immigration humans plants animals ghosts (late afternoon confusion) FCAC (Fei Contemporary Art Center), Shanghai, Installation, 2010 |
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The title of the exhibition "immigration humans plants animals ghosts (late afternoon confusion)" suggests a disbelief in the concept of individual species and artificial genus. The generalizing quantities "humans" " plants", "animals" imply that life, while created, is already determined by certain types. But aren't humans, plants and animals influenced and infused by immaterial fluctuations, like migration, mutation and ghosts? Or like Bruno Latour phrases it: We understand now why political ecology has to let go of nature: if "nature" is what makes it possible to recapitulate the hierachy of beings in a single ordered series, political ecology is always manifested, in practice, by the destruction of the idea of nature. A snail can block a dam; the Gulf Stream can turn up missing: a slag heap can become a biological preserve; an earthworm can transform the land in the Amazon region into concrete. Nothing can line up beings any longer by order of importance. (Latour, 2004) The aphorism (late afternoon confusion) describes an everyday state of mind, a tiny mental disorder, a slow flow, when consciousness and conceptual thinking withdraw themselves, and some other form of knowledge enters. |
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