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Wildrose Charcoal Kilns at Death Valley National Park

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Rather than remaining subject, in perpetuity, to the seductive efficiency of economic competition, we must reappropriate universes of value, so that processes of singularization can rediscover their consistency. We need new social and aesthetic practices, new practices of the self in relation to the other, to the foreign, the strange – a whole programme that seems far removed from current concerns. And yet, ultimately, we will only escape from the major crises of our era through the articulation of: a nascent subjectivity; a constantly mutating socius; and an environment in the process of being reinvented.

--Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies

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Mayra Sergio’s coffee fueled Sensorial Shelter began as an investigation into what brings a sense of belonging to people. Sergio explains: “Being a foreigner myself, I started questioning how the spaces and objects around me interfere in that feeling.”

Food carries a highly evocative power that enables one to feel ‘at home’ through the physical ritual of preparing it: the look, smell and taste. It has the power of momentarily becoming architecture, of sheltering our bodies through our senses. My personal story and fascination led me to choose coffee as my material. During the days of the fair, I will perform making bricks out of coffee and building up this sensorial shelter. Each day the installation will gain a different shape and this fragile, powerful and impregnating shelter will grow or collapse.

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In the broad movement of Afropessimism that has taken up the thought of Fanon, there are two senses in which the end of the world might be imagined. The first would be the end of this world-capitalism and its inherent anti-Blackness while the second would be the end of the valorization of human existence as being rich in world. What might it mean to think of world-lessness, or being poor in world, as an alternative to saving the world? In many ways postapocalyptic culture hints at an answer, albeit negatively. The end of the world would amount to stateless existence, a loss of the global technologies and industries that create a single humanity, and an abandonment of hyperconsump-tion and its attendant violence. The end of the world would be the end of the cinematic aesthetic that defines subjectivity as a capacity to view the world as if it were one's own horizon of sense, unfolding from the syntheses and decisions of the individual.

—Claire Colebrook, Who Would You Kill to Save the World?

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One of the less noted debts of Deleuze and Guattari's work is the inspiration they take from Franz Fanon and an accompanying antioedipal sense that the human is but one way in which one might think of existence and one that ought to be placed within a history of colonization and racialization. The subject for whom the world is a structure of sense beyond which lies the dark night of chaos is the outcome of a history in which complex social machines are contracted until we arrive at the private individual whose desires have been rendered personal and familial. If we are the effect of a history of evolving perceptions that can be mapped in relation to technologies, it would be both possible and desirable to think of potentialities beyond the human, because desire itself transcends and precedes the human. What makes Fanon's work so important today becomes evident when reading Deleuze and Guattari's debt to Fanon.

It may make sense to experience one's desire as being at odds with one's world; it might also be necessary—to quote Fanon quoting Aimé Césaire-to demand the end of the world:

we sing of poisonous flowers bursting in meadows of fury;

skies of love struck by clots of blood; epileptic mornings; the white

burning of abyssal sands, the sinking of wrecked ships in the middle of nights rent by the smell of wild beasts.

What can I do?

I must begin.

Begin what?

The only thing in the world that's worth beginning:

The End of the World, no less.

—Claire Colebrook, Who Would You Kill to Save the World?

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Karsten Lödinger, Untitled, 2013, reinforced concrete.

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Karsten Födinger, Untitled, 2009, adhesive plaster gypsum.

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Karsten Födinger, Frablo, 2011, concrete, wood.

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Karsten Födinger, Untitled, 2012, reinforcing basket, concrete.

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Marie Watt, Engine (installation view), 2009. Hand-felted wool, wood, three-channel projections. 9 x 20 x 13 ½ feet

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They say La Ciguapa was born on the peak of El Pico Duarte. Balled up for centuries beneath the rocks she sprang out red, covered in boils, dried off black and the first thing she smelled was her burning hair. … Her backwards-facing feet were no mistake, they say, she was never meant to be found, followed— an unseeable creature of crane legs, saltwater crocodile scales, long beak of a parrot no music sings forth from. … They say. They say. They say. Tuh, I’m lying. No one says. Who tells her story anymore? She has no mother, La Ciguapa, and no children, certainly not her people’s tongues. We who have forgotten all our sacred monsters.

—Excerpt from “La Ciguapa” by Elizabeth Acevedo

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Ragini Bhow, Sometimes when you sleep you look so ancient, 2020.

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The Atomic Priesthood Project, Ritualspace, 02012-Present.

Ritualspace is a site designed, installed, and consecrated by an actor within the APHP in anticipation of an audience. Rituals are enacted within these spaces and may be seen as an opportunity to enroll those unfamiliar with the APHP into its elusive mythology.

The architecture of Ritualspace is not fixed, but must destabilize the audience by fragmenting or reframing the natural within the designed. 

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I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance. SOJOURNER TRUTH. The imprint on the verso features the sitter’s statement in bright red ink as well as a Michigan 1864 copyright in her name. By owning control of her image, her “shadow,” Sojourner Truth could sell it. In so doing she became one of the era’s most progressive advocates for slaves and freedmen after Emancipation, for women’s suffrage, and for the medium of photography. At a human-rights convention, Sojourner Truth commented that she “used to be sold for other people’s benefit, but now she sold herself for her own.”

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Mikko Haiko, The Meadow (2017)  Single-channel video installation Duration: 3 min 00 sec

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Nikita Gale, END OF SUBJECT, 2022.

END OF SUBJECT proposes an intervention within 52 Walker’s architectural confines that engages the ideological apparatus and technological infrastructure of performance. The artist probes how a performance might be constituted in the absence of the human figure while reconfiguring the production of the experience of presence as it is mediated by the physical body—via such mechanisms as lighting, staging, atmosphere, and sound, as well as expectations shaped by existing social and political systems.

END OF SUBJECT considers the phenomenological limits of performance, how spatial hierarchies are stratified, and how transcendence and immanence are embodied by audience members. Here, Gale establishes bleachers as a kind of shorthand for the intersubjective act of witnessing: across the gallery, six sets of aluminum bleachers are distributed; three sets are violently crushed and made unfit for seating. Stage lights are mounted throughout the space, occupying some places in which the spectator would normally be present. A lighting program, automated by a show control system designed in collaboration with lighting designer Josephine Wang, shifts the site between dormant and active states. A synchronous four-channel audio installation features an original theme by composer Tashi Wada.

Reflecting on the material limits of ideology in END OF SUBJECT, Gale assumes the cycle of destruction and creation proposed by the framework of abolition. The exhibition attempts to instantiate the symbolic turning point of rupture in which both ruins and new social relations are formed. This trace evidences the physical and the ideological that continues to radiate after the annihilation of institutions, marking and formalizing the vestiges of the infrastructures that once prevailed. Drawing from a formal training in archaeology, the artist captures the moments in which the resonances of the destruction incurred linger and relations between subjects are challenged.