Beyond the End — KADIST — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 30 → July 27, 2014

Beyond the End is an exhibition dedicated to a research and residency program initiated in 2010 in Tierra del Fuego by curator Camila Marambio. Over the years, she has given shape to a dialogue between artists, scientists, local inhabitants and Karukinka Natural Park in a program entitled Ensayos. Based on the premise that only creative collaboration can efface frontiers in the field of biocultural conservation Ensayos enacts the complex interdependence of humans, non-humans and matter with the urgency of maturing aesthetic sensibility in the face of scientific discoveries.

Assuming the Karukinka Natural Park as a political landscape, as well as a laboratory, artists and scientists discussed their different disciplinary methodologies and created a shared experimental practice: tuning in to whatever calls. When one hears a call of any sort, emmited by someone or something, it immediately makes one responsible in the sense of having to respond, in word or in deed, to that call.¹ The initial exercise of sensitivizing oneself to the calls of the wild has lead the participants of Ensayos to venture into new ethical, performative and cognitive territories.

Christy Gast, Rio Robalo, 2014 Courtesy of the artist & Kadist Art Foundation, Paris

Articulated in three parts, the exhibition Beyond the End consists of an immersive installation, a week long discursive session and a research residency. The discursive session to take place the week following the opening between artists and researchers will delve into a meta-reflection on: transdisciplinary methodologies employed, the awakening of an eco-aesthetic sensibility and morality, the notion of species, the history of collective and individual movements as experienced in Tierra del Fuego, amongst other matters of concern. During this work week each participant will give a curated public presentation (calendar to be confirmed).

These presentations will serve as a leeway into the third part of the exhibition: the launching of Ensayos new research objective of grasping the post-human geography of the isles of Tierra del Fuego. The participants of this new essay get to use the remaining exhibition period to reflect on the history of Tierra del Fuego as seen from Paris. A history that is not only calling to be dealt with in terms of the interdependency with the non-human, but also quickly reveals its ties with the colonial, economic and scientific interests of the rest of world, in particular of the French. Each researcher is invited to use Kadist as an office/lab to gather their initial research material and to exhibit in the form of questions and new lines of inquiry that might arise. These inquiries will eventually be dealt with in-situ during a residency period in January of 2015 in Tierra del Fuego.

¹ The thinking and writing of philosopher Emilie Hache as expresed in her book, “Ce à quoi nous tenons. Propositions pour une écologie pragmatique” (Les empêcheurs de penser en rond / La découverte, 2011), as well as her joint essay with Bruno Latour “Morality or Moralism ? An Exercise in Sensitization” have informed Ensayos rhetoric.