Ride Into The Sun

RIDE INTO THE SUN

A utopic multilogue (in the age of absence)

by Christian Oxenius

“The loftiest work [of art] will always be, as in the Greek tragedians, Melville, Tolstoy, or Molière, the works that maintains an equilibrium between reality and men’s rejection of that reality, each forcing the other upward in a ceaseless overflowing, characteristic of life itself at its most joyous and heart-rending extremes.”

Albert Camus – Create Dangerously, 1957

A year or so ago, when the project of “Ride into the Sun” was starting to take shape through conversations between my fellow curators and the artists, we were oblivious to what was about to happen in 2020. One would have been excused for associating the ride into the sun with the topical ending of a “western” movie, a joyous moment after all the villains had been returned to justice. The innocence of that scene, needless to say, is long gone after all the tragic events that this past year has brought about. Many conversations between all of us were focused on how we could still make a meaningful project with all the restrictions, limitations, personal and collective tragedies that the pandemic brought about. We were forced to stir away from our initial project, art works took a different shape, concepts were re-discussed in the light of a changed world, we all had to abandon our familiar ways of working and planning, even doubting to be able to realize the project all together.

A year ago, an introductory text to this biennial might have had the rhetoric we are all too used to when encountering an exhibition, discussing the intricate philosophical ties between utopia, capitalism and proto-fascist ideologies currently spreading rapidly throughout the whole world. And while certainly there is still a reason to open up these discussions in the light of the works on display, I feel it is necessary to start discussing about this biennial from the day to day conversations we engaged with throughout these past few months. I am allowing myself to open this text with this personal note not just because I think the extraordinary circumstances call for it, but also because I find a subtle but illuminating connection between this and one of the main criticism of utopias emerging from our dialogues.

In Albert Camus’ famous speech given at Upsala University in 1957 and later transcribed into the essay “Create dangerously”, the Algerian-French philosopher discusses the delicate balance an artist has to find between individual freedom and political/social responsibility Not surprisingly given his political believes, he ultimately exhorts the artist to create works engaging with civil society not through the “roaring voice” and fury of history but with a sound as delicate as the flapping of a dove’s wings. Camus is clearly aware of the struggle this entails for the artist and renders this very convincingly and emotionally in his speech.

A similar tightrope walk between a fascination towards dreams and aspirations on the one side and reality on the other is also key to the profound criticism moved towards Utopias by the narrative developed throughout the exhibition. From the 1921 Albona Republic (Labinska Republika) to the socialist dreams of united Yugoslavia, passing through the dark period characterized by the Fascist ideology of Mussolini in the 1930s that profoundly shaped, not just as a society but also physically the territory “Ride into the Sun” is inhabiting, with the creation of towns such as Pozzo Littorio (today’s Labin) and of course Raša, this is without a doubt the perfect location to stage such a reflection. To curate a biennial today is, most of all, creating an occasion for a democratic dialogue between contrasting readings of themes filtered through the emotions, sensitivities and poetic language deployed by the artists. A method and process that, in itself, is a criticism of a way of thinking, the one based on utopias, that is almost by default aimed at ridding the world from the complexity, imperfections and multiplicities that form the very essence of our environment, that give us the richness in thought diversity and natural varieties we cannot do without for ours and others species to survive on earth. The discussions had over the past year or so with all the artists on the other hand, have highlighted how, the dream of a perfect world is something intrinsically human at least with an understanding of what this is from a western, capitalist, monotheistic perspective. The tendency to imagine utopias in a certain way is without a doubt interlinked with our understanding of our position within the natural environment, or rather our separation from it. Certainly this builds also on our natural predatory instinct, fueled by the ever-present capitalist ideology western societies have relied upon to justify the monopoly of violence on which all our modern states build on to enforce “law and order” and consequent nationalist agendas.

As through the words of Giorgio Agamben in “The Open” what emerged in many of the works and the discussions with the artists leading up to them is a sense that much of this can be linked back to a missing clear positioning of our being human within (or outside) nature:

The anthropological machine of humanism is an ironic apparatus that verifies the absence of a nature proper to Homo, holding him suspended between a celestial and a terrestrial nature, between animal and human—and, thus, his being always less and more than himself.