The body and the shelter: land rights and contemporary art. In conversation with Carsten Höller

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I, for one, have learned the lesson of concreteness from Carsten Höller (b. Brussels, 1961, lives and works between Stockholm, Sweden, and Biriwa, Ghana). And it weirded me out, which is why I believe this dialogue will leave a mark upon my consciousness, for a dissonance can always wield a more potent impact than a reclining, inert consonance. All the more so in contemporary art, where I profoundly believe in the constructive power of distortion. On a sickened earth, for culture to act as a healing in order to finally allow us to regain our senses, great works of contemporary art are duty-bound to be those wild splinters able to defy the status quo.

 

The dissonance that struck me while conversing with Carsten Höller revolved around the unique privilege of engaging with a real luminary of international contemporary art – terrain within which very, very often, national pastime is the high jump of the most sophisticated quotation, or the skeet shoot of whoever rants the loudest – and while I laboured in my verbose acrobatics, his gentle guidance brought me back to solid ground, main topic at the core of this issue of Ossigeno, and putting aside bombastic effect quotes, he spoke to me of concrete actions carried out through his art, real healing balm for our ailing earth. Actions carried out without ever coming to terms with the complacency snaking through that weed which is artwashing – or, in this case, (e)art(h)washing – for which we are infested by several self-styled artists hugging trees and beating their chests to ensure a spotlight not so much on a fatally wounded soil, who cares after all, but on themselves.

(Ed.’s Note: do you remember, in that surreal and pitch-perfect fresco about contemporary Italian culture represented by Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty, the scene of the artist’s performance in her birthday suit at the Claudian Aqueduct, who, according to the media hype, declared herself inspired by “extrasensory nature vibrations” but then, in front of a ruthless Jep Gambardella, she couldn’t even remotely argue what these vibrations consisted of? Well, it seems we are in a desperate need of more Jep Gambardellas)

 

Allow me to elucidate. Since Carsten Höller, before being an artist, holds a degree in Agricultural Sciences with a thesis on insect communication and a Ph.D. in Entomology, I asked him with particular pride a question that pivoted upon the notion of optimism or pessimism, in the context of defending the earth through art, scrambling across the metaphor of the fireflies, whose disappearance was recounted by Pier Paolo Pasolini as the ultimate crime in the face of the advance of blind capitalism, and conversely their faint presence was seen by Georges Didi-Huberman as a residual glimmer of hope. The glass half empty or half full, in short. Here is his answer.
«I have a great respect for both, but I am perhaps more of a practical type. I am interested in using art as a conservation weapon, as a way to stop destruction. Here is an example: there is a place in Ghana, called Atewa Range, which is incredible. In principle it stands as a protected area, a forest on some high hills, but it is incredible for the enormous amount of species living there – insects, plants, birds, even mammals. It embodies what is commonly identified as a biodiversity hotspot. Yet, it conceals a substantial reservoir of bauxite, and Ghana is in debt to China, because the Chinese government has lent money that Ghana is unable to repay. So the question is: will they be forced to sacrifice this pristine expanse for bauxite extraction in order to bring in the essential revenue to repay the debt? I think that a quandary of such magnitude necessitates a discourse far exceeding the boundaries of the Ghana-China bilateral relationship. This is a common heritage. We need to protect these places. Therefore, what I have proposed is very simple: we are going to put a big artwork there, a tower with two slides. The slides have actually first been installed at my exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2015. In tandem, we will build a brand new tower together with Ghanaian architects, serving as a kind of statement saying: nature is maybe kind of helpless, because it cannot speak the human language; but art can, it can proclaim “I am here, and right here is where I want to stay”. Any endeavor to despoil this space necessitates also the destruction of the artwork that now occupies this hallowed ground, amidst the bauxite mining fields. I think that such an intervention bestows upon that land an entirely new dimension. To the best of my knowledge, no prior instance exists wherein an artwork was harnessed to shield a region of remarkable biodiversity».
«So – Höller concludes – I think that we need to get very practical here. We need to speak about practical things, for we stand on the precipice of imminent jeopardy, as we all know. Unfortunately, neither Huberman nor Pasolini can help us at the moment. We need to get practical».

(Ed.’s Note: therefore, art and culture can really represent humankind’s last line of defense. This tenet has been concretely demonstrated to me by a multi-decorated fighter the likes of Carsten Höller)

 

Artistic acts bearing a resonance of much greater impact in the concrete safeguarding of the soil are far from unfamiliar to Carsten Höller. Giulio di Gropello, chief executive officer of Carma Innovative Organic Farmer – a carbon-neutral project born in 2000 in the breathtaking Civita di Bagnoregio landscape, committed to producing high-grade extra virgin olive oils through the respect of permaculture principles – tells me that, as part of the celebrations for their first twenty years, Carma invited Carsten Höller, together with Armin Linke and Norma Jeane, to craft exclusive works of art, the entire proceeds of which were pledged to NGOs engaged in the protection of the earth. The proceeds from Carsten Höller’s division paintings – Division Square Small (White Lines on Cobalt Green Background), 2020, ed. of 20 + 3 AP – have been entirely allocated by the artist for the preservation of the Nyambe Bepo forest, nestled in Ghana.

