74 75 The body and the shelter: land rights and contemporary art. In conversation with Carsten Höller The body and the shelter: land rights and contemporary art. In conversation with Carsten Höller The body and the shelter: land rights and contemporary art. In conversation with Carsten Höller The body and the shelter: land rights and contemporary art. In conversation with Carsten Höller The body and the shelter: land rights and contemporary art. In conversation with Carsten Höller Fabiola Triolo I, for one, have learned the lesson of concreteness from Carsten Höller (b. Brussels, 1961, lives and works between Stockholm, Sweden, and Biriwa, Ghana). And it weirded me out, which is why I believe this dialogue will leave a mark upon my consciousness, for a dissonance can always wield a more potent impact than a reclining, inert consonance. All the more so in contemporary art, where I profoundly believe in the constructive power of distortion. On a sickened earth, for culture to act as a healing in order to finally allow us to regain our senses, great works of contemporary art are duty-bound to be those wild splinters able to defy the status quo. The dissonance that struck me while conversing with Carsten Höller revolved around the unique privilege of engaging with a real luminary of international contemporary art – terrain within which very, very often, national pastime is the high jump of the most sophisticated quotation, or the skeet shoot of whoever rants the loudest – and while I laboured in my verbose acrobatics, his gentle guidance brought me back to solid ground, main topic at the core of this issue of Ossigeno, and putting aside bombastic effect quotes, he spoke to me of concrete actions carried out through his art, real healing balm for our ailing earth. Actions carried out without ever coming to terms with the complacency snaking through that weed which is artwashing – or, in this case, (e)art(h)washing – for which we are infested by several self-styled artists hugging trees and beating their chests to ensure a spotlight not so much on a fatally wounded soil, who cares after all, but on themselves. (Ed.’s Note: do you remember, in that surreal and pitch-perfect fresco about contemporary Italian culture represented by Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty, the scene of the artist’s performance in her birthday suit at the Claudian Aqueduct, who, according to the media hype, declared herself inspired by “extrasensory nature vibrations” but then, in front of a ruthless Jep Gambardella, she couldn’t even remotely argue what these vibrations consisted of? Well, it seems we are in a desperate need of more Jep Gambardellas) Allow me to elucidate. Since Carsten Höller, before being an artist, holds a degree in Agricultural Sciences with a thesis on insect communication and a Ph.D. in Entomology, I asked him with particular pride a question that pivoted upon the notion of optimism or pessimism, in the context of defending the earth through art, scrambling across the metaphor of the fireflies, whose disappearance was recounted by Pier Paolo Pasolini as the ultimate crime in the face of the advance of blind capitalism, and conversely their faint presence was seen by Georges Didi-Huberman as a residual glimmer of hope. The glass half empty or half full, in short. Here is his answer. «I have a great respect for both, but I am perhaps more of a practical type. I am interested in using art as a conservation weapon, as a way to stop destruction. Here is an example: there is a place in Ghana, called Atewa Range, which is incredible. In principle it stands as a protected area, a forest on some high hills, but it is incredible for the enormous amount of species living there – insects, plants, birds, even mammals. It embodies what is commonly identified as a biodiversity hotspot. Yet, it conceals a substantial reservoir of bauxite, and Ghana is in debt to China, because the Chinese government has lent money that Ghana is unable to repay. So the question is: will they be forced to sacrifice this pristine expanse for bauxite extraction in order to bring in the essential revenue to repay the debt? I think that a quandary of such magnitude necessitates a discourse far exceeding the boundaries of the Ghana-China bilateral relationship. This is a common heritage. We need to protect these places. Therefore, what I have proposed is very simple: we are going to put a big artwork there, a tower with two slides. The slides have actually first been installed at my exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2015. In tandem, we will build a brand new tower together with Ghanaian architects, serving as a kind of statement saying: nature is maybe kind of helpless, because it cannot speak the human language; but art can, it can proclaim “I am here, and right here is where I want to stay”. Any endeavor to despoil this space necessitates also the destruction of the artwork that now occupies this hallowed ground, amidst the bauxite mining fields. I think that such an intervention bestows upon that land an entirely new dimension. To the best of my knowledge, no prior instance exists wherein an artwork was harnessed to shield a region of remarkable biodiversity». «So – Höller concludes – I think that we need to get very practical here. We need to speak about practical things, for we stand on the precipice of imminent jeopardy, as we all know. Unfortunately, neither Huberman nor Pasolini can help us at the moment. We need to get practical». (Ed.’s Note: therefore, art and culture can really represent humankind's last line of defense. This tenet has been concretely demonstrated to me by a multi-decorated fighter the likes of Carsten Höller) Artistic acts bearing a resonance of much greater impact in the concrete safeguarding of the soil are far from unfamiliar to Carsten Höller. Giulio di Gropello, chief executive officer of Carma Innovative Organic Farmer – a carbon-neutral project born in 2000 in the breathtaking Civita di Bagnoregio landscape, committed to producing high-grade extra virgin olive oils through the respect of permaculture principles
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