84 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
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