 

Small artworks, 30 x 30 cm squares, capable of enacting a revolution, akin to that small oeuvre that became the root of Carsten Höller’s fertile imagery. «The massive thing with art is that it can shock you, and you can see something that makes you think like: “Wow, you can do something like that? That’s unbelievable”. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be majestic. It can also be extremely simple. I was a scientist until 1993; nevertheless, I desired to become an artist already in 1985, coinciding with my academic degree season, but I knew it would have taken several years to do my own training, for I had never traversed the halls of an art school. Thus, the declaration of my status as an artist would have verged on the ludicrous. But I needed to know what it was about, so I went to see as many exhibitions as possible. It was on one such pilgrimage that I stood before a painting by Sigmar Polke. It was not a typical Polke painting. It was not very big, you know, approximately 60 centimeters wide. It was a pink surface and one corner was painted black. And you think, “Okay”. But the title was: Higher Beings commanded: paint the lower left corner black! That’s it. And then you also think: “What does he mean by that? What impelled this directive for a blackened corner, and where it came from?”. It appears to be utterly nonsensical, and it gives you a possibility of imaging something else, something out of the ordinary, out of what our mind can do. Because we always think that our mind is all encompassing, but it’s very anthropocentric to think like this. The mind is just a tool, it only allows you to do certain things, to perform certain functions. I think, for us, it is a taboo to understand that there is a whole other universe out there, which our mind cannot comprehend despite all its philosophical, scientifical and whatever else apparatus. The mind has its limits, and that is the main thing for us to understand».

 

Contemporary art beckons us to reckon with our limits, and it goes further: it ignites within us a doubt, a salvific doubt. Carsten Höller, whose studio has often been defined as the “laboratory of doubt” (notably, in 2016, his impressive solo show at the Pirelli HangarBicocca was christened Doubt, akin to a declarative manifesto), responds to this call by setting up experiences of altered perception through a living, playful, colorful, ultra-saturated, ultra-pop, and otherworldly aesthetic journey, all rooted in the very ground that he has scientifically studied, enabling us to waver, to question ourselves as one species among species. Acknowledging our limits requires a paradigm that can no longer be postponed: from anthropocentrism to ecocentrism. From human to land. Simply, brutally, for so far it is clear that we have failed, and I believe this is the supreme taboo to be admitted for those of us – the vast majority, I dare say, sniffing the world air – who have thought fit to build churches on their navels.
Hence, within our path on the defense of universal rights made by contemporary art, where the violated and vulnerable body is none other than the earth, the vocabulary of rights should be enriched: not merely the right to the earth but, with equal urgency, the right of the earth. That florilegium of urgencies encapsulated within the UN 2030 Agenda states, in its Goal 15: “Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, halt and reverse land degradation, and halt biodiversity loss”.
Consequently, there is another precise, enormous taboo. Carsten Höller has confronted it several times (Killing Children, 1990-1994) in the way he best masters, that of thematization through the salvific shock of art. «We are but one species among countless others, yet we have succeeded in propagating and colonizing all kind of habitats all over the earth, basically everywhere, with the methods we have developed. This is the main reason why we are the root cause of our own problems. We persist in functioning according to the logic of species reproduction alone, mechanically adhering to our acquired evolutionary traits without being able to overcome them. We find ourselves ensnared in a dilemma situation: we know that we are in a problematic time because of our problematic behavior but, at the same time, we remain oblivious, persisting in doing what we have been shaped for, kind of unconsciously. We should seriously think about the damaging effect every human being has in terms of consumption of resources, particularly in the Western world. I mean, you have to get a driver’s license if you drive a car, and this is imperative, because you need to be able to drive amidst other people, obeying to the same traffic rules as the others, else chaos and danger would ensue. I think the same applies to making children. It was Terence McKenna who surmised the idea that in the consuming world – in the Western world, in parts of Asia – if we would just agree on a one-child per family policy, we would halve not only the number of people, but also the use of resources within twenty years. Believe me, that’s a pretty dramatic thing. We’re still like tumbling around, like half blind because of our evolutionary heritage, but at the same time our conscious mind says “We can’t go on like this”».
«This is causing real problems for us, today, but also for many other species, organisms that live on this earth. You spoke about the loss of biodiversity for future generations of human beings. We need to speak about it. It’s an evolutionary taboo, but we need to speak about it».

