain character far more than a marine one. Zarathustra was similar to his author, who started walking the morning with a hard-boiled egg in the pocket, a little bundle of salad, a phial of oil and vinegar, few chocolate bars, for the mountain Esoli, and never went down to the sea, never to Camogli or Recco if only to pick up the mail or take the train.

He went to meditate and write on the Esoli, carrying his books and his notebooks in a bag tied with a belt; he descended towards evening, had dinner, then committed himself to work in his studio, under the light of an oil lamp. His room-studio looked at the sea, beyond the wooded headlands, toward the light. (Galvano, 1950) 27 The Metro, a free newspaper distributed in the London tube stations with headlines like “Bruno Mars-inspired live lip-dub marriage proposal goes viral” throwaway news fodder for commuters on their way to work.

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based on images, words and information collected from articles, chronicles, news, concerning the social or public perception of the environment and its components.

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For over a year now I had been examining local/international newspapers and free journals, looking also for folkloristic aspects and anecdotal situations that arise with 29

the “nature versus culture” dilemma or dichotomy. I became intrigued by the pseudo or pop-science articles, which I believe reveal something about nature as a protean societal concept.

As an art practitioner one concern I’ve had with subverting the definition of nature is how to approach reality without adhering to a symbolic categorisation.

How should we go beyond illustrating this division of nature and humanity, and generate unconventional ways to see, perceive and understand? One possibility is perhaps to visualise the existing predominant structure. The images in the Metro are an interesting area of study because in my opinion they represent Western society’s most artificial and mediated experience of the environment, and not only because they are viewed and perceived in a subterranean, man-made habitat. The content of the Metro newspaper is a condensation of representation of human explanation of phenomena. Every morning one can flip quickly through extreme adventures, exotic places, rare animals, catastrophes and landscapes. These few minutes provide a condensed metaphysical journey, powerful enough to build in your mind an idea of the world, of the environment, of the phenomena from which we, over centuries of 30

evolution, have become detached.

That brief moment of your day offers illusory

compensation for a primordial, wild condition and for complicity with the non-human that we are lacking in our daily life and that we probably have lost forever.

Is this the Other world that Nietzsche is talking about?

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flora, fauna, matter, atmospheric agents, human behaviour and natural hazards.

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In the archive Nietzscheinturin, we see different images like a cat undergoing physical therapy, a fourteen-meter humpback

whale in the Trieste port, or workers walking on an airplane rudder in the ocean.

30 Martin Heiddeger speaks of being-toward-death as proper to Dasein (literally “being there”), his version of the human perceptual world, our Umwelt that we tend to raise up over those of other species, just as we tend to put our own concerns, and those of our loved ones, and our nation, over those of other people, races, and countries. (Heiddeger, 2012)

Â

26 Â

Are animals politically and socially correct?

What about the future of an unemployed pigeon?

What is a dog’s opinion about the London riots?

27

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In order to disengage myself from this intoxicating and highly mediated mechanism I started developing a dialogue with the newspaper. I direct my attention towards the human idea of control (or lack of control) upon nature and I ask myself: What is primordial? These ideas inform the method I use to browse the newspapers and to choose what to cut and keep in the archive. These two elements are then decontextualized from the newspaper, re-arranged and displayed in a blog where I try to present them in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions, visual and written information that must be willingly organised by the mind of the user or viewer.

With this archive I am trying to destabilise language with its categories and symbols and eventually, what I am trying to demonstrate, is that nature is nothing and everything.

We believe in the existence of very special becomings-animal traversing human beings and sweeping them away affecting the animal no less then the human (Deleuze and Guattary, 2004 p.261) According to Deleuze and Guattari society and the state need animal characteristics to use for classifying people; natural history and science need characteristics in order to classify the animal. Serialism and structuralism either graduate characteristics according to their resemblances, or order them according to their differences. Animal characteristics can be mythic or scientific. ‘But we should not be interested in characteristic rather in modes of expansions, propagation, occupation, contagion, peopling’ (Deleuze and Guattary 2004 p.264) Art can expand knowledge or destroy it, infuse it with new visions. But how far can art take us away from ourselves? If the worlds experienced by humans can be so diverse, as Hexukull (2010) has demonstrated, the life-world of other life-forms such as wolves, owls, plants or bacteria are even more diverse. We have to take this in consideration.

Has art, a human practice, the potential to encompass not only one type of diversity but also non-human diversity? And how can we avoid presumption in this?

I think there is a possibility. In fact, despite the multiplicity, it would appear that there are basic structures of the life-world that are shared, elements that are common to

29 31

different cultures and species.

While all organisms may have minor goals, such preparation for the future as that of a beetle larva, along with our personal Umwelts, we are part of an all-embracing master plan. Uexkull wheels out musical metaphors: organisms are instruments in a sort of celestial music show of which we hear only strains.

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I like to think that underneath the layer of the diverse cultural life-worlds there is a deeper more unitary life world, always already beneath all our cultural acquisitions, a vast and continually overlooked dimension of experience that nevertheless supports and sustains all our diverse and discontinuous worldviews.

Art might succeed in evoking this dimension because it doesn’t plan to understand or describe, rather to merge, melt with, and become diversity.

