Collapse, Saturn and melancholies
I would like to write a song for all my artist friends who cannot escape the prevailing depression. Those who feel that today is ineffable and tremulous, and that we can no longer talk about it without feeling terror. It is not only intense, but also incomprehensible and atrocious.
Collapse has a tragic and terrible meaning for us. However, it also means that something can no longer continue as it is, as when we say that the system has collapsed, or that something will collapses if we persist in demanding too much from it.
This might be the CEPO, “colapso experiencial podrido y orondo (hinchado)” (the rotten and putrid (bloated) experiential collapse) that surrounds us. Faced with this, we speculate a good LAME, which would be “Laorganización de Artes Malas Extrovertidas” (The Organization of Extroverted Bad Arts), which, well practiced, will lead to a GOCE, Gemido Orgulloso Colectivo Estético (an Aesthetic Collective Proud Moan) of infinite characteristics. Moaning can resemble, and very much, a practice, a project, an artistic work. I dream about it.
Dreaming, sleeping, but above all navigating. Artistic practice can regain the courage to navigate if it manages to leave its zone of comfortable melancholy. I know it is difficult to think this because international capital manages art by internationalizing melancholy. The global is a Saturnian strategy, that is, mythologically real, a daytime nightmare, the management of the eros, of the vital Chronos made by the biopowers that allow us to think of ourselves in the same matrix of times, the same ways, the same forms, the same end. We are all the same and we go to the biennials just like this.
Precisely, the 60th Venice Biennale is an example of this. On the one hand, the institutionalism of art with its art washing, its quota policy (women, elderly, LGBT and queer, indigenous, migrants, Palestinians, and Ukrainians…) that turn the work into the product of a biography. And it is difficult to think of that biography (which ends up being the work that is exhibited, almost), above practices of mutual nurturing, what we call, against exceptional biography, the intensity of vital arts that connect with territorialized practices. That is why we also talk about contemporario art, (instead of contemporary): temporary, let’s say it passes and continues, and another artist comes who illustrates something that represents, and continues.
Perhaps it is time to think from this collapse about that other moment. Not so much the one that represents, but the one that lives. We insist on this. It is the art freed from the representational demand that can help us procure common artifacts of shelter, nurture, and memory. Artistic practice is the imaginative power that can make us feel the ways to move away from a ruined future, with a present of celebration, fantasy, organization and encounter, above all, by sheltering and attaching ourselves to the present.
We all want to move away from this ruined future. This future is a particular phenomenon: we place it in the future, but the collapse is already set, and its ruins are in the present. It is a starting point for the destruction of the Anthropocene: the destruction of the future is in today. To ruin is to turn into ruins. The future is ruined because the ruins are of today, we see them today. That is the lapse we all enter: collapse.
Ultimately, we must respond to the collapse with a co-designed, collaborated present, collapsed from the other possibilities that are already here. Decollapsing is the way, decollapsing lapses, detaching the swollen, becoming intermediaries of worlds, relearning to listen, recovering the performative power, that is, exercising the unauthorized right to our existences (and when I say ours, I mean everyone’s because more than ever it is paratodestode -all for all of us-), and launching ourselves from precariousness, to create. To recover the notion of creation of public imagination outside the canons of history and feminist, anti-colonial, interspecies, loving, and unmarked art historiography.
Within the GIME (MOAN) and the GOCE contrary to the denied and aggravated melancholy, we can all start thinking about being artists, or none of us will be able to.
Kekena Corvalán