 

This is the moment when, raptured by an ardent fervor, I tell him about the infamous policies of our current government, which sets birth rate growth as one of its paramount goals decreed for our hapless country. And here is also when Carsten Höller is neither surprised nor outraged; instead, he prefers to tell me what he has concretely done to unveil this deeply ingrained taboo. «They all do, because they think economy has to grow, and then people have money in their pockets, they maintain their popularity, and everybody’s happy. But it’s not like this. You can maybe make economy grow, but you don’t need to have a certain percentage of increase in the number of children being born. There are other ways to do it».

(Ed.’s Note: see Pier Paolo Pasolini and his distinction between progress and blind development; and, in recent times, see Kate Raworth’s pioneering scheme of Doughnut Economy, which contrasts prosperity with mere growth)

«It cannot be – Carsten Höller proceeds – that you have to increase the number of people being born for the sole reason that they are consumers. If we are talking about reduction of consumption, we also need to speak about reduction of consumers. But almost nobody speaks about it. So, in the early 1990s, my first artworks actually were kind of traps for children. The idea was to introduce this concept in that shocking language of art I told you about, in order to speak about the false necessity of procreation and if this could have been treated from an alternative viewpoint. I know these traps – much like a subsequent f ilm detailing ten distinct methods on how we can catch children (Jenny, 1992) – were very dark humour, but I did it in order to raise this issue. And also to think about it from another perspective, the one of you as a child, when you start to understand that you exist, that you are in the world, and the world is so big and so difficult to understand that you get very dark thoughts too. I’m pretty sure we all went through this».

 

«It’s brutal», some might say.
It’s contemporary art, it has the duty to be as such, because «To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric» (Theodor W. Adorno, Critique of Culture and Society, 1949), because the move of contemporary art matches the tug of one who must awaken you, because the work of contemporary art is fearless, brutal, graceless and disgraced, but precisely by virtue of this ungraceful being it contains its constructive reason of being: to make us open our eyes and consciences wide.
At the root of the word “brutal” applied to contemporary art lies the Art Brut movement, baptised in 1945 by Jean Dubuffet and enlivened by «works created from solitude and from pure and authentic creative impulses – where the worries of competition, acclaim and social promotion do not interfere» (Jean Dubuffet, Place à l’incivisme, 1967). The art of individuals who have never been subjected to the constraints of academic indoctrination, born of the fringes, the margins, the convicts in prison, the madmen in asylums, instinctive and fierce, aesthetics devoid of any anaesthetic.
From Art Brut will come Brutalism as the architectural movement that made its material the béton brut, Le Corbusier’s exposed concrete. And from Brutalist architecture the Brutalist cuisine will rise, making its material the in-purity products of the soil.

 

Carsten Höller, a man of exquisitely gentle disposition, has made Brutalism one of his artistic features since his first project, Killing Children, conceived to raise awareness about the soil’s overconsumption of resources.

(Ed.’s Note: Brutal + Concrete: in English, “concrete” means both cement – the material of Brutalist architecture – and practical)

Today there is a venue called Brutalisten, located in Stockholm, that Carsten Höller has opened in collaboration with chef Stefan Eriksson just over a year ago, in proximity to the cinema where Ingmar Bergman’s films once premiered. It straddles the line between a restaurant and a work of art: a restaurant, because it fully adheres to the conventions of such locations; a work of art «because it takes you into an unexplored terrain, defined by a set of restrictive rules, which can evoke kind of a primal discomfort, leading then to an intense and specific pleasure, such as I often find in good art». Indeed, in the thirteen-point Brutalist Kitchen Manifesto (available at www.brutalisten.com/manifesto), the first point states that «Brutalist kitchen is a dogma kitchen where certain rules apply»: Brutalisten in fact serves “orthodox brutalist” dishes, made with just one ingredient; “brutalist” dishes, composed of one ingredient along with salt and water; “semi-brutalist” dishes, created with two ingredients. Further reading from the Manifesto: «We are born as Brutalist eaters, as mother’s milk is essentially Brutalist».
«Decoration on the plate is avoided».
«Brutalist Cuisine is […] a commitment to purity».

 

A radical act, a return to the roots, and roots are essential in holding the soil, to protect it and to protect ourselves. When Carsten Höller talks to me about Brutalisten, believe me, his eyes gleam. «In principle, you are only allowed to use water and salt for cooking an ingredient. You are not allowed to use even olive oil, nor any kind of grease, nor any kind of spice. And especially, you are not allowed to combine ingredients, like making a combinatory dish, which out there we are full of. That’s also very nice, for goodness’ sake, but I am more interested in the idea of working on one ingredient and adding as little as possible, trying to get out of ingredients; out of the product, you can get the authentic taste of products. Take salad, for instance: nobody ever tastes the roots of the salad, or the oil that you can make from its seeds or its flowers. For us, salad usually means just the leaves. So it is interesting to think about getting a salad dressing under these constraints, because it is very difficult. You cannot use lemon juice, nor olive oil, to make a little vinaigrette. It doesn’t work that way. So, what do you do? Maybe you have to ferment some leaves and make some salad water. Maybe you have to get the roots and try to use them. What we are interested in is a more complex approach to the product, that can incorporate the different parts of it. And then you can both cook it or serve it raw, very plain and s traight, very Brutalist».
«Our main care is to have great products and sometimes, at the best, we don’t do anything with them. We just look at the temperature. We had some turnips, at the beginning of the season: they were so fantastic, these little white turnips, that the only thing we did was serving them on ice – and we put them on the ice just before, so they shouldn’t have been too cold, just a little bit. Any kind of cooking, there, would have been wrong. I think it’s fantastic».

