Stubborn & Fertile
A convivium in three recipes
for a flower, a root and a leaf
under the old motto of Schaerbeek:
“Stubborn like a donkey, fertile
as the ground where the cherry trees grow”.
Guests are invited to develop a common appetite for
some questions on art, nature and the city.
24 August 2010
Domino Kingdom residency program at Nadine
Rue Gallait 80, Schaerbeek, Brussels
I. Flowers, or the life and death of inspiration
First course: ‘nature morte’ with fried flowers.
(Cucurbita pepo, Malva sylvestris, Achillea millefolium et al.)
art. Where do we find inspiration for our art? Are artists creators of something new or just parasites of the long food (domino) chain of the art world? This is the first topic you are invited to ingest and devour.
Here we could learn something from the flowers that we are going to eat as a first course. What’s the language of flowers? As much as the role of art in modern western societies, flowers are usually humanized as the most ‘sensible’ and ‘aesthetic’ part of the natural kingdom. Yet, as Bataille wrote, a flower’s fascinating power derives from an unconscious link with the basic instincts of reproduction and the fragility of life: sex and death.
We don’t want to solve the problems of aesthetics tonight. For now we pose a very partisan question: where is the materiality of inspiration? What’s the relation of inspiration with the flows of body, city and nature? For centuries the theory of signature (signatura rerum) dominated the knowledge of plants. If a plant had a similarity with a human organ, it was supposed to heal that organ. This superstition belongs to art too. When artists look for inspiration, are they still looking for the intangible signature of things?
On the contrary, can inspiration be something grounded and very material, then to become part of our body? Can inspiration be eaten? This brings us to the second course and second theme of this symposium.
II. Roots are the mouth
Second course: earthly soup of urban roots.
(Geum urbanum)
nature. Is there any common soil between art and nature? How can we artists, performers, gardners, botanists, urbanists, ecologists work together to fracture the borders of disciplines? Can we all find a new common ground into Nature in a different way the dominant (politically correct) discourse is suggesting?
Theophrastus considered a plant to be an animal with its mouth in the soil and its feet in the air. Roots are not necessarily the model for ‘meaning’ and ‘inspiration’, but the place of a transformation. Roots transform the soil into food, a matter in another matter. Is this ‘art of living matter’ a grounded practice transforming the common soil or a colonization from above of the spaces of the city? More profoundly, is there any art without the unconscious landscape of nature?
Today nature, energy and food are entering the art agenda and art is approaching these issues in a very conceptual way or as a form of relational aesthetics. Is there a means to consider living matter as a proper form of expression (as painters are using paint and brush and video artist screen and pixels)? Or is art inadvertently following these new top-down policies of green capitalism and climate change? Let’s move now from the roots to the leaves.
III. The theatre of the apocalypse on a leaf
Third course: ice sorbetto with absent leaves.
(Artemisia absinthium)
city. The leaves of the plants are the micro-cosmological theatre of the current apocalyptic debate about climate change. Leave cells (and algae cells too) are the place of photosynthesis, that is the transformation of CO2 in oxygen and the fixation of carbon atoms in sugars, carbohydrates and fuel for our machines (and also gas for our kitchens!).
How sincere is this apocalypse? Gigantic billboards advertising artificial fields of wheat that are “responsible, sustainable and possible” stand in front of the station Brussels Noord, surrounded by a banlieue of unemployed migrants and discount stores of industrial food. At the Belgica stop of the Brussels metro, a oceanic hurricane and a desert are depicted on big walls to warn passengers on the opposite consequences of climate change.
Are these totalitarian policies really grounded on the very soil of the city or just a new ideology, a new regime of biopolitical discipline, a control of the productive ground of life by imposing the new moral CONSUME LESS?
Do you want to be an artist of the apocalypse?
Guests, hosts and cooks
- Rasa Alksnyte (choreographer and cook)
- Anna de Manincor (artist and filmmaker, ZimmerFrei)
- Bruno De Wachter (writer)
- Pieter de Wel (artist, storyteller)
- Sonia Dermience (curator, The Public School and Komplot)
- Nicolas Galeazzi (artist)
- Loes Jacobs (curator, Nadine)
- Piet Joostens (writer)
- Wietske Maas (artist and cook, Urbanibalism)
- Kobe Matthys (artist)
- Matteo Pasquinelli (writer and cook, Urbanibalism)
- Anna Rispoli (artist, ZimmerFrei)
- Maarten Roels (researcher, urban gardener)
- Miriam Rohde (artist and architect, Dominokingdom)
- Maria Tarantino (filmmaker)
- Adva Zakai (artist, Dominokingdom)