OUTCOMES from the Anarchive: memory #05

Opening the Neganthropic Anarchive

Date: Sunday, 1st of September 2019
Location: Gammelgaard Arts and Culture Centre (wetland east)

[click here for the Ledger of other related works to the ANARCHIVE]

This past Sunday we made an opening for Anarquivo Negantrópico. It was a full afternoon of talks, tastings, installations, performances, and rituals.

[click here for the event PROPOSAL and here for the Installation Workshop of the Anarchive]

WHAT IS THE ANARCHIVE?
[ANARQUIVO NEGATRÓPICO] is a public art installation and social pedestal for visitors of all ages. It is situated at the Gammelgaard Art and Culture Centre. Located on the edge of a small pond west of Gammelgaard, the installation will serve as a small water harvesting station and medicinal garden. Anarchive is centred around a small, site-specific, solar greenhouse, with three adjacent terraces for action, play, and contemplation.

Not unlike a cleansing organ, or ‘liver’, it is offered to the Herlev community as a small-scale way to figuratively ask how we remember to forget the trauma of Global Warming; and formally to improve the quality of water, fostering the plant, animal, and human diversity around the pond. More specifically, Anarchive will revitalise water doused with rosemary essence distilled on-site.

This water, we call ‘Memory Water,’ will be used to irrigate the plants hosted by the medicinal garden and will be free on tap for children and adults alike.

Memory Water is free.

So come and visit the Anarchive so to share the water, the principal medium intersecting the technical, human, and non-human worlds of the artwork. Water, as the building block of life, is what brings these worlds together, proportionately, to resist and transform Global Warming.

[ PLEASE SEE BELOW IMAGES FROM THE DAY FOR MORE DETAILS ]

IMAGES FROM THE DAY (by various sources)

Aerial view of Anarquivo Negantrópico;

Richard Krantz (far right) discussing his work ‘Phantom Pain, 2019’ as the entry point to the Anarchive;

An introduction to the Anarchive with Anne Retz Wessberg, director of Gammelgaard;

Callum Harper performing their ‘we(‘)re:were’;

Southern profile of solar power for the Anarchive;

Freja Dahl Kofoed, Martha Skytte, & Randi Kjær doing their Ritual for Water;

Ivalu, Tida, Freia Pilar, and Franca Loa waiting to drink the Memory Water after it is ‘structured’ by the stirring and chanting ritual offered by Freja, Martha, and Randi;

Aliyah practicing water stirring;

Cuban master percussionist Eliel Lazo (left) visiting the Anarchive;

Freja Dahl Kofoed & Randi Kjær providing a chanting elixir prior to their Ritual for Water (Martha Skytte behind the camera);

Northern profile of water harvesting and processing through the Anarchive;

Spyros Theodoridis & Sonia Ntova with Luis Berrríos-Negrón conversing about biodiversity and perception;

Felix Becker w/Sisters Hope of Sensuous Society giving talk based on the manifesto for a “Sensuous society”;

Anna Sofie Keller Brandsborg of Sisters Hope and Felix Becker;

Loup (left) and Blåbær (right) of Dance for Plants warming-up for the ‘representing’ their performance ‘Seems like the last Pokemon…’

Dance for Plants reading the Anarchive three days before the opening;

Dance for Plants representing their reading during the opening of the Anarchive;

Ida Bergman initiating her ritual ‘Look look look [Datura]: burial rite’;

Ida Bergman (left) finihsing her perfomance as we transition to hear Alexander Hoglund’s (right) sound work ‘Substance’;

Maria Kamilla Larsen co-curating the opening while starting the fire with Luanda (center) and Katrine (left);

Ricardo Castillo warming up for his dance to the land;

Ayi Solomón (left) and Yohán Ramón (center) with Ricardo Castillo;

Dance to the land led by Ricardo Castillo;

Initial sharing of ‘Memory Water’ processed by the Anarchive with public;

Liver: rosemary distillation and reverse osmosis stations where free Memory Water is harvested, processed, and spliced: 1. returned to the wetland’s pond, 2. irrigating the medicinal garden, and 3. for humans to drink;

Presenting a weaving by Sebastian Gatz (centre) from his ‘Flora robotica’ series;

Processed water on its way to the final process of flowforms before returning to the wetland’s pond;

Clay flowforms made with Lisbeth Skytte and her ceramics group at Gammelgaard;

Lisbeth Skytte (center) provided her expertise and facilities for ceramics at Gammelgaard to produce the flowforms for the Anarchive;

Neganthropic Anarchive is open and will continue to process free Memory Water… for the land and for humans non-humans of all ages.