 

In this Magnificat of the in-purity product of the soil lies the deep respect imbuing the rituals. The very soil becomes a hallowed sanctuary, to defend it, to protect it, to cherish its diversity. Another tenet in The Brutalist Kitchen Manifesto avows: « The use of overlooked, hard-to-get or rare ingredients, or ingredients that are generally discarded, is characteristic of Brutalist kitchen». There is another manifesto speaking of the recovery of marginality as salvation for diversity, authored by another erudite with a background in Agricultural Sciences. It is the Manifesto of the Third Landscape (2004) by Gilles Clément: «If we stop looking at the landscape as the object of a human activity, we immediately discover (will it be a forgetfulness of the cartographer, a negligence of the politician?) a multitude of undecided spaces, devoid of function, which it is difficult to lay a name on. This whole belongs neither to the territory of shadow nor to that of light. It is located on the margins. Where the woods fray, along roads and rivers, in the forgotten recesses of the crops, where cars do not pass. Among these fragments of landscape, there is no similarity of form. One point in common: they all constitute a land of refuge for diversity. Everywhere, elsewhere, this is driven out». The Third Landscape is neither the infinite nor the finite; it is the indefinite, the unfinished, the imperfect, the undetermined, the nonsensical, like that product of the earth neglected and then cured by Brutalisten, like any terrain vague where lack of definition means multiplication of potential. Stop making sense (Talking Heads, 1984) as an admonition, for one of humankind’s afflictions is the compulsion to ascribe meaning and a name to all things at all costs, so as to be able to pigeonhole them and thus get rid of the discomfort stemming from dealing with diversity.

 

Carsten Höller is not afraid of nonsense; quite the converse, as he elects it as a symbol of his art, in a very specific form: «The mushroom. I use a lot of mushrooms. They are a very good image for my art, in the sense that they stand for something incredibly powerful and beautiful, but also mainly nonsensical. And that is what I have always found so interesting about mushrooms: that they often make no sense. Why do they look like that – sometimes masterfully camouflaged, other times so colorful that you can see them even from a distance? It has to be said that what we call mushrooms are just the fruiting bodies from the mycelium, and you cannot see mycelium unless you look at it very closely. Usually the only function, if we can call it that, of these fruiting bodies is to bring their spores out of the soil, to come out of the darkness, to go into the light. Spores are produced by millions and transported by the wind or by any other agent beyond the control of the mushroom. It’s not really like a flower, for instance, that wants to attract an insect in order to ensure pollination. Apart from truffles, for example, and stinkhorns, the majority of the mushrooms are therefore completely nonsensical, just splendid examples of something that has evolved; and this, I would say, is as close as it gets to being an artist, from my perspective».

 

Indeed, mushroom, which is also a symbol of the very soil Carsten Höller delved into as a scientist, is truly astonishing. Although its behavior lacks a discernible purpose and function, beyond that of its self-preservation, the paradigm shift from anthropocentrism to ecocentrism in defense of the soil and, consequently, of our survival, can also be justified by its superiority in terms of adaptability. In The Mushroom at the End of the World. The Possibility of Living in the Ruins of Capitalism (2021), anthropologist and feminist Anna L. Tsing documented the trade in Matsutake mushrooms, which grow on soils despoiled by environmental disruption, such as the devastated and razed city of Hiroshima in 1945, where this very species was the first form of life to re-emerge.
The application of mycelium in fields far removed from pure botany aligns with the cause of earth’s rights. In architecture, materials technologist Mae-ling Lokko has grafted mycelium onto organic waste, giving rise to an insulating adhesive that allows waste to solidify and then be used as bio based bricks. In design, shoes crafted by Kristel Peters are produced carbon-free using what has been called “mushroom skin”, a material derived from mycelium similar to calfskin. In music, one can just mention the name of John Cage with his groundbreaking revolution based on silence that has been the three-movement composition 4’33” (1952), to discover that he was a great mycologist, a passion that he often intertwined with his sonic experimentation, as in the case of the performance Mushrooms et Variationes (1985), where he aimed to raise awareness about the need to give a voice back to the soil.