Little Hans does not form an unconscious representation of the father with the horse, but it is drawn into a becoming-horse [..] the power of an impersonal that is not a generality but a singularity at its highest point. For example I do not play the horse but I become a horse by reaching a zone of proximity where I can no longer be distinguished from what I am becoming. (Deleuze, 1997 p.65)

Little Hans is becoming Nietzsche who is becoming the horse, the animal who is becoming me and all the non-human milieus that I cannot even try to begin to understand.

31 One basic recurrence: In the dog world there are only dog things, in the dragonfly world there are only dragonfly things, and in the human world there are only human things.

32 Jacob Von Uexkull, (1934) A foray into the worlds of animals and humans, ed. Minnesota Press

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CONCLUSION An Art and Science approach is not to see what has never been seen before, but to think, by means of re-association and projecting trajectories, what has never been thought before about what we see everyday.

The virtues of a dialectical/relational approach in art making is that it opens up all sorts of possibilities that might otherwise appear closed off or invisible.

The focus of this research has reflected on the importance to be receptive to those possibilities in the mass of constraints that are embedded in the body, environment, culture, and in a particular kind of socio-ecological order (capitalism) that regulates the mental condition of daily life.

Children never stop talking about what they are doing or trying to do: exploring milieus, by means of dynamic trajectories and drawing up maps of them […] the unconscious doesn’t deal with persons and objects, but with trajectories and becomings; it is not an unconscious of commemoration but one of mobiliation, an unconscious whose objects take flight rather than remaining buried in the ground (Deleuze, 1997 p.61, 63)

Let’s be children, let’s be animals.

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- Vidal Jhon Great storm: a wind of change for conservationists The Guardian, Monday 15 October 2012 -Warner Marina The Language of Stones in Joan Jonas book, ed.Charta, Milan 2007

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Web articles and documents -Binsky Paul The Cosmati at Westmister and the English Court Style. Available from www.jstor.org [Accessed 15 February 2013] -Fuller Matthew Think Twice. Available from www.spc.org/fuller/texts/think-twice [Accesed 12 April 2012] -Kirk Wendy and David Cook A Guide to Rocks in Graveyards and Cemeteries. and Building London. Available from www.ucl.ac.uk/es/impact/geology/walks [Accessed on 3 Februry 2013] -Lambert Tim Prehistoric Jericho Available from http://localhistories.org/jericho.html [Accessed 14 April 2013] -Latur Bruno Waiting for Gaia. Composing the common world through arts and politics. Available from www.bruno-latour.fr [Accessed 6 November 2012] -Norman Jeremy From Cave Painting to the Internet Database Map. Available from www.historyofinformation.com/maps-simple [Accessed 2 April 2013] -Robinson Eric Using the earth to measure time. Available from www.eolss.net [Accessed 2 December 2012] -Schmidt di Friedberg Marcella What is Nature? Cultural concepts, local representations, construction, deconstruction, political and marketing strategies of humanity’s oldest question.

Available from www.econgeog.misc.hitu.ac.jp/icgg/intl_mtgs/MSFriedberg.pdf [Accessed 21 November 2011] -Warner Marina The Writing of Stones.

Available cabinetmagazine.org/issues/29/warner.php [Accessed on 18 October 2012]

from

Film -Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) Directed by Werner Herzog, IFC Films, r/t 89’ -2001: A Space Odissey (1968) Directed by Stanley Kubrik, Warner Bros, r/t 161’ -The Turin Horse (2012) Directed by Bela Tarr, Artificial Eye, r/t 1.66’.1”

Audio Files - Documenta 13 press conference on 6 June 2012, Kassel.

-Westminster Audio Guide [Accessed on March 25 2013] Westminster Abbey

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Images -Pag.2 Folded metamorphosed clastic sedimentary rock [Online Image] Available from www.geoscape.nrcan.gc.ca [Accessed on 5 April 2013] -Pag.4 Chart representing the state of matter [Online www.physics.umd.edu [Accessed on 6 April 2013]

Image]

Available

from

-Pag.6 The Monkey Man invents a tool. Frame from 2001: A Space Odissey (1968) film directed by Stanley Kubrik, credit: Warner Bros -Pag.9 1641 A Botanical Clock from Magness, sive de arte Magnetica [Online Image] Available from www.mjt.org [Accessed on 15 April 2013] -Pag.11 Serena Porrati (2012) Gneiss stone, detail of a bank building, Kentish Town, London -Pag.14 Serena Porrati (2013) The mosaic floor made by the Cusmati family in 1268 and the altar with marble colums carved by Torrigiano in 1509 c.ca, Westminster Abbey, London -Pag.15 Serena Porrati (2013) Barclays building in front of Westminster Abbey, London -Pag.16 Serena Porrati (2013) Chart representing the temperature of the Earth inner. Natural History Museum, London -Pag.17 Professor Wulf Hein playing a bone flute. Frame from Caves of Forgotten Dreams, (2010) film directed by Werner Herzog, Credit: IFC Films.

-Pag.20 Village street for a fly’s eye. Figure from Jakob Uexkull, A foray into the worlds of animals and humans p.65 -Pag.23 Frame from the film The Turin Horse Film directed by Bela Tarr, (2012) credits: Artificial Eye. -Pag.26 Fox in town/

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Pigeons will not be used anymore by the Spanish military forces as a means for communication. (2011-2013) Selection of images from Metro newspaper, London Underground. Credits:Metro.

-Pag.27 Police’s dog was honored for bravery during London riots. (2011-2013) Selection of images from Metro newspaper, London Underground. Credits:Metro.