Nothing can be linear anymore. There is no possible ‘ecological thinking’ based on linearity or binary notions, which could be defined as pave stones for a monocultural approach of reality. Anna Tsing analyzes those ‘disturbance-based ecologies’, typical of the Anthropocene, that form ‘new assemblages’ and ‘unexpected alliances’ between species cohabiting among precarious environments, entangled together. This is the seedbed of a new narrative, whose leading principle would be: addressing complexity.

The last chapter of my essay Inclusions. Aesthetics of the Capitalocene was devoted to an ‘Expanded relational aesthetics’ including non-human forms of life. This move is based on what I call ‘inclusive thought’. Its first basic principle is acknowledging that we are immersed in a finite world, admitting that we are neither facing nor overlooking an environment, but evolving within a complex ecosystem. Wouldn’t you think that this impacts our ways of feeling or reasoning? Our representations? Our ways of doing, our reading grids? Contemporary anthropology made us more aware of other ways of thinking —incidentally, the very same ways that capitalism has tried, and is still trying, to eliminate. For a person living in the Amazonian forest, what the western people call “environment” rather appears as a gigantic semiosis: the trees, the wind, the clouds and the animals “produce meaning” (to quote Eduardo Koch) as much as any human being. Art represents to me another kind of forest—it is also a semiosis, a semiotic collective production. Within any exhibition we visit, we are placed in a dialogue mode, just as an Achuar Indian is in their forest. Exhibitions and forests are two relational milieus: Philippe Descola described animals as the ‘social partners’ of the Amazonian Indians, and when we experience an exhibition, we are placed in a similar state of encounter: the Achuar forest, saturated with emissions, is recreated there at a smaller scale. In the art world, which extends through time (we encounter signs from the past) and space (we get to meet with distant realities), all the minds gather together, just as with the Achuar Indians after dark. Feeling immersed in the world (or being obliged to do so due to the looming disaster), is first and foremost forgoing the frame of mind that generates all the dualisms which constituted and supported western capitalism (male/female, nature/culture, civilized/savage, citizen/slave, etc.).

What does it mean in terms of curating? Any curator works by organizing webs of relationships between protagonists (artists and artworks), thus forming a ‘field of subjectivation’, a notion that was developed both by Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. But individuals are assembled from a variety of natural and cultural elements, made of things that grow and others that die, of patches—and almost geological foundations. We all are landscapes. Deleuze, again, said that when we encounter someone, we unfold the landscape carried by that person—their history, geography and ‘climate’, another word for psychology. If human beings are landscapes, we cannot continue asking artists to produce in the same way factories do: we have to let them cultivate and grow their forms, manufacture their milieu, prepare or heal their ecosystem. Formerly, artists would expel and produce. Nowadays, they guide things to their formal destination, they plug them together. Art has been considered as superimposed on nature; now, artists view their work as a framing exercise on their milieu—which includes objects, beings, and everything in between.

Impressions from Gwangju, Photos: Dorothee Richter

Entrance to the Gwangju Biennale 2024. Photo: Dorothee Richter

That was the theoretical ground upon which I built the Gwangju biennale 2024. Space will be the main topic. It apparently is a very vague notion: most artworks address space, produce a formal thought that develops within a space.  But I am convinced that this notion is a key to apprehend the Capitalocene, as it is the dimension of life that is violently and radically disrupted by climate change. Deleuze saw the beginnings of art, not in impression or shaping, as most philosophers do, but in the notion of territory. According to him, art starts with an articulation between color, line, and song — the constitution of a territory, a mental ecosystem. Animals are constantly ‘on the alert’ in their ecosystems, and there lies what they have in common with artists, who are vigilant in scanning their surroundings, using urban fragments or visual marks to constitute a parallel order of things. Non-human species do this for their very survival; human artists, to feed their projection. Having antennae is more important than having hands. From an anthropological point of view, art also helps us adjust to our milieu, to learn how to integrate in our ecosystems. Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote that Impressionism, after the immense natural landscapes of the previous centuries, was actually acclimatizing human beings to a suburban environment made of gardens and panoramas always surrounded by buildings. Cubism tightened the focus even more, leaving only café tables and human artefacts to be seen. Lévi-Strauss stopped there, but we could see in abstraction a willingness, or the necessity, to break free from shared spatial coordinates; or perhaps, from the very first incursion of artists into the tiny and the immense, as all abstract paintings end up looking as if they depicted something viewed from a plane or a microscope.

