If 2020 is teaching us anything, it is that we urgently need to review the social-natural contract, and not only that, we should also learn from the capacity of adaptation and evolution of some animals and assimilate more complex models of intelligence. We have seen it in nature and we see it in society. The dinosaurs, which dominated the earth for millions of years, became extinct, but their evolution has led to birds that are smaller, with less need for food and more capacity to adapt to the environment.
Another fascinating example is the octopus, an animal that carries out genetic self-editing that allows it to adapt to changes. Its neurons are spread throughout the body, so we could talk about nine brains, one central in the head and eight peripheral ones, distributed among the different tentacles.
The days of large monothematic structures are numbered. In a recent interview with A*DESK, Frédéric Migayrou, chief curator of architecture and design at the Mnam-CCI Centre Pompidou in Paris, reflected on the evolution of the museum sector after the pandemic and proposed making the museum more open to participation and the circulation of information, using technology to make the museum a means of communication.
I don’t know if the big institutions are aware of this degree zero we are in right now. Judith Butler just said it in a virtual talk organised by Whitechapel: “The pandemic is a crisis in itself but it also exacerbates the pre-existing crises of capital, care, race and climate.” I don’t know if society or institutions have the capacity to rethink themselves at this level. But perhaps the only possibility of survival is to resize themselves in order to evolve, to lose centrality in order to adapt to the new environment. To share structures and square metres, to stop thinking about economic profitability and more about cultural profitability. It is time for museums to stop thinking of themselves as luxurious Prada stores and become accessible and usable spaces (physical and virtual), places of encounter and use. If schools do not have enough space right now to operate safely, why not take advantage of the generosity of museum spaces? It is the time when culture and education must be communicating vessels. It is the time of small structures, of self-management, of minimal gestures with maximum impact, of networks of neurons, of rhizomes. We return to Deleuze and Guattari: “In the rhizome there is at stake a relationship with sexuality, with the animal, with the plant, with the world, with the book, with everything natural and artificial, as opposed to the arboreal relationship.”
Joan Jonas. Moving Off the Land II, 2019. Ocean Space, Iglesia de San Lorenzo, Venecia. Performance with Ikue Mori and Francesco Migliaccio. Comissioned by TBA21-Academy Photo: Moira Ricci. © Joan Jonas
[Article published in Bonart, 2020]
