Fabian Marti
28 May - 31 Jul 2015
FABIAN MARTI
tais-toi accélérationiste!
28 May - 31 July 2015
Galleria Fonti is pleased to announce tais-toi accélérationiste!, the third solo exhibition in the gallery by artist Fabian Marti. The show is composed by new works realized using the photogram technique and some drawings on paper.
tais-toi accélérationiste!
by Dr. Paul J. Ennis
Life emerged from de-subjectivated matter. This qualitative leap is the embryonic stage leading, through torturous routes of mass extinction, to our taking centre-stage. Entangled in the arms of an octopus called conscious life we were hatched into an existence none of us could possibly have asked for. For we were not there before our birth and nobody could ask us: is this what you want? Our species has a desperate desire for procreation, it celebrates fertility, and yet only a few ask whether it is worth it at all. On this question things are truly black and white: either existence is better than non-existence or it is not. Morose anti-natalism stalks the egg. The oval we steal and eat for sustenance from creatures we recognize as living and yet lesser. Lesser because in our narrative of sentience evolution is a teleological line leading to consciousness. It’s an illusion, of course. We think because we adapted in just the correct manner, in response to contingent pressures, but this good fortune, if one wishes to call it that, is held down by nothing more than a blind biological evolutionary process. Let us recall a false memory that is nonetheless excellent advice: “tais-toi accelerationiste!” It never happened. And this is the point lost on the politicized: no matter how it all ends, and it will end, as we know, nothing will have ever really happened. It is better in this sense to “shut up” (I would if I could, as one writer said to the other).
To stay silent is a challenge of immense proportions for our species. To recede from the desire to leave a trace or a mark. Proof that you were here. Fertile, vital, alive. When, to borrow the logic of Ray Brassier’s “transcendental extinction,” everyone’s already dead when you think according to cosmological time rather than human temporality. If all matter dissolves, and this is where the cosmos is going, you are retroactively dead. The French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux once revealed a desire to visit the world of de-subjectivated matter and to return with tales to tell. Both Brassier and Meillassoux were once thinkers of the compulsion toward death-drive: the will to be at one with the in-itself. However, even when we are retroactively dead this journey cannot but occur in the time-slice of life. We index a current configuration of time experienced in a peculiar manner. Aware we are to cease, perhaps even desirous of it, we persist in a loop of reproduction: there are ever more eggs to be made. There are no gods, but there are libidinal forces stronger than any we might imagine. Let me be clear: the problem is life. It is a vector inhabiting inorganic matter. It is we who are the edge of the non-vital. Break every egg you see. Eat them too. They are the ones fortunate to have been spared.
This is the energy and impulse that vitalism raises from the inert. Far better to revert to radio silence where at least the cosmos refuses to provide a message. Cut if you must. Conserve energy only to become ever emptier. It is only a neurobiological simulation. My body tells me otherwise, but it would. Prepare for transcendental extinction as if it were to occur tomorrow. Refuse the air. Let in the voices that speak across one another and do so at the same time. They are all vouching for a significance that, criss-crossing one another, attest to their mutual insignificance. The big brain says to the small brain: keep going. The oval in your head. Here my cards are all on the table. Is it just an extravagant ruse? Or is there nothing more than the electricity that types? Let us take a walk to the beach where, as it happens, turtles come to lay their eggs. Sound biological imperative washed ashore. And to us? What could this process possibly be other than a wave, a mirror, a spectacular terrorism that is evidence of the cosmic mistake? The same questions always arise when one meditates on contingency: who, precisely, am I talking to? An audience member perhaps, but you should know I do not even believe in myself and so, all things being equal, perhaps you should return the favor.
Who does one who does not believe in a self write for? Perhaps the young since they do not yet know. Absent of the full awareness of the situation they remain at play. As the process of de-mystification sets in it is replaced by either delusions or distractions. My chosen axiomatic of ontological nihilism has no other balm than aesthetics. Specifically the aesthetics of pessimism. Shorn of my critical knives I am there too in the dirt: a libidinal embryo imbricated in the same sorry mesh as the rest. There is no bridge here that leads one to the light. I write so as not to drown in the river below. To this end, it is only left to live, as one must, amidst the qualitative leap from matter to life: to witness in the egg an occurrence, emerging as if from nowhere, and walk amongst what can be built from even the most ruinous state of being. Our world is a menacing intotality. Do not take its strangeness for granted. Not that those in art galleries often do. Tones, textures, and wine, but more importantly: “tais-toi accelerationiste!” Remind yourself: you are as dead as the eggs.
tais-toi accélérationiste!
