Where art as a system reduces community to a cluster, art to an asset, the public to a target, his art as ecosystem builds elective communities based on feeling, on philia – from his near alter ego Pierre Huyghe to artistic director Jérôme Sans, from our splendid guest in a previous issue Carsten Höller to DJ Pan Daijing, from architects Lacaton & Vassal to the Britto Arts Trust collective, all united in the commitment to extend sharing to what they all conceive not as audience, but as co-author: «Relational Aesthetics – Bourriaud explains – celebrates elective communities, rather than identity-based ones. Identity is something you look for, not something you were born into. And if art creates communities, artists have to stay away from stable identities. The twentieth century has brought us radicality: it is a movement of return to the root, by cutting all the branches and leaves from the tree. Personally, I prefer leaves than trunks. I am radicant (Radicants being the name of his curatorial cooperative, Ed.'s Note), which means that my roots are growing, work in progress, flexible roots planted along my nomadic path. Radical thinking is killing us: whoever pretends to be radical is actually an accomplice of Western extractivism, essentialism, binarism. So, you are right saying that I privilege densification over cementing, articulations have to be loose. I am fascinated by polymers, those chemical agglutinations. For me, an interesting artwork functions dynamically: it is a traject, rather than an object.» I am then keen to hear from Nicolas Bourriaud, a vivifying enzyme within a fatigued body, the kind in which cultural institutions tend to turn themselves into brands, moth-eaten temples or devices of domestication (see the Roman GNAMC case, and a programming that hailed as a miracle the exhibition on poor Tolkien, made prisoner by sovereignties), what his perspective is on the future of art institutions, whose mission should be the sharing of art, and whether infrastructures still exist that can build living communities, able to share without colonising, to host without neutralising, to welcome without flattening the complexity of living beings: «When I am asked to conceive or manage an institution, I tend to apply to it what I learnt from the artists. When I arrived in Montpellier, there was one art centre specialized in new technologies – La Panacée – an art school totally isolated, and the project to renovate a building to create a contemporary art venue. My work consisted in gathering the three elements to create an horizontal institution, crossing the city, and driven by education. Students were part of the art centre, and the invited artists were involved in the art school. At the time, in 2015, I had just left the Beaux-Arts de Paris school, and it was important for me to involve the students of Montpellier into the project. Education has always been central in my career, and I have always tried to bring together exhibiting and teaching, placing the artwork and the artist at the center of art education. We all learn from situations, from confrontations, from dialogues. And any art institution is born out of encounters, which solidify and strengthen with time. If you manage to create the right community, you create the right institution – bureaucrats who try to build them on paper are always wrong. Today, I am on the verge to create a new kind of art centres, but I cannot yet talk about it, it should be ready in the coming months. What interests me is to invent, to go out of the box, and the only way to do that is trusting life, which always reinvents itself. Our task is to pay attention to the artists’ energies, to translate them, to carry them to the next level. What is emerging? That is the central question for me. When you carefully listen to the studios, when you are connected to the artists’ antennas, you can invent a new institution. Today, artists describe a relational milieu that is never perceived as exterior, but as the ecosystem to which they belong. We are immersed within the world, and we have to find proper ways to express this immersion. The planet is a living organism. Let’s dialogue with Gaia.» 127 «Relations are based on them. Blocks don’t communicate. And fascists, who hate fragility, see our bodies meanly as blocks.» Poetics and politics, as living art heals wounds, it does not dispense placebos. I therefore ask Nicolas whether he would like to share a moment in his path when a wound, a crack-up, a crisis has been able to turn into a gift, and he offers us two: «Spontaneously, I remember an extraordinary moment during the Istanbul Biennial in 2019. The concept of the exhibition, titled The 7th Continent, came from the image of the garbage patch floating over the ocean, which was then six times bigger than Turkey. In the main venue, a disaffected warehouse on the Bosphorus – an incredible location – I had conceived the exhibition as a maze: each artist’s room led to the next, according to a very specific pathway. But one month before the opening, as the walls had been built and the first artists were already installing, we found asbestos in the soil. Actually, we sneaked in a specialist, as the company that owned the place did not allow us to do any test, and he found a massive dose of asbestos all around the venue. It was immensely painful, but we had to alert the press, cancel the venue and organise an emergency meeting with all the artists: we had only one month to move the whole Biennial, more than sixty artists, to another place. We thought about cancelling. Then, there was a miracle: a building had just been finished, and it was supposed to open six months later. I had to forget my original plans and re-curate the whole show in a three-floor building, whereas it had been on one floor, according to a specific pathway… But I could finally recycle this idea of a constrained route six years later, for the Gwangju Biennale, because the building allowed it.» «Another moment, more intimate, happened during the preparation of the Kaunas Biennial in 2015, in Lithuania. Every day, back at my hotel around six p.m., I used to watch an episode of the first season of Twin Peaks, which I had first seen in the early 1990s. During the whole installation, I had felt quite weird, a strange feeling of wandering. I had bizarre dreams, and woke up with ideas for the exhibition. One day before the opening I watched the last episode, in which special agent Dale Cooper gets shot in his hotel. On the door, his room number was visible: #315. It was also my room number. The coincidence was extraordinary enough to make me write a text. Suddenly, I saw my job as curator differently: like agent Cooper in Twin Peaks, I just landed in a foreign city, meeting different kind of people every day, and tried to solve a problem, an enigma: the complex equation of an exhibition. Two years later, I curated Back to Mulholland Drive in Montpellier, which was the transcription of David Lynch’s movie into an exhibition: all artworks functioned as signs.» I love listening to Nicolas Bourriaud. He makes me want to call myself Diane, to bring him a slice of cherry pie with a “damn fine cup of coffee” (agent Cooper, indeed), or at least to be part of his community. Because although the community has resurfaced in cultural discourse, it is mortally exposed to right-wing winds, hollowed out into mere rhetoric, set up only to sell propaganda fanaticism and obtuseness. And yet Bourriaudian communities have always been trajectories capable of resisting beyond the ephemeral logic of the event, crossing histories and territories without fetishising them, magnetic fields in co-evolution through rituals of sharing, reciprocal exposure, the pooling of responsibility. Utopias – but concrete utopias, as Olivetti wanted, non-places capable of hospitality and imagination, as Foucault wrote, as Bourriaud’s emerging Roman project BAAB – Basement Art Assembly Biennial – aims to demonstrate. Baab, in Arabic, means door. Convivia of art and resistance, Bourriaudian communities are not cemented but densified. 126
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