To be sensuous, that is, to be really existing, means to be an object of sense, to be a sensuous object, to have sensuous objects outside oneself –– objects of one’s sensuousness. To be sensuous is to suffer.

Karl Heinrich Marx, Keizaigaku Tetsugaku Soukou (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844)*

The main feature of an art festival of the scope of the Aichi Triennale is to offer art the opportunity to leave its traditional museum environment and spread itself into living spaces. This year’s edition occupies three large cities as venues for exhibition and performing arts events, but as considerable as this macro scale may sound, the artworks found their temporary homes through the details rooted in each building’s history, each room’s memories, each beam’s buttressing sensation. Art temporarily occupies these spaces – as travelers used to do in the caravanserai –, which respond back and shape a relationship of complicity between objects and space. This relationship captures the visitor not as a subject that predicates it, but one that is predicated by such a relationship. Isn’t an aesthetic experience one of an active surrender?

Particularly with regards to participatory artworks, the interaction between objects and humans restructure the coordinates of a given space, and one is able to witness its remaking as the work takes shape. The production of João Modé operates through an ethic of affection towards the objects or the environment with which the Brazilian artist establishes a relationship. The subtle impact of his installations is given by an internal dynamic between these “bodies” that implies an act of horizontal exchange between them: the artist selects the objects but the objects also choose him; Modé observes the space, which reacts back and determines the actions to be undertaken in his projects. The NET project exhibited at the Triennial consists of an organic and collective artistic proposal that grows out of the hands of the artist as well as any participant - art visitors and otherwise - that feels encouraged to take part in it. Strings of all colours and materials are at the visitor’s disposal for choosing or being chosen, as it is the place, type and number of knots s/he is to add to the growing net. Carefully decided by the artist, the waist level height at which the net stands invites the participant to look at it – and through it, at the city – from different perspectives.

Japanese artist Matsubara Megumi exhibits a new series of ceramic works made in collaboration with dancers and blind students from the Nagoya and Okasaki School for the Blind. The withdrawal from one of the five senses in the process of sculpture making rendered a different phenomenological outcome. The pieces were created in movement as the students supported the clay onto the body of the moving dancers while dancing themselves; they walked on clay placed on the ground, creating a dynamic relationship between humans, material and space surrounding them. The ceramic pieces grew out of a narrative determined by a different set of perspectives, which does not privilege the sight, but touch, movement and chance.

The experimental magazine produced manually on discarded Portland cement bags (P350) that are spread around Havana is a hybrid of visuality and literature.  Cuban artist Yornel Martinez coordinates the editorial project, which consists of inviting a different collaborator for each issue. The ethics of this collaboration distances itself from the idea of an “anthology”, which nevertheless stays within a particular realm of interest and respects a certain hierarchical structure. Rather, to the invited artist, poet, scholar, friend as editor is deposited the confidence to imprint all her/his personal investment to give the new issue weight, irregularity, a voice (with an accent; not necessarily Spanish, but with a “locality”), and lack of a continuous editorial and aesthetic criteria. Albeit strongly tied with the context of the city where the magazines are created, the singularity of P350 relies on the engagement with an ethical commitment towards disappearing as subjects-creators and having the object speak on their behalf.  A severe change of perspective takes place in this editorial project: its corporeal and political language implies that these objects predicate the subjects involved in its making, circulation and handling, as opposed to just illustrate a compendium of ideas.

A shift of perspectives has had a strong effect in the field of social sciences in the past recent years. There has been an epistemological change from the traditional perception that the world is understood through the lens of human culture isolated from other non-human or non-cultural beings. The idea that every living thing has its own perspective of the world has caused a radical reformation of those disciplines, which some have been nominating an “ontological shift”.  One of the main contributions to this discussion has been Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s perspectivism, a concept that moves out from the Amerindian world as an object of observation/study into an effort to look to the world (including its non-human components) from an Indigenous point of view; it is not the return of the native, but the turn of the native, as the author has stated. Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network theory combines semiotics and social sciences to insist on the active role of objects – animate and inanimate – in the participation and construction of networks (societies). The groundbreaking work of Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think argues that, from an ethnographic viewpoint, humans are not the only producers of generalities and abstraction (what some would call “culture”). The Brazilian author makes a conceptual intervention in the field of anthropology and ethnography by looking at Amazonian cultures through the point of view of the region’s extremely complex ecological and semiotic systems combined. Kohn insists that in order to explore the larger question of how to situate the human, it is necessary to go beyond itself – as in an ex-anthropocentric reason – and attempt to situate it in the larger non-human domain.

The work Fuga (Flight) by Brazilian artist Laura Lima escapes entirely from the anthropocentric reason. Fuga (Flight) is for birds. There, she offered them Didactic windows, or landscape paintings that simulate horizons viewed from different flying perspectives; the large and sculptural El niño, a nest, and the Belvedere Restaurant, an architectural structure that projects out of the building into the sky. The public is encouraged to enter the space in silence, and travel through the interstices of the installation while facing the fact that s/he is not the protagonist of that artistic experience.  In the politics of large format exhibitions such as this Triennial, Laura Lima’s work presents an institutional hiatus by privileging a species other than humans to engage in an aesthetic event.

Might spectators learn one or two things from birds about how to experience art, in the fashion that Sero Hiki no Gōshu (Gauche, the Cellist) did? The 1934 released short story by Kenji Miyazawa accounts for a struggling young cellist who resorted to anthropomorphized animals in order to get insight for his music. The tale – as well as Lima’s work, as an afterthought – alludes to a common practice in Asia, including Japan, to have animals instructing or predicting the future to humans, such as with the “auspicious birds” or “fortune telling birds”. Acknowledging the symbolic and cognitive attributes of all living things – including meteorological phenomena – may be a recovery of a long-gone-but-hidden-somewhere imaginative competence that has been marginalized in the name of the production and maintenance of society as we know it. In this sense, is it an exaggeration to speak in terms of an “epistemological turn”? We will leave this as an open question to the reader.

It is however a fact that the disciplines dedicated to the scientific study of the natural world and human societies have reached a methodological limit, and have resorted to semiotics and aesthetics in order to expand their fields. The Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) is an experimental laboratory at Harvard University that promotes innovative combinations of aesthetics and ethnography.  It uses analog and digital media to explore the aesthetics and ontology of the natural and unnatural world.  Harnessing perspectives drawn from the arts, the social and natural sciences, and the humanities, the SEL encourages attention to the many dimensions of the world, both animate and inanimate.  The Leviathan project exhibited in the Triennial combines cinema and anthropology in order to investigate processes of realism and representation, expanding the potential of visual and acoustic media to represent indigeneity and alterity, lived experience and cultural difference.

As a means of concluding this short text, we started by looking at artworks that point towards different and unexpected perspectives with which to sense the world, and arrived at the radical shift in scientific and academic thought as a response to the Anthropocene. Thinking together with Eduardo Kohn, and inspired by the over 150 art projects that compose this festival, the question that remains to investigate is: how are we going to create an ethical practice in this time of ours in which the future of human and nonhuman kinds are increasingly entangled and interdependent in their mutual uncertainty? The journey through the unknown driven by curiosity that the Triennial invites people and otherwise to undertake may lead to some elucidations.

* Karl Heinrich Marx, Keizaigaku Tetsugaku Soukou (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844), Iwanami Bunko, p. 208

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Catalogue draft: Daniela CASTRO + MINATO Chihiro