Opening the Neganthropic Anarchive
PROPOSAL for memory #05
Date: Sunday, 1st of September 2019, 13:00–17:00
Location: Gammelgaard Arts and Culture Centre (wetland east)
Programme: inauguration of public work with talks, tastings, music, and performances from invited contributors.
[please see below for details and click here for the Outcomes of Memory #05]
I ain’t got no home, ain’t got no shoes
Ain’t got no money, ain’t got no class
Ain’t got no man
Ain’t got no mother, ain’t got no culture
Ain’t got no friends, ain’t got no schoolin’
Ain’t got no god
Hey, what have I got?
I’ve got my liver (1)
““Why the liver?” It is an organic mirror in which divination is practiced, in which, during the sacrifice, divine messages of memory are interpreted […] Organ of all humors, of feelings of all situations, because it is the seat of the “feeling of situation.” […] The liver is, as a mirror of the ceaseless mortality — which never occurs — of the body and the heart, the mirage of the spirit. A clock, its vesicle, that conceals those stones that secrete the black bile, melas kholie.” (3)
It is said that biodiversity (4) is one of the few measures we have left to dissuade ourselves away from the disproportionate entropy and terminal destiny of Global Warming. That dissociative destiny is paved, in no small measure, by the colonial trauma and messianic technology of ‘greenhouse’— as gas, effect, and dis-place.
Anarquivo Negantrópico is an ongoing public art installation for human-non-humans of all ages. The work is situated on a residual field and wetland near the grounds of the Gammelgaard Arts and Culture Centre in Herlev, DK. The work is a medicinal garden with a water harvesting plant that operates around a paramodular greenhouse. As such, it is a public work that looks to transition-away from that anthropocentric, anthropogenic destiny.
Think of the Anarchive as a ‘liver’… not as a human organ, but as a manifold of geochemistries, substances, and toxicities we share with so many other species. One that, in this particular embodiment, re-mediates alternative perceptions and relations that foster life. Ultimately, the form of this support-structure, as social pedestal, is its water… by providing free ‘memory water’ to the soils, plants, animals, and visiting public, it serves as a place to question the environmental rupture we call the interior/exterior binary; it gives space to consider the fractures between us humans and the non-human world; it gives place to re-member, so to forget, the messianic trauma that is Global Warming.
For the opening we will have a day of talks, tastings, installations, performances, and rituals by invited contributors:
- Alexander Höglund (inst.)
- Callum Harper (perf.)
- Dance for Plants (perf.)
- Ectoplasmic Materialism (inst.)
- Felix Becker w/Sisters Hope of Sensuous Society (talk)
- Freja Dahl Kofoed/Martha Skytte/Randi Kjær (ritual)
- Ida Bergman (ritual)
- Lisbeth Skytte & the Gammelgaard ceramics group (inst.)
- Richard Krantz (inst.)
- Sebastian Gatz (inst.)
- Spyros Theodoridis & Sonia Ntova (talk)
- Yohán Ramón / Ayi Solomón / Ricardo Castillo (perf.)
- With a generous participation by Extinction Rebellion
[Final listing and program TBA]
Neganthropic Anarchive is one of three final components that define my practise-based PhD work titled ‘Breathtaking Greenhouse Parastructures’ for the Konst Teknik Design (KTD) joint doctoral programme by Konstfack / KTH (Stockholm, to be published in late 2019).
I (Luis Berríos-Negrón, Puerto Rico, 1971) am an artist working on social pedestals in collaboration with my partner, curator Maria Kamilla Larsen and our daughter Freia Pilar.
For more information please visit the Anarchive’s Ledger here.
(1) edited segment of Ain’t Got No, I Got Life as performed by Nina Simone (1968, ‘Nuff Said!), lyrics by Galt MacDermot / Gerome Ragni / James Rado
(2) Nematolahi, P., et al (2017) Effects of Rosmarinus officinalis L. on memory… https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29389474
(3) Stiegler, Bernard (1998) Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, Stanford University Press, pg.203
(4) Forest, Isbell, et al (2015) Biodiversity increases the resistance of ecosystem productivity to climate extremes… https://www.nature.com/articles/nature15374
[click here for the Ledger of related works of the ANARCHIVE]
