Models of the Universe

video essay, 2’00”, 2009

The film is created as a study reflecting on the function of a specific cultural genre: art exhibitions. It emerged from the discussions around the preparation of the Manifesta 8 biennale in Murcia. The author, as a member of the curatorial collective, created a statement in which he tried to summarize the current approach and interpretation of exhibitions as a modeling of the world, a tool for thinking about human history and the future. In it, he suggests methodological openness, interdisciplinarity and a connection with poetic analogies. Human complex activities taking place in time, such as gardening, city building or scientific approaches, offered him a cognitive tool for creating and reading temporary spatial formations established in the present into exhibition forms.

Script:

I’m interested in an exhibition as a model of the world – this can have various forms:

A model of the universe as a society similar to how the human world is organized in which the various entities cooperate together or compete against each other.

A model of the universe as a constitution in which each of the participants draws up its own paragraph of a common constitution, its own rules and rights of coexistence.

A model of the universe as a brain in which relationships are defined through the interaction of the various parts and the intermingling of scales.

A model of the universe as a thinking process in which lines find connections with other lines and create nodes from which other lines come from.

A model of the universe as a library in which the various bookshelves are divided according to themes and correspond to various types of knowledge.

A model of the universe as a book in which the stream of text is divided into unexpected contexts.

A model of the universe as a mathematical exercise whose end does not produce a result, but an unsolvable paradox.

A model of the universe as a machine that produces the certainty of continuity for its gears.

A model of the universe as a garden in which one can lose his way and never find the exit.

A model of the universe as the human body in which the organs fill all the space within and have their function subordinate to the whole.

A model of the universe as a theatrical play in which the viewer goes through various degrees of empathy and illumination.

A model of the universe as an archaeological field in which by adding to incomplete parts new wholes are reconstructed and created.

A model of the universe as a dictionary in which everything is arranged by entry and in alphabetical order.

A model of the universe as a city built upon the ruins of older cities.

A model of the universe as a narrated story to be continued.

etc