‘Worldmaking’ by Adam Budak

"Worlds like words multiply in the narrative of lives we conduct. One after another, and the one next to it, they proliferate in an organic process of symbiosis and growth. American philosopher, Nelson Goodman underlines the world’s collective self-referentiality, its interdependency and plurality: “If I ask about the world, you can offer to tell me how it is under one or more frames of reference; but if I insist that you tell me how it is apart from all frames, what can you say?” Nelson sees the world as a fabric of interwoven narratives; our role is to retell those narratives. To find the strategy - the way to do it - is what constitutes and determines our task: “We are confined to ways of describing whatever is described. Our universe, so to speak, consists of these ways rather than of a world or of worlds. (…) The many stuffs - matter, energy, waves, phenomena - that worlds are made of are made along with the worlds. But made from what? Not from nothing, after all, but from other worlds. Worldmaking as we know it always starts from worlds already on hand; the making is remaking.”1

Such is a paramount premise of the 7th Biennale Gherdëina: to research and to challenge our ability to contribute to an active process of the world’s continuous (re)making while the world we inhabit finds itself at its apparent limit: in a critical precarious moment of a sociopolitical turmoil, an ethical vacuum and an immunological crisis. The principle of responsibility and care, as well as civic responsiveness and a humility linked to it, come forth as agencies of our daily poiesis, defining the urgency to act and engage. We are in this together, a chant frequently uttered during the recent months of the pandemic limbo, reminds the founding statement of the philosopher Rosi Braidotti’s politics of affirmation. We are this world’s participants, its tender narrators2 and the passerby3, listening to the poets, the Shelleyian “unacknowledged legislators of the world”. Ultimately, we are the interpreters of this world and its vast fields of land and thought, both real and imaginary. In this together.

The 7th Biennale Gherdëina’s main title – a breath? - a name? – embraces a line from a poet of “the world’s unreadability”, the most important German-language authors of his time Paul Celan (1920-1970).4 French philosopher Jacques Derrida analyses the poet’s poetics and politics of witnessing, describing Celan as a poet of singularity, of solitude, and of a secret encounter. The poet bears witness and “the poem speaks, even if none of its references is intelligible, none apart from the Other, the one to whom the poem addresses itself and to whom it speaks in saying that it speaks to it. Even if it does not reach the Other, at least it calls to it. Address takes place.”5 The act of address, of naming, sets up an ethical stance. Derrida voices the call to responsibility on Celan’s line The world is gone. I must carry you (Die Welt ist fort, ich muss dich tragen), following French philosopher Maurice Blanchot’s elaboration of responsibility as a paradox of subjectivity which involves a withdrawal and accountability: “My responsibility for the Other presupposes an overturning such that it can only be marked by a change in the status of ‘me,’ a change in time and perhaps in language. Responsibility, which withdraws me from my order - perhaps from all orders and from order itself - responsibility, which separates me from myself (from the ‘me’ that is mastery and power, from the free, speaking subject) and reveals the other in place of me, requires that I answer for absence, for passivity. It requires, that is to say, that I answer for the impossibility of being responsible - to which it has always already consigned me by holding me accountable and also discounting me altogether.”6 In their discussion on dispossession as the indication of the performative in the political, the philosopher Judith Butler and the anthropologist Athena Athanasiou emphasize too the Derridean claim that responsibility requires responsiveness, and consider self-poiesis as an (ethical) relational category which embraces self-care and self-crafting. 7 “Responsibility is itself is a scene of political contestation”, so the authors contextualize the social situation of a responsive self and bring in a question of an ethical relation. “The politics of performativity entails an avowal of the power relations it contests and depends on; it encompasses ‘bearing responsibility,’ as it were, for the power configurations in which and through which we respond to each other.” 8 Linking dispossession - a troubling concept which constitutes the processes of subjection - with disposition, as a presumed readiness towards the other, Butler and Athanasiou reflect upon what makes the political and ethical responsiveness possible: “The condition of dispossession - as exposure and disposition to others, experience of loss and grief, or susceptibility to norms and violences that remain indifferent to us - is the source of our responsiveness and responsibility to others. Performativity attends to precarity, then. It works to heed the claim of precarious life, through responsiveness, understood as a disposition toward others. In fact, ‘disposition’ - with all its implications of affective engagement, address, risk, excitement, exposure, and unpredictability - is what brings performativity and precarity together.”⁹ Disposition in a world of decline becomes a moral obligation, a duty; it too constitutes an act of resistance in precarious life on the search for collectivity and belonging. The world is gone. I must carry you."

Excerpt from text by Adam Budak

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Pavel Büchler (*1952, Czechoslovakia) Pavel Büchler is known for his pioneering conceptual work with language, obsolete technology and the moving image, as well as his long career as an influential teacher and writer. Focusing on subverting the codes of everyday life or deconstructing iconic texts from the history of literature and science, Büchler’s multimedia practise incorporates performance, photography, installation, writing and books. Sound – often appropriated and reworked – belongs to his favourite means of artistic expression.

A sense of transience and nostalgia is evoked in the sound installation Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (2013). The two-channel sound installation broadcasts a fragment from Galileo Galilei “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems” (1632), a treatise on the old Ptolemaic versus the new Copernican system, in which Galilei, as the founding father of the modern natural sciences, no long longer defines Earth, but the Sun as the central body in our planetary system. The artist is concerned with the representational systems, both communicative and epistemological, as the protagonists in a selected fragment tellingly speak about their doubts and their fears of loss of orientation in view of the radical issues in question. This dialogue he translates into the coded communication tool of Morse code, supplementing it with the sounds of the foghorns of Cape Arago and Vancouver.

Another work in public space is the neon writing “Open”, an adaptation of the historical inscription “Pension” on the façade of the Hotel Ladinia, the historical inn at the heart of St. Ulrich/Ortisei that shut its doors years ago and was reopened just for the duration of the Biennale Gherdëina to serve as an exhibition venue. Through the simple shifting of individual letters of the original inscription the word “Pension” turned into “Open” and thus, also in times of a pandemic and their restrictions, or because of them, became a subtly positioned, yet central symbol of this biennial.

The text installation Problem gelöst (2016) consists of a series of framed prints bearing the inscription “Mögen andere kommen und es besser machen” (May others come and do it better). Once again, the artist intervenes in a subtly ironic manner in order to subvert and to question our daily routine and habits. Working with texts that reflect everyday life and its experience in art is an essential aspect of Büchler’s practice. According to Pavel Büchler, art changes the world and our perception, not by producing works, but by interacting in the world.