88 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 Rights2. 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 stems 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, questioning 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 2 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».
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