“All that is solid…”
Karl Marx launched his critique on the capitalism with the now-famous quote “All that is solid melts into air.” Here the mechanisms and relations of production, and hence the whole relations of society must be kept in a state of flux and continual renewal in order drive the insatiable demands of consumption. This signals a fundamental departure from the fixity and stasis of previous social paradigms. If I lost you with the mention of Marx and capitalism hold on a second—this project is about so much more. What Marx captures here is a fundamental rewiring of how we regard the material world and how “things” simultaneously materialize and disappear in the relations of their creation. We see this in the present day in the rupture of binary gender, the challenges of quantum physics (where for instance light can exist at the same time as a particle and a wave), and in computing where we live both virtual and embodied lives.
For this project I collected a series of quotes from philosophers, physicists, authors, and artists that thought through this dialectical condition. The artists of the Koumaria residency were challenged to pick one quotation that resonated with them and create a response at a common location in perhaps the most liminal of (non)spaces: an abandoned house beneath a bridge.
We can understand the project through the first response by Xenia Papadopoulou to a quote from philosopher Emmanuel Levinas:
“Let us imagine all beings, things and persons, reverting to nothingness. One cannot put this return to nothingness outside of all events. But what of this nothingness itself? Something would happen, if only night and the silence of nothingness. The indeterminateness of this ‘something is happening’ is not the indeterminateness of a subject and does not refer to a substantive. Like the third person pronoun in the impersonal form of a verb, it designates not the uncertainly known author of the action, but the characteristic of this action itself which somehow has no author. This impersonal, anonymous, yet inextinguishable ‘consummation’ of being, which murmurs in the depths of nothingness itself we shall designate by the term there is. The there is, inasmuch as it resists a personal form, is ‘being in general’.”
Her response was a visual love poem where the boundaries of the subject dissolve into one another.