Bruno Latour, Eva Lin, and Martin Guinard Contemporary Art Biennials—Our Hegemonic Machines
The advantage of the term “planet” over the term “world” is that it does not simply point to “visions” or “perceptions” of the world, but it directs us more towards the material composition of the latter, whether it be the gases that make up its atmos-phere, the density of the rocks, the quantity of water on its surface, or any of a great many other characteristics.
“Planet” helps to talk about a multiplicity of ways of articulating social and material order. In this sense, it could quite easily be interchanged with “cosmology.” And on this point, it is clear there is a cosmology of neoliberalism (yes, in our opinion neoliberal-ism is a cosmology). The promise of this state of the world could have been formulated as follows: “As long as you are democratic from a political point of view, and liberal from an economic point of view, you will have access to development.” Although this promise, of course, concealed all forms of hypocrisy, neo-colonialism, and hegemony, the promise of development remained intact. What can we say when we now see that to reach the state of abundance of the American way of life, six or seven planets would be needed?
The reactions to the problems posed to us by ecological change are such that it seems necessary to open the breach, and to study the contrasts between cosmologies that approach the questions of future change in different ways. Obviously, the artists with whom we work register these differences. For example, Aruwai Kaumakan’s practice is characteristic of what Latour calls the Terrestrial Planet. As a former jewelry maker, she decided in 2008, after a violent typhoon devastated her village, to “upscale” her productions so that she could work collaboratively with members of her community, using weaving as a resilient and social fabric. This “grounded approach” presents a sharp contrast with the “off-shore” and limitless space of the Global Planet, depicted by artists such as Antonio Vega Macotela. The latter has initiated a fairly unusual
collaboration between a textile atelier (Marisol Centeno Studio), the local craftsmen, and hackers. Together they encrypted within the mesh of large tapestries information related to tax evaders, whose capital flows across borders and escapes the tax systems put in place within the boundaries of their nation-states.
Regarding the centering and “de-centering of the West,” it is obvious that we cannot avoid the question of “who” speaks in the stating of this biennial’s title. In this case, two Europe-ans from a country with a colonial history. We are, of course, aware of this, and there are two important points for us that condition the success or otherwise of this edition.
First of all, the aim is not to impose a fixed narrative, but to propose a thought experiment through the format of an exhibition. The precepts have, of course, evolved between the first intuition and the current configuration. For example, following a conversation with the curator of the museum, Sharleen Yu, it appeared important to include the planet’s “alternative gravity,” which is interested in astrology and invisible and vibratory substances that would affect the world according to principles that escape modern sciences. Chin Yinju draws astrological charts, which are like snapshots of the configurations of the stars at the beginning of five massacres in recent Asian history, “questioning whether such actions by humanity are inevitable under the predetermined and inexorable laws of the universe, whether these laws constitute a form of cosmic force majeure.”5
The second point that is important for us is to use the biennial as a platform that allows us to make experiments, exercises and especially to respond to the framework that we propose. The collaboration with the curator Eva Lin is a major asset for setting
Bruno Latour, Eva Lin, and Martin Guinard Contemporary Art Biennials—Our Hegemonic Machines
up more relevant devices (such as the theater of negotiations, which we will talk about below). As she says, the workshops are not parallel but central to the biennial. In addition, the advisers we work with help us to get in touch with local NGOs, artists and above all to reflect on the context in which we operate.
So, if we come back to the question of “hegemonic machines,” yes, of course, biennials can be tools of homogenization (characterized by the term “biennial fatigue” that describes similarities between international exhibitions despite their geographical differences). What we hope to do, however, is to take advantage of the opportunity to generate forms of exchange and knowledge with visitors who wish to deepen these exchanges. What interests us is not to illustrate a Eurocentric theory, but rather to test it. To test it through the workshops but also through all the contradictory messages that the works provide us.
3. Which curatorial formats are necessary to propose a space of radical democracy?
There is a need to think about what we mean with the term “radical.” Since the term etymo-logically implies a “return to the roots,” we are a bit wary about the tabula rasa that it implies, this eternal Modernist revolutionary gesture. What seems to be needed more than ever is to multiply each of the steps and mediations necessary to develop a discussion.
Let’s say that, when talking about the ecological mutation, there are two absolute opposites: less democracy, through dictatorship of experts; on the other hand, more democracy.
