prologue
absence of acting and drama
just the polis
the soil we inhabit
without gods and without sin
just the space that the mist hides
sins and capitals, or a certain mist for empty spaces
..the space is so false, suddenly it is so false to want to establish relationships in that space, to want to place a being in that space, a cell would be enough… (Samuel Beckett)
(I) The city is incoherent like the capital. Industrialization and smoke. 1952. The sinister London smog. Mist without mysticism. Inert space. The clean air Act. 1956. Green energy prepares the war games. The blue economy is designed as a theater of operations. Maneuver fields. Artificial islands are built for military use. The nationalist and messianic infernal cycle. 2023. Sins and Capitals. The Uninhabitable Earth or to believe that we are still capable. David Wallace-Wells wrote:
The solutions, when we dare to imagine them, are also global.
(II) Breathing physically doubles the sense. We are touched by the scented wind that transforms the crowd into a delirious rapture. There are populations that oppose mortification and present us with a certain discomfort. They enunciate another land and different words, they murmur that the Sun is a lyrical effect without capital. They also imagine walkers on a sea of mist. They believe they have already seen one of them in Hamburg and whisper that only the multiple makes it possible to approach infinity. They argue that there is no mist without the sun. The voice of Cornelius Castoriadis:
I speak of an imaginary institution of society because this creation is the work of the anonymous collective imaginary.
(III) Nomadism of work and capital — power, control and spectacular space — cyberspace. The ontology of data and the consolidation of Being. We travel faster. We have millions of daily electronic visits through which we adjust the world. We have lost Euclidean space, or, if you prefer, Cartesian space. Landmarks no longer relate to units of distance. These, in the way of Michel Serres, gave rise to neighborhood spaces:
New technologies do not reduce the distance, they transport the houses to a completely different space, a topological space.
(IV) The exhibition space. In the manner of Emmanuel Kant — form, if we abstract from objects, is a pure intuition that goes by the name of space. The invisible made visible of Peter Brook — Empty Space and Sacred Space. Silence. Let us summon for the works and by analogy with Artaud, a space of cruelty that works like the plague, by intoxication. Form is matter and energy. The work is capital. The magical action that does not dispense with contingency. The transfiguration that fulfills the rigor of what was lived. Artaud, magnetic:
Evil that will finally be alleviated, in the supreme instant when everything that was form is about to return to chaos.
(V) Magnetic field intensity and line density. They never cross. The works are electrical charges and the trajectories that assume the respective speeds describe, within that field, various movements. The travestied space stimulates sinless shocks — lines, circuits and forces, structure, process, vibration and flow. Overcoming categories in favor of digressions. Art. The work that trans(forms) the space modifies itself. In celebration of Harald Szeemann:
The work and the space are one and the same thing.
The SINS AND CAPITALS, or a certain mist for empty spaces traveling curatorial program, consists of six exhibitions in international spaces, film screenings and an editorial project, initiated in Portugal It is based on the work of Caspar David Friedrich — Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer — and the premise that space is freedom and that critical approaches are called for in between the space we inhabit and the exhibition space. Considering the multiplicity of meanings that we can find in the concepts of “space”, “mist” and ‘capital’, the project enunciates some philosophical, ethical and political implications that articulate ecology, economy and artistic practice. In this project, physical space is assumed as a determining and operative conceptual tool for the visual and sonic materialization of the works. The in situ proposals are therefore approached differently in each of the six projects, affirming the work and the space as elements that construct each other.
