CURA.

A frozen kitchen in which salt crystals invade the objects (Bianca Bondi); white masses that sweat (Isabelle Andriessen); hanging carbonized forms that seep onto the floor (Agata Ingarden): recently, one increasingly finds representations of spaces that are deserted, as if left to themselves, their life continuing in silence. If they echo fears of mass extinction, they are also representations of the possible.

In a contracting world, resistance plays out in corners that have to be pressed in. Finding the potentialities of the future in the past and present has always been a strong aspiration. But today, the task is becoming complicated: which representations would keep the promises of a consciousness of the Anthropocene? How can one decenter human beings, give them a less hegemonic place, and give voice to other beings that are more hybrid, perhaps more precarious? In observing the work of Bianca Bondi, Isabelle Andriessen, Dora Budor, Grégory Chatonsky, Rochelle Goldberg, Ian Cheng, Pierre Huyghe, Agata Ingarden, Laure Vigna and others, the lines of force become apparent: the work must be able to generate possibilities.

Feedback
The invisibilized museum population enters into the work: everything that had been separated from it by the hermetic white walls returns, and forms a cycle with it. The feedback loop, a temporal phenomenon that explains global warming, becomes an artistic motif. Thought that is modern, linear (time is chronological) and separatist (distinction of humans from nonhumans) has purged the world of chain reactions in which dispersed elements were linked by the same phenomenon. But the world is populated by hybrids: the coronavirus is provoking reactions in ecology, culture, politics, medicine, education, etc. It is analyzed as a total fact that disciplines translate into their language. It is a singular thing that circulates and is incarnated in different forms.

Likewise, Dora Budor shows us that the small volcanic eruptions of the series Origin (2019) are linked to construction works a few meters from the exhibition site. With the motif of the color pink in Untilled (2011-2012), Pierre Huyghe shows that a dog, a bench, water, and a flower could be linked by one same phenomenon. To get out of modern impasses, we have no choice but to conceive of the world as chains of translation.^[1] The work is no longer alone.

Histories: Materialisms, systems
The history of modern art has seen similar forms come into being: formlessness, matterism and Land Art offered works in which the dynamism of the material was foremost. Contingent (1969) by Eva Hesse showed pieces of latex and muslin that developed in a contingent way. Entropy was a process of disorder sought by Robert Smithson, finding its most iconic expression in Spiral Jetty (1970). In the catalogue L’informe: mode d’emploi,^[4] Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss named this tendency base materialism, borrowing George Bataille’s term. Going against idealism, it designates a matter never absorbed by the idea or form, without any subject, structure or history.^[5] But for Krauss and Bois, formlessness is primarily understood within a postmodern dynamic in which the aim is to represent the end of the great narratives, the lack of meaning, and the abyssal void in which the human being has plunged. Mirroring humans, the analysis was always anthropocentric.

In the 1970s, the experiments of E.A.T.,^[6] accompanied by system aesthetics,^[7] found less anthropocentric representations that gave room to light, wind, vibrations (Hans Haacke, Michael Asher, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage) and other components, where the work is considered within a set of relations with the environment. It was the time of cybernetics, of a non-organic life of things that subsequently inspired the complex systems of Pierre Huyghe and the artificial simulations of Grégory Chatonsky.

Generating possibilities
An aesthetic of the possible moves the work away from reception problems in order to concentrate on its movements. It will not be so much a matter of understanding in what sense the piece is beautiful, sublime or a vehicle of ideas, but rather how it is generative of forms. How did the skin change in Perfect Skin XI? How did the colors of Ivory Dampers develop?

Seeing the work as a chain of relations echoes the anthropologies of relation developed by Philippe Descola and Anna Tsing, the hybrid philosophies of Donna Haraway, Baptiste Morizot and Emanuele Coccia, the metaphysics of Tristan Garcia: each approach moves away from a naturalist vision (nature is the unified field of the nonhuman, and the human is an exception) and never considers an entity alone, but always within a field of relations, an environment that retroacts.

Getting away from “the objectivization of the world and of others”^[8] proceeds by means of representations that are less stable and unified, more precarious. The works that generate possible populate a low-intensity world. But one must not be mistaken about it, mass extinction does not concern all life on earth, just some of the living beings. As James Lovelock explains in Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth,^[9] life is a force that very few speculative scenarios can get the better of. The forms of the possible can help us listen to it.