122 123 Nicolas Bourriaud Sharing = Ecosystem + Care + Community Nicolas Bourriaud (Niort, 1965) is the father of Relational Aesthetics, the most famous artistic current of the contemporary era, which he theorised in a foundational essay of critical theory, Esthétique Relationnelle (1998), where artworks acquire meaning according to their capacity to produce relations among living beings. Relational Aesthetics provides the conceptual and philosophical framework for Relational Art, honoured at documenta 2022 and recently at MAXXI under his curatorship, thus sealing its definitive historicization: Relational Art is the ensemble of artistic practices that spread from the 1990s onwards, whose primary aim is the development of context and relationships – placing, in a Copernican revolution, the production of images and objects in the background, in favour of vital bonds. At the basis of the work of the artists brought together by Bourriaud there is not a common style, but rather a shared horizon: that of art as an ecosystem and of horizontal sharing between artist, community and living beings, against the predatory logics of capitalist realism, making sharing a political act, before an artistic one. If in Maria Lai sharing is physical, territorial, almost mythological, in Nicolas Bourriaud it becomes a critical device. A crucial shift, because it subtracts sharing from any facile temptation to romanticise it, and makes it methodological. The artwork is no longer what one looks at, but what happens between those who look, those who leave, those who choose to stay. An artwork that does not end in itself, that frays its own boundaries, that decides to inhabit a shared space. It is in this space that the figure of Nicolas Bourriaud takes root, as the man who has made thinkable, and practicable, the intuition that contemporary art does not merely represent relationships: it produces them. With the concept of Relational Aesthetics, Bourriaud inaugurated not a trend, not an avant-garde, but the most significant global movement of contemporary art. And despite the powerful worldwide echo of his thought, and despite having curated, directed or founded some of the most prestigious art institutions in the world – from Tate Britain to the Palais de Tokyo, to name just two, definitively and unwillingly contributing, as an undesired side effect, to the spectacularisation of the figure of the curator (to the point that The Square, Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2017, is said to have been written by studying his path) – Nicolas Bourriaud acts like the gardener of Gilles Clément’s Third Landscape, moving along the margins, tender towards the reject, the unfinished, the imperfect, the exforma, to be protected and accompanied in its uniqueness, in its natural movement. «You are right – Bourriaud tells us – I’ve always moved along the margins, even when I was in the most visible points – Palais de Tokyo is now well known, but it started as an outsider in the Parisian art scene, with a budget that did not even cover the regular expenses.» «And when I arrived in Montpellier, the city was not yet on the art map. I like challenges. And the only method I have is to create viable ecosystems. I believe in relational ecosystems: building places where employees are happy to work at, mixing up life and labor. Every institution is the metabolisation of an atmosphere. For me, it always goes with a café-restaurant, parties, discussions (his openings, parties lasting entire days and nights, have entered into legend, Ed.’s Note). Just before leaving the MO.CO. in Montpellier, I had the project of creating a roof garden, cultivated according to permacultural methods, that would provide all vegetables for the restaurant of La Panacée. Earlier, at the Palais de Tokyo, we sheltered a project by Robert Milin, Le Jardin aux habitants, which still exists and allows communities and some individuals to grow whatever they want, all year long.» Opening spaces, beyond their stamped legal function, from the closed form to the Open Work. To put it another way: if in Pop Art the artwork is the reproduction of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup, in Relational Art the artwork is the sharing of the Soup/ No Soup prepared and offered, at the Grand Palais in 2012 under Bourriaud’s care, by Rirkrit Tiravanija. If it is true that art is called upon to allow us to imagine alternatives, Relational Art becomes the engine of a form of sociality that is communal rather than procedural, alive rather than musealised. Not just encounter, but ecology. Art as a relational ecosystem, producing bonds without solidifying them, communities without rigid identities, spaces of sharing that are energetic rather than extractive. Thus, in his more recent thought, in the face of the complexity of digestive collapsed fluorescent terminal times, like a reel, Relational Aesthetics has turned into Integral, shifting the axis of critique from relation to co-evolution, from the micro-politics of encounter to the macro-tensions of the Anthropocene: «The potential of the relational has no limits. I realized that intertwinings are more important than masses, relations more important than objects. Everything in this world was born out of the relation of two entities: 1+1=1. You, me, were born out of an encounter. All animals are born out of the encounter of two beings. One of my favourite philosophers, Louis Althusser, described capitalism as the encounter of a worker with a wealthy man who did not want to do the job himself. Random meetings, ties, bonds, that stick, glue together, and create something new… Since the Taipei Biennial I curated in 2014, I expanded Relational Aesthetics to nonhumans, and it provided me an angle to understand the Anthropocene: the space we live in is relational, it is not an object to be exploited. There are no landscapes, only a collection of portraits.» Sharing thus becomes active care in Bourriaud’s thinking, when one switches from the conception of the world as a scenario to the world as a choreography of interdependencies, as Stefano Mancuso would say. Care as permaculture, a cornerstone of Bourriaud’s thought, but also care as risky, flamboyant proximity. A queer care, mindful of Donna Haraway and Genesis P-Orridge, which does not normalise, moralise, or sterilise. An erotic gesture, not a hygienic one, embracing every otherness; exhibitions not as shop windows but as forests, geographies open to the unforeseen. This is the bloodline I see running through all his opera omnia: a care that shares, hybridises, infects and lets itself be infected, aware that sharing also means exposure, and thus risk, but that risk management always brings evolution. «I like your expression, forest-exhibition – he tells me – because it corresponds to my way of thinking (and curating), which I call ecosystemic thought: it means a mode of composition elaborated by densifications, interlocutions, injections, rather than adding or accumulating. We spontaneously see art as an act of printing, imposing form to matter. It was already in Aristotle’s aesthetics, and the Western world remained stuck to this idea. Responding to Aristotle’s theory, Deleuze and Guattari laid the foundations for a theory of artistic permaculture: they perceived the oeuvre of an artist as a land to cultivate, or as a material to feed: “The aim is no longer to impose form on matter, but to elaborate an ever-richer, ever more substantial material, consequently capable of capturing ever more intense forces,” as they wrote in 1000 Plateaux. And they add: “What makes a material ever richer, is what holds together heterogeneous elements, without them ceasing to be heterogeneous.” And let me tell you one thing about the role of poetry in curating, which tends to be neglected in favour of a purely theoretical approach: every exhibition I curate starts with a poetic image. In Gwangju, it was a sequence from a Korean movie, a woman singing in front of the mountains. Within this short sequence, I had the idea of the Biennial: sound and space. How can sounds tell us about the Anthropocene? So I organised the show from sounds: echoes, feedback effects, polyphonies, and finally the primordial sound, called Ôm in the Hindu tradition, which is exactly the Big Bang of the creation of the universe. Maybe that is the queer care you mention: I love that expression. Curatorial work as queer care for the beings you bring into the exhibition, like in Noah’s Ark. Embracing otherness and showing wounds. One of my favourite writers, Georges Bataille, said that we can only communicate through our wounds, crack-ups, interstices.»
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