Twenty-first century art, with its interspecies processes and its collapsed spaces, seems to be preparing the human minds to a world that will be soon emptied of any others (animal or vegetal), to a lethal entanglement, to this ‘disturbance-based ecology’ that Anna Tsing writes about. An expanded relational aesthetics has to deal with those entanglements and disturbances. Most of the artists I wrote about in Relational Aesthetics in 1998, let’s say the generation which appeared in the nineties, are nowadays caught in a much broader dynamics: from inter-human relations, they moved to establishing relations with the whole sphere of the living, as social sphere is now clearly including non-human worlds. New short-circuits and new vicinities are appearing, every distance is being reconfigured. Art is a sustainable energy: it reveals the principles that organize space within a society, how knowledge is transmitted, how signs circulate. Covid-19 epidemic, by making “social distancing” the global watchword, facilitated the control of our relational space and was even likely to reshape contemporary cities according to its logic. In 2014, I started a cycle of exhibitions to address the Anthropocene. The Great Acceleration (Taipei Biennial) mapped the interwinings between human, vegetal, mineral and mechanic spheres. The 7th Continent (Istanbul Biennial 2019) approached it from the image of the floating garbage patches in the oceans. In the world of industrial hyper-production, where waste accumulates, overload becomes a crucial element: knowing that thinking implies generalizing, and therefore choosing to forget: how do artists invent new ways of thinking in a saturated space-time? The third part of this trilogy, Planet B: Climate Change and the New Sublime (Venice 2022) acknowledged the return of an old aesthetic notion, the sublime, as the most adequate to describe the immersive reality we are living in, its mix of threat and loss of control. We now know that a virus from the other end of the world can modify our daily life, that the Nutella we have for breakfast has an impact on the Malaysian forest. The world has strangely shrunk and distance does not determine human spaces anymore, as we all are living within a huge network of interconnections. What interests me is to see how artists represent the world according to this new situation: saturation, promiscuity, loops… Or, at the opposite, a quest for an outdoor.

From Taipei biennial to Gwangju, I have the feeling I got rid of my own anthropocentrism, including the need to focus on identity, which represents, for me, a somehow ambiguous notion. Identity is always an ongoing construction, not a state. Anyway, who would start a psychoanalysis on the Titanic? Art comes from an analysis of a milieu and exacerbates the faculty to transform it. Nothing distinguishes the humans from their milieu, nature being their biological framework: from stones to the human brain, and from bacteria to an artwork, the world in indivisible. Human art is a natural production, like the fruit of a tree. Focusing on art as coming from a specific region called “culture” seems quite naïve to me. Colonization is about space (conquered), pollution is about space (exploited), apartheid and patriarchate are about space (allocated). A room of one’s own…, the text by Virginia Woolf, written in 1927, is still relevant today, it could even be expanded.

I always start an exhibition with an image to be reached, an image that the exhibition is supposed to make appear. For The 7th Continent, it was a view from the Pacific garbage patch, floating plastic debris on the oceans. For Gwangju Biennale, it is the image of a Pansori female singer exercising on the top of a hill, vocalizing towards the landscape, taken from a Im Kwon Taek movie, The Pansori singer (Seopyeonje). Pansori is a musical genre created in Korea in the 18th century, originally accompanying shamanistic rituals. It could be translated as the sound (sori) of the market place (pan): but also, as the voice of the subalterns. The exhibition will address contemporary spatial issues through the metaphor of sound, from the social space we inhabit to the way artists are exploring new outdoors with the microscopic and the cosmic. Noise and form will intertwine — only vibrations, wavelengths. The politics of wavelengths… And how they constitute, determine and assign us to specific spaces. Feedback effect signals a lack of distance, saturated space; polyphony is a democracy of sound; and the primordial sound, the original emission, points at the infinite, either the infinitely small or the cosmic immensity. The exhibition will be organized according to those three sounds, but they won’t displayed to the visitor. Only the formal itinerary provides the meaning — because curating is a grammar of its own. The exhibition is elaborated like a film: both a movie, constituted of distinct sequences, and a kind of mental ribbon upon which signs are inscribed. Pansori is subtitled A Soundcape of the 21st century, because the exhibition always keeps the sound in mind; like in Chladni figures, designed out of the powders submitted to vibrations, it translates sonic waves into shapes, and forms into music.