 

In Carsten Höller’s entire body of work, the mushroom has truly transcended the boundaries of art to become a pop icon on an international scale.

(Ed.’s Note: Milan, Fondazione Prada, my daughter and I in the elevator. Two young girls entered brandishing their smartphones as some kind of scimitars. «Excuse me, do you know where the mushrooms are?» «At the ninth floor» I replied smiling, as that’s where Carsten Höller’s ultra Instagrammed permanent installation Upside Down Mushroom Room is located. But I must admit – even a bit ashamed of a vague regurgitation of chic radicalism, then quickly smothered – that the urge to answer «In the woods» has been almost overwhelming, to put it mildly)

In particular, Upside Down Mushroom Room (2000) is the experience created by Höller in which, after traversing a narrow corridor in pitch blackness, with only the aid of a handrail as a guide, one finds itself dazzled in a room that serves as an artificial habitat for giant mushrooms hanging from the ceiling and turned upside down. The initial sense of estrangement is akin to Freud’s Unheimliche, that sense of perturbation arising from the internal conflict between the familiar and the uncanny, because those mushrooms are exactly the ones we unknowingly, and with their stems firmly planted in the ground, used to draw as children – the Smurfs’ houses, just to make it clear (or the nerdy fetish Toad from Super Mario Bros.). But that species is the Amanita muscaria, confidentially called Fly Agaric for its poisonous and hallucinogenic properties, whose use is attested as far back as some prehistoric rock engravings and is still used in collective shamanic rituals, mainly in Siberia. Amanita muscaria is the species most knowingly utilized and reproduced by Carsten Höller, who is doubly aware of the facts: as a soil scientist, he is aware of its properties and historical use, and as an artist, he knows the imaginative power a symbol can hold. In 2010, at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, Soma – the name of the extract of Amanita muscaria used by Vedic nomads since the 2nd millennium BC, believed to facilitate contact with the divine – was the tableau vivant in which twelve reindeers (which regularly consume Amanita muscaria), twelve canaries, four mice, and two flies moved freely inside the exhibition hall of that international contemporary art temple – some of them, in truth, more freely than others since half of them, without declaring which ones, were given Soma twice a day. Science and art, Bruno Latour Eugène Ionesco and David Lynch, laboratory experiment and psychedelic vision.

 

Psychedelia, indeed. This is what, from an aesthetic standpoint, I have always found in Carsten Höller’s artworks, finding it in terms of ethics as well – also in relation to soil conservation – particularly in his constant attention, investigation, and exploration of the limits intrinsic to mind and perception. Speaking of limits of the mind, in Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge (1992), one of the fathers of the psychedelic counterculture, Terence McKenna (already mentioned here by Höller in the context of the relationship between overconsumption of resources and overpopulation of the earth), systematizes his thoughts by examining all psychoactive plant organisms, including Amanita muscaria, making them a viaticum for one’s own spiritual evolution, provided they do not assault the brain and are not alien to it – i.e. difficult to metabolize, such as synthetic drugs, alcohol, tobacco, tea, coffee, sugar, cocoa, all implemented to perform alienating jobs inherited from the Industrial Revolution, and television, which McKenna refers to as an “electronic drug”, functional to the dominion civilizations for mass control: «We have sold the spiritual dimension of nature for the plunder of its resources», McKenna wrote. From psychedelic literature (and from Aldous Huxley and his experiments with peyote; hands up if any of us, in our youth, hasn’t at least once declaimed quotes from his essay The Doors of Perception, because I’m almost certain that each of us has had at least one hippie phase), directly descends a book like The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (2001) by Michael Pollan, which describes the ability of cannabis to blur the filters between us and the world, allowing the return of a childlike sense of stupor. Furthermore, from his profound respect for plants as sentient beings, led to the excellence, the science of the father of Plant Neurobiology Stefano Mancuso also stems, former guest of Ossigeno 10 and Carsten Höller’s companion at Palazzo Strozzi for The Florence Experiment (2018), aimed at measuring the empathic relationship that can be established between humans and plants.

 

