Uncertainties in Gaia - Mohamed Zinelabidine

Pr. Mohamed ZINELABIDINE

Ministre tunisien des affaires culturelles 2016-2020

Directeur de la Culture et de la Communication à l’ICESCO

My friend, the artist and professor Sandra Rey, holder of the ICESCO chair Art and Nature, Hybrid Processes honors me with the opportunity of writing this text – and for that I express my gratitude – to present the exhibition “Uncertainties in Gaia”, an iconic exhibition partially held by the Museum of Contemporary Arts of RS, in the city of Porto Alegre, at Xico Stockinger Gallery and Virgílio Calegari Photogallery, where she gathered around herself artist such as Elaine Tedesco (BR), Éliane Chiron (FR, in memoriam), Hala Al Khalifa (BAHRAIN), Nivalda Assunção (BR), Siham Issami (GERMANY), Tetê Barachini (BR), Hugo Fortes (BR), and Irineu Garcia (BR). Simultaneously, a video exhibition is scheduled at the Cultural Center of the UFRGS from March 16 to June 18 of 2023.

“Uncertainties in Gaia” is a promise held by recognized artists in order to remind the world of its duty to humanity, calling upon the Earth, nature and culture to create a common ground and better coexistence. It is a promise kept out of lucidity and hope, without ever hiding the human genius to create, to be free and to share their world views. However, for Sandra Rey and the exhibiting artists, it is about sounding an alarm in our minds. The term suggests the explicit idea that culture is a power that interferes with the planet’s biological processes. A warning to raise awareness and a call for action against the dangers that incur in our present and the serious geological time we are living in with the industrial revolution, the changes on Earth and the overcoming of geophysical forces. In face of the planet’s imbalances, there are good reasons to worry, but are we sufficiently aware of that?

What emerges is the effort of these artists who want their works to be a statement of the contemporary world, of its ecological, political, and social crises and their threats to the planet that now inspires the worst.

From there comes “Uncertainties in Gaia”!

I thank all the protagonists, artists, creators, makers, designers, technicians, organizers and managers and Sandra Rey for this great exhibition that marks the beginning of the activities of the “Chair Arts and Nature, Hybrid Processes”.

As a posthumous tribute to Éliane Chiron, a friend of mine and Sandra’s, I would like to add this excerpt of a text I am writing about the poetics, the visuals, the silence and the sound in the unpredictable pathways of creation and its creative behavior:

Done by chance and will of confused letters, by metalanguage and anachronistic writings, there is transgression of the habitus in the arts, disordered order, shape escaping itself and contents that some might interpret indiscriminately, out of its elements or teleological reasons. Art would be the presentation free from all a priori, giving room to a more permissive representation, open to the sense given by Paul Valéry, to whom aesthesis is this reception of the work, given that it ceases to belong to its author and is finally released to the free interpretation of the observer. “O Espírito do Destino (The spirit of Destination)” will involve the author as an artist through several poetic, pictorial, resounding writings, in the dubious pathways of unusual meetings, with anachronistic temporalities, seeking for a “poietic unprecedented” where the author escapes and avoids the conventional, the establishment, the hierarchy, the predictable to return to what we fear, as a proof of the state of the art and thinking. A work or a piece of art depends on the creative conduct freed from conformism, with a little conventional, not to say uncertain, approach to the taste of purists. A way of rejecting, as done by Paul Valéry[1], the aesthetical function of the work of art as its main purpose, as named by Genette, that would be as any means, serving its own purpose.

I fully accept the choice to irreversibly make arts be the liberation from stereotypes and escape to adventure.

A poetic adventure, sound, visual and bookkeeping that surrenders itself, to the the white of the page, the white of the sheet music, the white metaphorical of a spirit that wanders by chance on its way A poetic adventure, sound, visual and writing that surrenders itself, to the the white of the page, the white of the score, the white metaphorical of a spirit that wanders by chance on its way. Or, as Éliane Chiron[2] used to say, “to rescue the enigma of the visible and the difficulty of the work’s discursive argument, to see what we do not necessarily see, to hear what is not arbitrarily audible”.

In this manner, the observers walk through personal pathways of reason and intuition to join these creative behaviors that were dressed as voice, letter, sign, and symbol in these issues that involve chance and the unprecedented in arts. As if to combine praxis and poiesis, an itinerant artist such as Eliane Chiron in “A artista migrante (The migrant artist)”, “Desenho e corpo criativo (Drawing and the creative body)”, “O trabalho em processo, cruzamentos, entrecruzamentos (Work in process, crossings, intertwining)”, “Espaço e lugar (Space and place)”, where she described her relationship with the works, the tensions and the meetings she shared with and around Marcel Duchamp’s, Pablo Picasso’s, Henri Matisse’s and Niki de Saint-Phalle’s art.

Between the immanence of praxis in the Aristotle thinking and poiesis, which, on the contrary, is the transitive action different than the act it produces, why not trying a philosophy of praxis, or perhaps a new practice of philosophy and the unprecedented that only arts can witness?

The prolific meanings of art can often define its diversity as a place of common thought and unique performance, where everyone develop, at the same time, their own singularity and alterity. What happens is that the artists express a unique self in themselves, a common plural shared in another way. A poietic and poetic manifest, a psychic and emotional latent, a close and distant past.

Cécile Cloutier, poet, presents poietics as “the making of the art work”. Works resulting from a creative behavior “of an art that is made “. According to René Passeron, would art be an identity, a personality, an acknowledgment, a brand, a substract, generic universals accumulated since the dawn of time, shouting, all at once, men and women, what express their humanity?

If arts allow the expression of the collective, it is because it is, at the same time, the transfiguration of this expression, ignorance, absence, silence of a single being who, in the mirror of their fixed refraction, decline of their senses, objects, sensations and ideas in the aesthetic plan to be understood by the self and by the other. A living being, intrinsic, extrinsic, singular, plural, common, communal, individual and private! It is through this force that governs art and makes it react that the artist touches diversity, offering a work capable of reflecting and fulfill, from themselves and on behalf of the community.

Thank you, Sandra Rey, thank you artists of “Uncertainties in Gaia” for making us reflect, rethink, meditate and agitate our minds and uncertainties... to make them uncertainties and interrogations about the world and its obstacles.

Map of the exhibition "Uncertainties in Gaia"

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Notes

[1] VALERY (Paul), Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci, Paris, La Nouvelle Revue Française, 1919 Lire du même auteur “La Crise de l’esprit”, “Regards sur le monde actuel”, “Œuvres”, “Poésies”, “Tel quel”, “Cahiers (1894-1914)”...

[2] CHIRON (Éliane), L’énigme du visible, Poïétique des arts visuels, préface de Jacques Leenhardt, Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 2013.