Secção Autónoma de Teoria e História

CORRESPONDENCES  - http://correspondencias.weebly.com/projectoproject.html
EXHIBITION _ CURATING _ Eduarda Neves | Artists _ Amarante Abramovici | Covadonga Barreiro | João Vssco Paiva | Sérgio Leitão | Tânia Dinis
CONFERENCE _ TEXTS -  Alberto Samaniego - Eduarda Neves _ Fernando José Pereira _ Monica Coralli
Ernesto Neto - ARU KUXIPA  - project presentation

Thought is like the Vampire; it has no image, either to constitute a model of, or to copy. 1 I. Curating is one of the forms of war 2 On the subject of the theory of sovereignty, race wars and devices of domination, Michel Foucault considers that politics is the continuation of war by other means and that "the basis of the power-relationship lies in a warlike clash between forces-for the sake of convenience, I will call this Nietzsche's hypothesis." 3 Looking at history from the point of view of its wars and battles, the intelligibility of its fights, strategies and tactics, Foucault does not consider war only at the level of the defeat-victory or failure-success relationship but also as the vigour, energy and strength underlying power relations. War is a fight between the forces that are wielded through it. Its modalities and developments are transversal to the social body and are formulated in a variety of mechanisms that aim to ensure the status quo. If, for Foucault, asymmetries, antagonisms and rivalries as well as conflicts and fights between individuals, groups and classes can be configured in the general mode of war, Éric Alliez and Maurizio Lazzarato also remind us that since the beginning, the history of capitalism is traversed and constituted by a multiplicity of wars: "wars of class, race, sex, and gender; wars of civilisation and the environment; wars of subjectivity (the singular gave history its capital). (...) "Wars" as the foundation of the internal and external order, as the organising principle of society." 4 It is the wars of subjectivation, like political wars, also in the Guattarian sense, that we find objectified in the art system and its institutional mechanisms. This system, being a power structure that is part of a global strategy, is defined using a set of forms of submission and force relations from which the practice of curating does not escape.

In some cases, the will continues its march "But what is Europe and its culture? To which Europe do we need to go? To that of mister Churchill or mister Blum? To that of Hugh Dalton or doctor Schadt? To the Europe of Thomas Mann or of Céline? Of Massis or Bertrand Russell? Of Sartre or Sertillanges? Of Lucáks or Malraux? Who cannot see that it is to the conscience of the living contradiction concealed by each of those pairs of names that we need to go? Who does not realise that it is precisely the awareness of that conflict that we need? The cultural reality of Europe today is as complex as the multiple appeals that shape it, appeals and contributions that are almost countless. To live up to or be able to live up to its demands is to be able to understand and accept the tremendous dialogue that has shaped the process of European consciousness ever since the Ionian times of the 6th century." 1 I. the ill will In this superstructure that we know as the Western civilization, faced with an internal revolt and the contradictions of its own history, the far right, populist, nationalist and xenophobic movements have been gaining ground. Refugees, poverty, precarious work and street mobilisations are on the rise, among so many other examples that give shape to reality. The economic forces, the primacy given to financial markets, the claimed-for monetary stability and the much-lauded budgetary discipline cancel out the social struggles and achievements of the last centuries, as well as collective action and structures of solidarity. It is increasingly clear that issues regarding real social and housing policy, employment, the right to work and a minimum wage, continue to be minimised, just as monetary unification only continues to express the perverse nature of competition. Europe's crisis, which is also the collapse of its political representations, is expressed in several demonstrations by citizens-such as the Indignants in Spain, the mobilisations that led to Brexit and, more recently, the Gilets Jaunes in France. While European construction has come to reinforce the imperative of its gregarious conscience, it is no less true that the apparent democratic and progressive movement of its history has also engendered useful and usable workers, motivated for slavery, trained for sacrifice, and thus made European. These signs, which point us towards an ill and weak will, a herd animal morality, which Nietzsche had already diagnosed in Beyond Good and Evil, continue to spread all across this increasingly obscure Europe. Everything that contributes to elevate impulse, life, strength or tragic joy, is immediately stigmatised. The spirit of our time paralyses the will, gives it a resigned shape. In these times that perhaps we do not yet 1 Eduardo Lourenço-Heterodoxia I. Lisbon: Editora Gradiva, 2005, pp. 24-25.