88 89 soil, rejecting every boundary, sowing seeds. Carsten Höller, who has made his home both Sweden and Ghana, was born in Belgium, to German parents, and as an international artist he continues to sow seeds of contemporary art as concrete acts and occasions for reflection at every latitude of the earth, trusting that they can become bridges. «You did everything to bury us / You forgot that we were seeds» (Dinos Christianopoulos, The body and the wormwood, 1978). In the quest to protect the rights of the soil, enshrined in the UN 2030 Agenda, Carsten Höller also explores the protection of the right to the soil, as stated in several articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights2. He does this through the investigation of the topos of the Double, in works such as The Double Club (2008-2009, a London nightclub that puts in dialogue Congolese and Western culture in food, music, and design); Double Carousel with Zöllner Stripes (2011, two merry-go-rounds from the 1950s, La Regina del Volo from Belluno and Ciapa Ciapa from Reggio Calabria, in opposite and extremely slow motion to allow its continuous fruition, immersed in the optical illusion of Zöllner Stripes and surmounted by a 2011 video, Alone (Twins on Double Carousel with Zöllner Stripes), featuring fifty pairs of homozygotic twins getting on and off the carousels); Fara Fara (2014, a two-channel video installation, "face to face" in Lingala, a deliberately unfinished documentary about soundclash, the Congolese musical challenge between two live bands that mobilizes tens of thousands of people for extended periods). The peaceful presence of the Double once again highlights how much more ethical, respectful, and free is coexistence rather than hybridization, which relates not only to the right of the land to protect biodiversity, but also to the right to the land, which calls for peace among nations. For Carsten Höller, the topos of the Double has been a sort of imprinting. «I grew up in Belgium, and Belgium has a complex situation because, first and foremost, it is a very young country. It’s only since the late 19th century that there is a Belgium. A land as a compromise. There are two main language groups – or, rather, three – that do not fit together. So, for me, Belgium is one big Double Club, which stems from an idea like this and which I use a lot in my work: you have two parts that are somehow similar because they belong to the same big entity, but then they are also unique, and when we put them together, they somehow clash, but it's a fertile clash». Carsten Höller uses the word clash to describe this fertile collision, which reminds me not only the immortal punk tones of Should I stay or should I go, but also of that idea of iconoclash baptised by Bruno Latour in 2002 to refer to the contemporary artistic practice of producing and destroying images, which actually generates an incredible source of new images, new strategies, new languages, much like it should be for contemporary African art we discussed earlier. In this sense, Höller continues, «As a child, I saw the neighbors on the left speaking Flemish, and the neighbors on the right speaking French. And we, at home, spoke German. So I thought in every house a different language was spoken – which is a beautiful idea. Instead, in Belgium, there are so many problems because of this non-fitting, and you have the land as the only way of holding it together. But then I also think, “Okay, there are some problems, but there is also a great double, triple potential”. There is something very beautiful about non-fitting, not resigning to alignment. Maybe it's a big word, but I see a certain freedom in it. Instead of indulging in complaints, one should focus on the infinite possibilities based on non-homogeneity, on what doesn't fit, what doesn't align, on the differences between parts. So Belgium, The Double Club, Fara Fara, even my Giant Triple Mushrooms have a lot to do with this idea of uniqueness, of units that are there, standing together and occupying the same place. They are not the same, they don’t contain each other, and they are not hybridizing. They are just sharing». Ubuntu, then, is the word, that profound sense of being human that is only realized by sharing, a philosophy become practice in Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, made art by Miles Davis and Marcus Miller (Tutu, 1986). It's that deep sense of belonging to the land, and not only to a circumscribed land limited by the violent imposition, in ink or by gunfire, of a border. (Ed.'s Note: here in Southern Italy, to inquire about your parents, the elders ask you a cu appartenisi, whom you belong to. Moving towards ecocentrism means acting as if the only possible answer is, finally, «To the earth») Having made both Sweden and Ghana his home, Carsten Höller's sense of belonging is amplified, «and you don't really know why, because it's not just about temperature, or smells. It's a part of you that is either locked or wide open. I have always liked the idea that you should never reduce yourself to one; you know, for me, the double agent is a very interesting figure. In some way, and in a much nobler sense than the common use of this expression, we should all be double agents in our lives, like those stories of Russian spies who are also American spies, because it gives you the opportunity to experience new things not just once, but at least twice. We have been so much working on a culture somehow linear and consequential, but if you can go into different forms on different lands, questioning yourself, it’s a strong statement. It's not dialectics what I mean; it's not about a solution between the two in the form of thesis/antithesis/synthesis; it's about being there, you know, being two, splitting your own self into different coexisting units that are not necessarily contradicting each other, from a Western or an African viewpoint. It's about blowing up a linear development model that is already threadbare. To me, that is the real nature of progress». On an ultra-connected and overheated soil, not liquefying one’s own self in the frenzy of wanting everything is the first step to still being something. It's the lesson of the importance of biodiversity. Carsten Höller's aesth/etics is proof that art and soil nourish a relationship of osmotic exchange. After all, one of the favorite materials of art is indeed the land. Land as subject, protagonist of the Land Art movement. (Ed.'s Note: the real Land Art gesture, in my opinion, lies in that man kneeling on the ground, Jean Dubuffet, pressing inked paper onto the soil to bear witness to its wrinkles in his Phénomènes, a cycle of 324 lithographs composed between 1958 and 1960. It is that of Hussein Chalayan, who in 1993, for his degree thesis project The Tangent Flows, presented a collection of organic clothes that he designed, crafted and then buried underground for three months, ode to the soil as a regenerative force. The real Land Art gesture, as in all of Carsten Höller's oeuvre, lies in investigating the land to fully comprehend it and, through the power of his vision, to finally give it a voice) Land as object, as primal medium, as it is primarily from the baked soil turned into clay that one of the most iconic forms of art is born: sculpture. And land as right, land that is the mother of right, since the very legal institution of right originates when a man demarcates it, proclaiming that plot of land as his own and giving rise to private property. But it has become clear by now that everything needs to be rethought. The responsibility of art in defending the earth is to cleanse thought, severely polluted by a mania for ferocious and titanic progress, in order to return a soil finally free to embrace the seeds generated by the ecocentric paradigm. A paradigm that stands for salvation, whose symbol is a strange mushroom. 2 Art. 6: « Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law»; Art. 13: « Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within each State»; Art. 14: « Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution»; Art. 15: «Everyone has the right to a nationality». a warm thanks to Silvia Pichini, head of communications @ Galleria Continua
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