76 – 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”».
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