Psychedelic counterculture, from music – with the Velvet Underground, the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, Mario Schifano’s Le Stelle, the early Beatles, the Pink Floyd, The Doors – to cinema (with masterpieces like Sergej Paradžanov’s The Color of Pomegranates in 1969, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point in 1970, Carmelo Bene’s Salomé in 1972, or Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain in 1973), has been able to produce aesthetically powerful images, being one of the most involved in restoring centrality to the soil, to the point that today we speak of a Psychedelic Renaissance for the capacity, evoking Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene (2016) and Bruno Latour’s Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (2020), to imagine new ecosystems, founded on ecocentrism and necessary for survival on a planet we have culpably infected. Carsten Höller, along with other artists like Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno with their hallucinated, vivid and ecocentric aesthetics, are certainly cornerstones of this movement; perhaps, however, the Psychedelic Renaissance brings a new awareness with it, born of disillusionment with the presumed human omnipotence. As if to say, we can and must imagine alternative worlds, but mind has its limits, indeed. «Psychedelia is very interesting – Höller tells me – because it shows you how expansion of the mind acts in a peculiar way and how much you can do with it. But I also think about the other thing I told you before: it is even more interesting when you realize that you can go so far with psychedelics, but then you can’t go any further. When you know this, you will get the feeling of your own limitations. Psychedelia questions with limits as much as with mind extension, but the limitation part is very interesting because it shows you that your mind is nothing but a tool, and it is absolutely sure there is so much more out there that we cannot figure, that we cannot even think about. Do you know what I mean?».

 

I know, indeed. Concreteness. Power to the imagination, all right, but with feet firmly grounded, especially at a juncture when the crucial matter pertains to the defense of the earth’s rights through the medium of art. After all, we are talking about Carsten Höller, a figure in whom two dispositions coexist (they coexist, they do not hybridize, and this distinction is pivotal, just as – talking about the preservation of biodiversity on earth – coexistence, rather than hybridization, is vital): the disposition of the scientist coexisting with that of the artist.

 

Making our own the parable of Galileo, who pondered the earth’s position and shape, thereby triggering an epoch-defining revolution, ecocentric in nuce, science is duty-bound to raise cultural revolutions capable of investing humankind in its presumption of omnipotence. Exactly like art. Both domains share the collective responsibility of nurturing the doubt. In the initial phases of his journey, Carsten Höller delved into the intricacies of the terrestrial landscape as a scientist, dissecting the behavioral intricacies of insects within their ambient milieu; now he does so through the lens of an artist, examining the human being amongst an array of coexisting equal living beings inhabiting the earth. And while Höller’s practice as a scientist was rooted in the methodology of the experiment, his practice as an artist is based on the creation of an experience.

(Ed.’s Note: Even at Brutalisten experience is essential, but what sets it apart from experiment is another fundamental trait. �uoting again from its Manifesto: «The different dishes may be served at the same time. The eater may combine the tastes of different ingredients while eating. Instead of a chef imposing what should go together and which amount for a given serving, the eater takes these decision». Here: beyond the shared etymological root, experiment and experience differ in their diverse degrees of freedom)

 

Carsten Höller sets up his experiences according to a strict synchronic system: observation / interpretation / interaction, developed between the artwork and those who partake in it. I am thinking above all of his imposing installations in open spaces, mammoth slides such as The Slide (2016) at the ArcelorMittal Orbit at the invitation of Anish Kapoor, or carrousels slowed down to the extreme like RB Ride (2007) in San Severino Lucano, within the Pollino Park. Artworks freely accessible, able to give the Land Art movement – the most explicit in the history of art in making land protagonist, but which originally, in the 1960s, in my view remained rather inward-looking – a brand new breath, finally alive and livable, finally ecocentric. In Carsten Höller’s experiences the playful component is intense; yet, as the polished and elegant intellectual he is, Höller knows, drawing from Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938) to Jean Piaget, Jerome Bruner and Maria Montessori, that the momentum of play holds a fundamental role in cognitive advancement. Art as a carousel, allowing the playful experience to evolve into conscious awareness, for aesthetics to rejoin ethics by defusing cosmetics. Art as experience, as if Carsten Höller’s scientific background acts as a source code, in a sort of osmotic process between earth and art.

 

Nevertheless, Höller explains to me, commonalities between the laboratory and the atelier end here. «I have often been asked – or rather, it has been asserted quite like a statement – if there is a similarity between art and science: “In both cases it’s about creativity”, and so on. I think this is completely wrong. What we call contemporary art is a very specific language, not based on something trying to find out about the world as a scientist would. When I was a scientist, I was always surprised by how we get results: through exclusion. Basically we are surrounded by noise, noise everywhere, so you need to go in the laboratory in order to get rid of the noise – in a way, the laboratory is similar to the exhibition’s white cube. But then scientists go further, because they want to study the influence of a certain factor. You know, when you are conducting a clinical study –wanting to know, for instance, whether temperature is affecting the outcome of an experiment – you keep everything the same except for one factor, temperature, because then you can better measure its effects. And that’s a process necessarily based on exclusion, because at the end you won’t even know if your results are fully effective. By the time you go and put them out in the world again, with all its noise, and temperature may be affected by other factors you have not investigated, and then there can be cross effects too. Also, there is the fact that you, as a researcher, always try to stay outside, as objective as you can, but interesting results emerged when some experiments with mice were looked at, focusing on procedures whether done by men or by women, because there actually were consistent differences in the outcome. So, interestingly, the scientific method is a great way to understand because it tends to simplify, but it’s also very difficult to relate it to the world. The effect of the temperature on one side, or a painting on the wall of a white cube on the other side, are not that significant, because they show more the limitations of the mind, again, because they pertain to what you can still understand. But noise is out of our reach».

