Entradas
“Il y a dans ma tête une abeille qui parle
bas”. Johanna Caplliure
“Poème: Il y a sur la nuit trois champignons qui sont la
lune. Aussi brusquement que chante le coucou d'une horloge, ils se disposent
autrement à minuit chaque mois. Il y a dans le jardin des fleurs rares qui sont
des petits hommes couchés et qui s'éveillent tous les matins. Il y a dans ma
chambre obscure une navette lumineuse qui rode, puis deux des aérostats
phosphorescents! c'est les reflets d'un miroir. Il y a dans ma tête une abeille
qui parle bas”. Max Jacob
It never occurs to us to think that nature is inside us. We are active
and reactive nature. We have the power and the counter-power to turn our
existence into a unique event of saving and destroying potentials, a fact
without guarantors or heroes in the struggle to dominate the ruling forces. We
are the poison and the antidote for our afflictions. We think in terms of
isolated departments, never of the unit. The obvious lack of a holistic view
turns our life on Earth into a jigsaw puzzle, and this is putting an end to a
large part of that unit which provides energy to our lives. However, we have to
be careful with the euphoria of desiring the whole: Le tout seul n’est qu’un trou (whole is a hole).[1] Life forms emerge and submerge in a
dance of waves we cannot discern within the immensity of existence, an ocean
life that is always foundering.
Nature’s needs do not use the sting described by Simone Weil to bite
the excessive condition of the natural man, whose ambition was to find shelter
or a piece of meat, not even the desire to have an existence that is mortgaged
by a job, a home or a life that does not belong to us, as she also argued on
the voluntary oppression to inhabit the Capital. The thorn has been driven into
reason and it inoculates the most heartless form of desire—destruction in order
to achieve possession and control over life. All this because, along the
journey of Progress, we have lost sight of the question “who are we?” Without
this question on the horizon, all meaning collapses and life lacks “the nature
of life”: to live.
It is well established that the desire to know and dominate nature
through turning it into man’s vassal, has led to the loss of a global vision of
the world, to an unbalance between the sources, the consumption and the
resources of energy, and to a deviation from the crucial issue: “the nature of
nature”. Because (n)ulle science
naturelle n’a voulu connaître son origine culturelle. Nulle science physique
n’a voulu reconnaître sa nature humaine[2].
What has found a place within academic settings, has met its most painful
outcome in the industries, states and governments, namely, the immunity to the
nature of our nature. There is a bee whispering in my head - Elle me parle tout bas.[3]
It dances. I, too, know how to zigzag in a relational dance. They call it
“social subconscious”, “collective subconscious”: life forms emerge and
submerge, and, even if it is in our dreams, we know how to sting.
Now
it’s nature—our own nature—that comes out of our dreams and puts us in the
urgency of taking a stand in life. Let’s wonder what we are, like Johan
Grimonprez does, as if listening to Schöndinger with a turn towards the common.
We must go from the certitude of our nature into action, fight for safeguarding
a sustainable system, a system of systems, a complex system that is capable of
striking a balance between the natural needs and the human needs.
If the enigma of existence lies in the impossibility of dictating a
specific future, of generating one single, safe reality, and if any inquiry
into a glimpsed expectation is that of the end, then, why not transplant ideas,
cultivate communities, get rid of parasites and, if we still have the strength,
gather the best nectar. These ways of caring for the system of systems have
been brought to light by environmentalists, naturists, scientists, activists, gardening guerrillas, scholars of
permaculture, of deep ecology or radical ecology, economists, mycologists or
engineers—why not—as well as artists and fiction writers.
The importance of the impact a soft buzzing can have on the rest of the
planet is what the work of Johan Grimonprez offers us. The tail movement
produced by On Radical Ecology and Tender
Gardening is that of a buzzing readying for assemblage. Therefore, we are
not talking of the “butterfly effect” that shatters predictions with a flap of
the wings, but of an agitated movement that swarms the multitude outside
markets, states, institutions, and even the beliefs which have been laid down
as the logical basis for our lives.
On Radical Ecology and Tender Gardening is a “WeTube-o-theque”. In
other words, it is a free, shared bank of knowledge, where knowledge is
compiled by a ‘we’ and for a ‘we’ in Youtube. Grimonprez’s selection of
materials in this “WeTube-o-theque” is constructed in the form of a Vlog, with six
categories that establish the base for a new radical ecology, for current ways
of sustainability and for caring for the man/nature relationships:
0.1-Biotecture, 0.2-Guerrilla Gardening, 0.3-Transition World, 0.4-Radical
Ecology, 0.5-Off the Grid, 0.6-Education. The video material comes from
different sources. They are independent or TV documentaries, fragments of
international news, talks recorded at symposia or conferences, animated
cartoons and videos from environmental and activist organisations. Therefore,
it is a plural archive offering an irrefutable panoply of information for
knowledge, debate and eco-guerrilla. Furthermore, it offers a multiple
apprehension of the real. And this is what can be found in the construction of
a “WeTube-o-theque”, an
operation involving a multiplicity of images, codes, knowledge and actions as
possibilities, and possibilities as powers. The power of a ‘we’. The emerging
and submerging of life forms, sometimes manifest and sometimes hidden, but
always in nature. There is dancing in the darkness of the beehive. What we call
“swarm intelligence”, the action of swarming
or the strength of anonymity is
nothing other than a multitude swarming with a noise that is undecipherable for
the ruling apparatus. Les agencements
sont pasionnels, ce sont des compositions de désir[4].
Desires that make us dream of a bee inside our head. Grimonprez’s dream of a
social network fabric linked to a new radical culture, committed to a real, conscious
multiplicity of the attentions for the survival of a ‘we’. Inside my head, a
bee whispers to me and tells me that the swarm is relaxing in the garden.
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| Buckminster Fuller on 'Spaceship Earth': Everything I Know Sessions Philadelphia, USA 1975, 2 min |
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| In the Open: Art & Architecture in Public Spaces — Deborah Gans & Matthew Coolidge BOMBLive! 2010, 4 min 25 sec |
[1] “The whole by itself, without its parts, is
nothing but a hole (whole is a hole)”. E. Morin, La Méthode: La nature de la nature, Paris, Éditions de Seuil, 1981, p.126.
[2] Since “no natural science has ever wanted to
know its cultural origin. No physical science has ever wanted to admit its
human nature”. Ibid, p.11.
[3] “It speaks to me very softly”.
[4]
“Assemblages are
passionate, they are compositions of desire”. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., Mille plateaux, Paris, Gallimard, 1980,
p.497.
