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