Sincerest Thanks to the visiting public and our invited contributors:

• Alexander Höglund (with the sound of ‘Substance’ );
• Callum Harper (with the performance ‘we(‘)re:were’ );
• Dance for Plants [with the performance ‘Seems like the last Pokemon of the summer has disappeared already (possible ghosts of a Virgo season garden party)’ ];
• Ectoplasmic Materialism (with the sound of ‘The World Chewed Up’ );
• Felix Becker w/Sisters Hope of Sensuous Society (talk based on the manifesto “Sensuous society — Beyond economic rationality
  A L L * T O M O R R O W S * D R E A M S
  manifesting ** transformation”);
• Freja Dahl Kofoed, Martha Skytte, & Randi Kjær (and Ritual for Water);
• Ida Bergman (with the ritual ‘Look look look [Datura]: burial rite’ );
• Lisbeth Skytte & the Gammelgaard ceramics group with Luis Berrríos-Negrón (with the installation of flowforms);
• Richard Krantz (installation ‘Phantom Pain, 2019’ );
• Sebastian Gatz (with a weaving from the larger work ‘Flora robotica’ );
• Spyros Theodoridis & Sonia Ntova with Luis Berrríos-Negrón (with a talk about biodiversity and perception);
• Yohán Ramón, Ayi Solomón, and Ricardo Castillo, with Luis Berrríos-Negrón (with a drum and dance for the land);
• With a generous participation from Extinction Rebellion;
• And, an introduction to the Anarchive by Anne Retz Wessberg, director of Gammelgaard.

Remember to 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.

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)

Rosmarinus Officinalis (2)

““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.

With that in mind, 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.

“Essa planta é muito importante, porque simboliza Tembu. Ela cresce em formato de ‘kodia’, que é como nós entendemos o tempo.” — in conversaiton with Tata Mutá Imê and Daniel Sabóia, at the Terreiro Mutá Lambô Ye Kaiongo for the 3rd Biennial of Art of Bahia, foto by Patricia Almeida, May 2014

Relational Liver (a.k.a. Relational Circuit, by Paul Ryan)

Tembu

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, 2020).

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.

Very Special Thanks to Sergio Montero Bravo, Konstfack, and their bachelor students of Interior Architecture and Furniture Design for their support in installing the Anarchive.

For more information please visit the Anarchive’s Ledger here.

We are fans of Maria Benedetti and her traditional and biomedicinal
practices in Puerto Rico (see Botanicultura), Solcelle, Ole Dahl and Palle Flensted at www.vandrøring.dk, of Thomas Juul-Heider and his Naturcenter Kildegården in Herlev, Naturplanteskolen, www.waterjournal.org, www.tryllehaven.dk, of Extinction Rebellion, of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and of Greta Thunberg.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I offer my deepest gratitude to my partner Maria Kamilla Larsen, our daughter Freia Pilar, and our families in Denmark and Puerto Rico, for which this work would have otherwise been impossible without their indispensable support.

Very Special Thanks to Michy Marxuach, Felix Becker, Florian Dombois, Miguel Prados, el Maestro Reyes, and Sergio Montero Bravo for all the support and needed friendship, to The People of Sweden, Maria Lantz, Marie Knudsen, Juan Quemada, Jonas Harder, Jens E. Bergsted, Kirsten Høi & Bolette Halfdan-Nielsen of Herlev Komune, and not least Anne Retz Wessberg and her team at Gammelgaard.

(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

Funded by the Art Technology Design Doctoral Programme of Konstfack University of Arts & Crafts and the Royal Institute of Technology of Sweden (KTH);

…with additional support by the Herlev Kommune and Gammelgaard;

And, with technical support from Tellux Sustainable Lighting.