Exhibition Structural Disparities. Seoul. South Korea

From Friday 18 to Sunday 26 March, Karla Kracht and I are showing our latest work, “6º below nothing, an interactive installation”, in Seoul, as part of the exhibition “structural disparities” at Seoul Art Space Geumcheon.

What is 6º below nothing about? What are we telling? Here is a small taste. For the rest you have to come and see it, feel it, touch it…

Memory is a house of cards in the hands of a child. Fragile, volatile. It is also a place lost in time. Distorted, blurred. It is us and those who came before us… The future too, but not yet. Not yet…

History repeats itself over and over, nothing changes and everything is different. Meanwhile we go on being the same, and we give the present new names, forgetting that in the past — our past — we already named them and swore they would never happen again…

We thought we were learning with every year that passed, and yet the better we came to know one another the less we knew, and time, that great ally of forgetting, covered our eyes and sank us in an ocean of ignorance… We, who believe ourselves wise.

The Berlin wall, Palestine, the twin towers, the atomic fear, mass exoduses, the fear of pain, fear and again fear. The twentieth century and the twenty-first and fear again and you and I lost in memory. Impassable borders, invisible borders, all of them borders. New technologies, new slaves, new countries and new migrations. Religion, again, and the other religions, yes, those too, and the bombs and climate change; I am thirsty, and hungry, and I feel alone in a city of thirty-five million people. I buy the void and fill myself with nothing and go on buying and dream of the Moon and of Mars. I am alive, or so I tell myself.

Time passes and erases everything. Tomorrow, some tomorrow, nothing will be left, and like a dream, a tale or a nightmare it will all begin somewhere else, or in the same place, and we will believe ourselves gods again, and we will discover the theory of relativity, the guillotine, the Higgs boson, democracy, credit cards, the power of the media and mint-and-chocolate sweets.