 

I then ask him if it is noise, the terrain of art: «Yes, I think so. Noise turned into music, even intentionally distorted music. And even for music, as well as for science, literature, art, architecture, and so on, we can say it’s like sport. You have rules for the game, they are all very different coming from different domains, but then it’s all in how you play. But the real question to me is: what else could we play? What we have not even come up with? Because art is undoubtedly interesting, but its better thing is that in principle it could be the territory for another form, not evolved yet. So we have our conventional forms of cultural expression, each with its own language, as I call it. But could there be other forms that we still don’t know? Why confine ourselves solely to creating art, science, sports, or forms of worship, following predetermined patterns? Maybe there is something else. That’s what is interesting about art: you can use it as a model situation, testing how it works with people who come to see an exhibition, for example. They can try things out, like an experiment, except there are no scientists taking data. It’s more like a proposition for society. So, I am a proposition maker. As an artist I make propositions, but I no longer want to go like a scientist into one small, controlled space like I did before in my life. I’m more interested in the proposition making, and the language of art – let me use this term again – is quite a powerful thing, so I’m actually working on the language as well as I’m working on the proposition, aside of something that can be done with the language. But we need to stop to make all these paintings, sculptures, and so on. It’s terrible what is going on there. I have a real problem with it. It’s so reactionary».

 

Thus, with respect to the worldwide attention that there seems to be at the moment towards African contemporary art – going from the recent Venice Architecture Biennale curated by Scottish-Ghanaian architect Lesley Lokko, to the numerous exhibitions featuring African artists of the caliber of Pascale Marthine Tayou, Zanele Muholi, Yinka Shonibare – Carsten Höller opens my eyes to yet another Western-centric attitude dressed up to the nines: «When we speak about contemporary art, it also means a certain way of exhibiting it, of making it accessible, and once more it is something like we impose one form onto the whole world, again in a Western perspective. I still can’t see African forms in this portion of the world, but only big Western containers holding smaller African containers. And that’s not how it should be. We need to embrace the beauty of the differences in contents, for sure, but also in containers».

 

So: concrete, constructive, in formulating practical and useful propositions in the language of art for the defense of the earth.
Brutal, disturbing, in an attempt to awaken us to issues urgent for the soil, but silenced as taboos. There is another trait that, in conversing with Carsten Höller, now becomes evident to me: extravagant, extra-vagans, the one who moves beyond imposed boundaries. Extravagant as his aesthetics, absolutely eccentric and immediately recognizable, and extra-vagans as his ethics too, always on the move, always in search of new lands to explore, always aimed at unmasking a limit, be it a territorial boundary or a mental taboo. Sublime, sub limen, on the threshold, devoted to nomadism, and being nomadic means being open to belonging to each land and to no possession, mirroring in each visited soil, rejecting every boundary, sowing seeds. Carsten Höller, who has made his home both Sweden and Ghana, was born in Belgium, to German parents, and as an international artist he continues to sow seeds of contemporary art as concrete acts and occasions for reflection at every latitude of the earth, trusting that they can become bridges. «You did everything to bury us / You forgot that we were seeds» (Dinos Christianopoulos, The body and the wormwood, 1978).

 