We are, of course, trying to promote the second aspect through devices that try to bring together agents/stakeholders/people who don’t necessarily agree.
For example, the Theater of Negotiations is a format between that of a role play and a performance. This project starts from an exhaustive study of some controversies present in Taiwanese society, whether they concern air pollutants, reproductive technologies, or the management of the COVID-19 pandemic. Several science and technology studies scholars will train the participants to study who the stakeholders of the controversy are and what their agenda is. Then the participants will reenact the controversy by playing the role of the various stakeholders, and “negotiate” together.
The point here is not to be moralists, but to really understand what the “nodes” are in a controversial situation. It is more interesting for us to allow a marine biologist to get into the “shoes” of the CEO of the company that destroys the corals that the biologist studies than to preach to the choir a message of which they would already be convinced. And the museum is an excellent place to imagine these kinds of formats.
Notes
1 Andrew Todd, “Bruno Latour: ‘Trump and Thunberg inhabit different planets – his has no limits, hers trembles,’” The Guardian, February 4, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/
stage/2020/feb/04/bruno-latour-moving-earths-theatre-science-climate-crisis.
2 Term used by Latour to designate the impact of human activity on the Earth System, while avoiding the inability to register inequalities fostered by the term “Anthropocene.”
3 Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the World (Hoboken:
John Wiley & Sons, 2016).
Bruno Latour, Eva Lin, and Martin Guinard Contemporary Art Biennials—Our Hegemonic Machines
4 Bruno Latour, “We don’t seem to live on the same planet…” — a fictional planetarium for the exhibition catalogue Designs for Different Futures, edited by Kathryn B. Hies-inger and Michelle Millar, Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Art History of Chicago (initially given as the Loeb Lecture, Harvard, Graduate School of Design) 2019, 193-199.
5 Chen Yinjue, Liquidation Maps, 2014, http://www.yinjuchen.com/installation.html
Bruno Latour is a Professor at Sciences Po Paris, scientific director of medi-alab Sciences Po and the founder of SPEAP program for experimentation in arts and politics. From 1982 to 2006 he was professor at the Centre de Sociol-ogie de l’Innovation (CSI) at the École nationale supérieure des Mines in Paris and, for various periods, visiting professor at University of California, San Diego (UCSD), at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. In addi-tion to work in philosophy, history, sociology, and anthropology of science, he has collaborated on many studies in science policy and research management.
He has published various books and articles, including: Laboratory Life. The Construction of Scientific Facts (1986), Science in Action (1987), The Pasteuri-zation of France (1988), Pandora’s Hope. Essays in the Reality of Science Studies (1999), We Have Never Been Modern (1993), Reassembling the Social.
An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (2005), On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (2010), An inquiry into modes of existence: an anthropology of the moderns (2013), Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (2015), and Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (2018).
Together with Peter Weibel he curated the major exhibitions Iconoclash.
Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art (2002) and Making Things Public. The Atmospheres of Democracy (2005) at ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. In 2013 he received the Holberg Prize.
Eva Lin's practice is questioning reality and its perception with interdiscipli-nary practice. She stirs up intuitive experience to awake spectators’ bodily sensation and imagination toward the space. She recently curated Parallax 2017: Damage Control, The Hidden South (2018), The Upcoming Past (2019), Ryoji Ikeda Solo co-curator Taipei Fine Art Museum 2019, Taiwan International Video Art Festival Anima (2020). She is now the director of mt.project where she works closely with creators, hunters, craftsmen, indigenous communities and other professionals to connect the relationship between human and nature by revealing the cultural spirits and wild knowledges endangered from the rational reality in the modern society.
Martin Guinard is an independent curator based in Paris, with a background in visual arts and art history. He has worked on several interdisciplinary pro-jects dealing with the topic of ecological mutation. He has collaborated with Bruno Latour on four international projects over the last four years, including Reset Modernity! at ZKM in 2016 as well as a reiteration of the project through two workshop platforms in different geographical contexts: the first in China, Reset Modernity! Shanghai Perspective as part of the 2016 Shanghai Project;
the second in Iran, Reset Modernity! Tehran Perspective curated with Reza Haeri at the Pejman Foundation and the Institute of History of Science of Teh-ran University. He is now a guest curator at ZKM working on Critical Zones, Observatory for Earthly Politics. Other projects include the co-curation of a section of the Socle du Monde Biennial in Herning, Denmark.