If the three sounds will be invisible in the Biennale, I mean not signaled as such, they will appear in the structure of the exhibition, as building elements. The exhibition space, in the biennale building, will be constructed from the projects, around them, starting from empty halls. It will start with a large corridor, a kind of tunnel where visitors will hear a sound piece by Emeka Ogboh, recorded in the streets of Lagos, Nigeria. This extreme density (the feedback effect) will inhabit the whole first floor of the exhibition, involving the omnipresence of the human figure (Matthias Groebel, Frida Orubapo, David Noonan, Gaëlle Choisne…) within a context of oppression (Choi Haneyl on queer culture in Korea, Sung Tieu and immigration bureaucracy…). The saturated space will be prolongated on the next floor, through projects addressing the artificialization of nature and the colonial plantation system. Noel Anderson’s work will mark the transition between those two floors, pointing at police call up as a spatial structure, bodies caught into an oppressive order. Third floor will be about saturated landscapes, nature as caught in the capitalist system — plantation being the appropriate metaphor. The fourth floor will show intertwinings between human and non-human spheres: interactions between vegetal, machinic and social layers that constitute the world. The last two galleries will have more open spaces, only a few walls, and they will gather artists looking for an outdoor beyond the common space: either into shamanistic rituals (Tabita Rezaire, Jura Shust, Marguerite Humeau…), then artists practising what I call molecular anthropology, i.e a critical depiction of the world at its molecular level, the traceability of our social environment. From oppression to a felling of liberation from the spatial coordinates we live in, the five floors of the exhibition will correspond to five steps.

Cheng Xinhao, Stratums and Erratics, 2023-2024. Gwangju Biennale, 2024. Single-channel video, color, sound, 71 min 58 sec, Section: Polyphony, Gwangju Exhibition Hall Gallery 3. The Polyphony section displays works of artists focusing on multi-layered and multi-focused perspectives. The "Polyphony" section displays works of artists focusing on multi-layered and multi-focused perspectives. Photo: Dorothee Richter

Dora Budor, Passive Recreation, 2024. Single-channel video, rotational grazing wheel fencing, electronics, Dimensions variable, 7 min. 48 sec. Courtesy of Antenna space and Galerie Molitor Commissioned by Nottingham Contemporary Projector sponsored by LG. Section: Feedback Effect, Gwangju Exhibition Hall Gallery 2. The Feedback Effect section shows the sound image of a planet, saturated with human activities, where relationships between humans and species have become dense and the space they inhabit, an echo chamber where everything is contiguous, contagious and immediate.

As the French film director Jacques Rivette once said, every movie is a documentary on the way it was made. First, I always pay attention to the contact with the artists. A biennale is also an occasion to meet many people, and more than half of the list here is constituted by artists I had never met personally beforehand. I remember Harald Szeemann confessed to me, in the nineties, that every exhibition he curated, when it came to choose the artists, implied the same relational formula: One-third confirmed artists, one-third emerging artists, one-third friends. More or less consciously, I always stuck to that lesson. As every city offers different settings, opportunities and organization, there is no system to be applied to create a biennale: you have to reset every time, adjust your way of thinking, adapt to the cultural environment. That is why what I call the ‘Law of Rivette’ is so important for curating: it tells the story of an encounter, a collective meeting between a territory and the participating artists. And here the dominant model will be cartography, an intimate cartography based on investigations and a personal experience of space. For example, Na Mira is working on the memories of the wall separating the US military base from the rest of Seoul; Sâadane Afif, on the former police station that was implemented to control the students in Gwangju; Kwon Hyewon, on deep caves near Jeju Island whose shape can only be determined with sonic equipments; Kandis Williams, on the history of the Afro-American soldiers who remained in Korea after the war… I also asked the Korean writer Han Kang to write a contemporary pansori, interpreted on stage by the Seoul band We Mu, which will be the backbone of an opera, programmed on the opening day, gathering performances and musical pieces by the participating artists into a coherent 45-minutes unit. In the same spirit, rather than multiplying the venues all over the city, I have chosen to divide the biennale in only two distinct parts: beyond the biennale building, the exhibition will spread in a specific neighbourhood, Yang Nim, where a dozen places (an abandoned house, a garage,x an artist’s studio, a gallery…) will shelter solo presentations linked with the city.

And the relational formula applied here would be the following one. The Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro describes the modern world as "an opera with a unique microphone on, the other musicians having been slowly shut down throughout history". Pansori intends to be an opera with all microphones on, more of a social generator than a magnet.

PANSORI, a soundscape of the 21st century
15th Gwangju Biennale, 7 September – 1 December 2024, Gwangju, Republic of Korea
Artistic director: Nicolas Bourriaud
Curatorial team: Barbara Lagié, Kuralay Abdukhalikova, Sophia Park, Jade Barget, Euna Lee
72 artists

French art critic, theoretician, and curator Nicolas Bourriaud was Cofounder and Codirector of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Gulbenkian Curator for Contem­porary Art at Tate Britain, and Director of the l’École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Bourriaud was one of the co-curators of the “Aperto” section of the 1993 Venice Biennale. He is the author of the Relational Aesthetics, first published in 1998 and widely referred to by many artists, curators, and art professionals globally. He has been appointed the artistic director of the 15th Gwangju Biennale, to take place in 2024.