In the quest to protect the rights of the soil, enshrined in the UN 2030 Agenda, Carsten Höller also explores the protection of the right to the soil, as stated in several articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [1]. He does this through the investigation of the topos of the Double, in works such as The Double Club (2008-2009, a London nightclub that puts in dialogue Congolese and Western culture in food, music, and design); Double Carousel with Zöllner Stripes (2011, two merry-go-rounds from the 1950s, La Regina del Volo from Belluno and Ciapa Ciapa from Reggio Calabria, in opposite and extremely slow motion to allow its continuous fruition, immersed in the optical illusion of Zöllner Stripes and surmounted by a 2011 video, Alone (Twins on Double Carousel with Zöllner Stripes), featuring fifty pairs of homozygotic twins getting on and off the carousels); Fara Fara (2014, a two-channel video installation, “face to face” in Lingala, a deliberately unfinished documentary about soundclash, the Congolese musical challenge between two live bands that mobilizes tens of thousands of people for extended periods). The peaceful presence of the Double once again highlights how much more ethical, respectful, and free is coexistence rather than hybridization, which relates not only to the right of the land to protect biodiversity, but also to the right to the land, which calls for peace among nations. For Carsten Höller, the topos of the Double has been a sort of imprinting. «I grew up in Belgium, and Belgium has a complex situation because, first and foremost, it is a very young country. It’s only since the late 19th century that there is a Belgium. A land as a compromise. There are two main language groups – or, rather, three – that do not fit together. So, for me, Belgium is one big Double Club, which s tems from an idea like this and which I use a lot in my work: you have two parts that are somehow similar because they belong to the same big entity, but then they are also unique, and when we put them together, they somehow clash, but it’s a fertile clash».
Carsten Höller uses the word clash to describe this fertile collision, which reminds me not only the immortal punk tones of Should I stay or should I go, but also of that idea of iconoclash baptised by Bruno Latour in 2002 to refer to the contemporary artistic practice of producing and destroying images, which actually generates an incredible source of new images, new strategies, new languages, much like it should be for contemporary African art we discussed earlier. In this sense, Höller continues, «As a child, I saw the neighbors on the left speaking Flemish, and the neighbors on the right speaking French. And we, at home, spoke German. So I thought in every house a different language was spoken – which is a beautiful idea. Instead, in Belgium, there are so many problems because of this non-fitting, and you have the land as the only way of holding it together. But then I also think, “Okay, there are some problems, but there is also a great double, triple potential”. There is something very beautiful about non-fitting, not resigning to alignment. Maybe it’s a big word, but I see a certain freedom in it. Instead of indulging in complaints, one should focus on the infinite possibilities based on non-homogeneity, on what doesn’t fit, what doesn’t align, on the differences between parts. So Belgium, The Double Club, Fara Fara, even my Giant Triple Mushrooms have a lot to do with this idea of uniqueness, of units that are there, standing together and occupying the same place. They are not the same, they don’t contain each other, and they are not hybridizing. They are just sharing».

 

Ubuntu, then, is the word, that profound sense of being human that is only realized by sharing, a philosophy become practice in Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, made art by Miles Davis and Marcus Miller (Tutu, 1986). It’s that deep sense of belonging to the land, and not only to a circumscribed land limited by the violent imposition, in ink or by gunfire, of a border.

(Ed.’s Note: here in Southern Italy, to inquire about your parents, the elders ask you a cu appartenisi, whom you belong to. Moving towards ecocentrism means acting as if the only possible answer is, finally, «To the earth»)

Having made both Sweden and Ghana his home, Carsten Höller’s sense of belonging is amplified, «and you don’t really know why, because it’s not just about temperature, or smells. It’s a part of you that is either locked or wide open. I have always liked the idea that you should never reduce yourself to one; you know, for me, the double agent is a very interesting figure. In some way, and in a much nobler sense than the common use of this expression, we should all be double agents in our lives, like those stories of Russian spies who are also American spies, because it gives you the opportunity to experience new things not just once, but at least twice. We have been so much working on a culture somehow linear and consequential, but if you can go into different forms on different lands, q uestioning yourself, it’s a strong statement. It’s not dialectics what I mean; it’s not about a solution between the two in the form of thesis/antithesis/synthesis; it’s about being there, you know, being two, splitting your own self into different coexisting units that are not necessarily contradicting each other, from a Western or an African viewpoint. It’s about blowing up a linear development model that is already threadbare. To me, that is the real nature of progress».

 

On an ultra-connected and overheated soil, not liquefying one’s own self in the frenzy of wanting everything is the first step to still being something. It’s the lesson of the importance of biodiversity. Carsten Höller’s aesth/etics is proof that art and soil nourish a relationship of osmotic exchange. After all, one of the favorite materials of art is indeed the land. Land as subject, protagonist of the Land Art movement.

(Ed.’s Note: the real Land Art gesture, in my opinion, lies in that man kneeling on the ground, Jean Dubuffet, pressing inked paper onto the soil to bear witness to its wrinkles in his Phénomènes, a cycle of 324 lithographs composed between 1958 and 1960. It is that of Hussein Chalayan, who in 1993, for his degree thesis project The Tangent Flows, presented a collection of organic clothes that he designed, crafted and then buried underground for three months, ode to the soil as a regenerative force. The real Land Art gesture, as in all of Carsten Höller’s oeuvre, lies in investigating the land to fully comprehend it and, through the power of his vision, to finally give it a voice)

Land as object, as primal medium, as it is primarily from the baked soil turned into clay that one of the most iconic forms of art is born: sculpture.
And land as right, land that is the mother of right, since the very legal institution of right originates when a man demarcates it, proclaiming that plot of land as his own and giving rise to private property. But it has become clear by now that everything needs to be rethought. The responsibility of art in defending the earth is to cleanse thought, severely polluted by a mania for ferocious and titanic progress, in order to return a soil finally free to embrace the seeds generated by the ecocentric paradigm.
A paradigm that stands for salvation, whose symbol is a strange mushroom.

[1] Art. 6: « Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law»; Art. 13: « Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within each State»; Art. 14: « Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution»; Art. 15: «Everyone has the right to a nationality».

a warm thanks to Silvia Pichini, head of communications @ Galleria Continua