28 May - 31 July 2015
Galleria Fonti is pleased to announce tais-toi accélérationiste!, the third solo exhibition in the gallery by artist Fabian Marti. The show is composed by new works realized using the photogram technique and some drawings on paper.
tais-toi accélérationiste!
by Dr. Paul J. Ennis
Life emerged from de-subjectivated matter. This qualitative leap is the embryonic stage leading, through torturous routes of mass extinction, to our taking centre-stage. Entangled in the arms of an octopus called conscious life we were hatched into an existence none of us could possibly have asked for. For we were not there before our birth and nobody could ask us: is this what you want? Our species has a desperate desire for procreation, it celebrates fertility, and yet only a few ask whether it is worth it at all. On this question things are truly black and white: either existence is better than non-existence or it is not. Morose anti-natalism stalks the egg. The oval we steal and eat for sustenance from creatures we recognize as living and yet lesser. Lesser because in our narrative of sentience evolution is a teleological line leading to consciousness. It’s an illusion, of course. We think because we adapted in just the correct manner, in response to contingent pressures, but this good fortune, if one wishes to call it that, is held down by nothing more than a blind biological evolutionary process. Let us recall a false memory that is nonetheless excellent advice: “tais-toi accelerationiste!” It never happened. And this is the point lost on the politicized: no matter how it all ends, and it will end, as we know, nothing will have ever really happened. It is better in this sense to “shut up” (I would if I could, as one writer said to the other).
To stay silent is a challenge of immense proportions for our species. To recede from the desire to leave a trace or a mark. Proof that you were here. Fertile, vital, alive. When, to borrow the logic of Ray Brassier’s “transcendental extinction,” everyone’s already dead when you think according to cosmological time rather than human temporality. If all matter dissolves, and this is where the cosmos is going, you are retroactively dead. The French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux once revealed a desire to visit the world of de-subjectivated matter and to return with tales to tell. Both Brassier and Meillassoux were once thinkers of the compulsion toward death-drive: the will to be at one with the in-itself. However, even when we are retroactively dead this journey cannot but occur in the time-slice of life. We index a current configuration of time experienced in a peculiar manner. Aware we are to cease, perhaps even desirous of it, we persist in a loop of reproduction: there are ever more eggs to be made. There are no gods, but there are libidinal forces stronger than any we might imagine. Let me be clear: the problem is life. It is a vector inhabiting inorganic matter. It is we who are the edge of the non-vital. Break every egg you see. Eat them too. They are the ones fortunate to have been spared.
This is the energy and impulse that vitalism raises from the inert. Far better to revert to radio silence where at least the cosmos refuses to provide a message. Cut if you must. Conserve energy only to become ever emptier. It is only a neurobiological simulation. My body tells me otherwise, but it would. Prepare for transcendental extinction as if it were to occur tomorrow. Refuse the air. Let in the voices that speak across one another and do so at the same time. They are all vouching for a significance that, criss-crossing one another, attest to their mutual insignificance. The big brain says to the small brain: keep going. The oval in your head. Here my cards are all on the table. Is it just an extravagant ruse? Or is there nothing more than the electricity that types? Let us take a walk to the beach where, as it happens, turtles come to lay their eggs. Sound biological imperative washed ashore. And to us? What could this process possibly be other than a wave, a mirror, a spectacular terrorism that is evidence of the cosmic mistake? The same questions always arise when one meditates on contingency: who, precisely, am I talking to? An audience member perhaps, but you should know I do not even believe in myself and so, all things being equal, perhaps you should return the favor.
Who does one who does not believe in a self write for? Perhaps the young since they do not yet know. Absent of the full awareness of the situation they remain at play. As the process of de-mystification sets in it is replaced by either delusions or distractions. My chosen axiomatic of ontological nihilism has no other balm than aesthetics. Specifically the aesthetics of pessimism. Shorn of my critical knives I am there too in the dirt: a libidinal embryo imbricated in the same sorry mesh as the rest. There is no bridge here that leads one to the light. I write so as not to drown in the river below. To this end, it is only left to live, as one must, amidst the qualitative leap from matter to life: to witness in the egg an occurrence, emerging as if from nowhere, and walk amongst what can be built from even the most ruinous state of being. Our world is a menacing intotality. Do not take its strangeness for granted. Not that those in art galleries often do. Tones, textures, and wine, but more importantly: “tais-toi accelerationiste!” Remind yourself: you are as dead as the eggs.