"The memory of the memory of the memory" 2010

 

The Anxious Prop, Berlin
current issue Case 4: Reviewing Making-Visible, 2011

As a follow-up to The Turtle, Nonspheres and Immediate Archeologies series, The Anxious Prop is a project-based adaptation of the object in the contemporary cultural field. Stimulated by present modes of production, performative and of fabrication, it is an agressive look into alternative scenographic practices. This loose adaptation is rooted in the intersection between seeming disparities, for example, between intuition, new labor societies, and rapid prototyping techniques.

This prospectus is not necessarily intended to explore theater itself. There is no prescription, as the process and projects are yet unknown, nor will the interventions necessarily compliment one another nor operate on a traditional stage. It is an alibi, from model, to prototype, to environment, to materialize mental relations between disciplines, so to open us to raise questions through one of the few platforms that can actually experiment with the strategic, tactical, physical, and phenomenological scales of space and contemporary cultural production. The Anxious Prop aims to be a prescient, theoretical and practical endeavor. It aims to foment collective modes of production that will propose a contemplative object, plastic or figurative, testing its conceptual and material footprint, delivering criterias that question authorship and position, as tangible interventions in the public mind and body.

 

Oxígeno Magazine, Spain, o5.2oo8
By Vanesa Sánchez (full interview)

VS: How do you mix art, technology, politics and social commitment in your work?

LBN: This rarely occurs simultaneously. I see the collectivity of my work as a body that creates a series of environments, experiences where these fields might affect one another. That's why I call my current effort 'Nonspheres', as a reference to the relevant term Noösphere, referenced by Soviet naturalist Vladimir Vernadsky who locates human creativity as much as a part of what is natural, just as the wind and the sea. I attempt to propose 'Nonspheres' as a revision, within the context of the contemporary, questioning minimalism, reductionism, and the commodification of ideas into ideologies. Ultimately, I want to celebrate new economies of materials, social interdependence, and the reticulation of human knowledge. As Gramsci said - "everybody is an intellectual, but not everyone has the role of being an intellectual... that is, once in a while we fry an egg or sew a tear on a suit, but that does not necessarily mean that we are cooks or tailors."

VS: Could you give us examples of your work that are related to sustainability?

LBN: I have difficulties with the term 'sustainability'. I understand that in many ways we are in need of packaging and marketing ideas in order to merchandise discourse. The problem is that we are selling everything under the assumption that the economy is a somewhat stable structure based on the false assumption that petroleum is somehow renewable. There's nothing further from reality. The phenomenon 'peak oil' is unfortunately a pending conflict, and we do not have the slightest idea as to what will be its impact. The only thing we do know is that there is a powerful faction in the United States that has no problem with maintaining the future of their 'lifestyles' through the use of international, violent, military force using religion & terrorism as pretext for resource conflicts (creating a fabulous precedent for Russia, China, etc.). This alleged pretext of freedom brand 'USA' is a Trojan horse itself, the 'prequiem' (term referenced by David Woodard) was Kuwait, and now is fully exercised in Iraq, and in lesser-known areas such as Darfur and Chechnya. This 'branding' of democracy reveals the alarming structural instability of the projects of justice and human rights, as Foucault (and Freud before him) had foreseen. So then, how are we going to use the term 'sustainable' if the variables that we are using have fictitious values? That is why I am trying simultaneously to reassess the relationship between the natural and modernity, as well as the incongruence between religious cultures and the logic of the open market... where questions might emerge, thus breaking the hermetic aspect of 'sustainability' as we know it, in order to realign it to the practice of everyday life. This is what we proposed in our microprojects at SOS48 in Murcia.

VS: Tell us your experience at the festival SOS 4.8. What was the reaction of the public?

LBN: It was one of curiosity. And so it was designed. When I proposed the work with the filmmaker / artist Eric Adamsons, the idea was to create another Trojan horse. This had two purposes: one, the idea of using materials found in the immediate area of the Festival, in this case the concrete formwork; two, creating an offering to the public that took the figure of a war machine... simply put, the term was based on 'Nomadology' by Deleuze and Guattari, where the intention is to position the work as a counter-cultural agent. At SOS48, the idea was that in this case the horse was a filtered stage rather than a container, where the spectator was compelled to ask about what is this doing here at SOS48? ie. the context of the sustainable, the logic of Empire, resource wars, neo-liberal colonialism, all gazed through exercises of torture and pleasure (Abu Ghraib, S&M) taking place in the viscera of the 'horse'. The stage transposed the public using tactics of both the tragedy and satire, combined with chroma-key technology, all framed within these performative, contemporary practices.

VS: Tell us about 'Verde que te quiero Verde'; What is this work about?

LBN: Well, the title has two dimensions. The first is a commentary on the diverse meanings and contradictions bearing the color green. I am talking about hope, rebirth, the political and environmental movement(s), the use of it to mask fictitious environments in cinema and television, not to mention the visual association that goes beyond just being the colour of the Muslim faith, but of Islamic fundamentalism. On the other hand, Lorca, which is of course the author of the title, used his own talent not only to deliver his art but also as a vehicle to carry a subversive message against the violent suppression of political and sexual practices during his time. I saw Lorca and the title as a reference to the tactic, which emerges from the fragility of freedom and the human condition. That's why, so far, I use the title twice: first in Kabul where I directed a collaboration with local artists, and now in Murcia where we need to play off from not only the excessive construction developments in this city, but also the challenges related to immigration issues, fascist history and the Aznar government's involvement in the North American exploitation against the people of Iraq.

VS: How do you feel about being part of a new generation or movement of artists who base their works on a commitment to social critique?

LBN: We can see a clear trend, artistic and discursive, about such practices from the moment that serious problems arose from the industrial era... mainly the paternalistic thinking that assumes that we can force Nature. Dewey, Emerson, Vernadsky, Jacobs, Freud, Duchamp, Hubbard, Fuller, et al, are a few of a number of thinkers who identified, with great precision, in text and / or in plastic works, these challenges. The difference today is that we are again approaching one of those conflicting, potentially disastrous moments where the exponential balance between population, the economy of fossil resources and food supplies does not add-up. There are many artists / colleagues whom I admire enormously and with whom I share the enthusiasm of our unspoken practices. I continue trying to generate work that addresses the aesthetics of these challenges, but I do not want to pigeon-hole them into a movement. If we are lucky, all practices will realign their footprints back into the temporal scale of Nature, ceasing to live in the fallacious faith that technology and the heavens will solve everything and that there will be no beauty without it. Yes, faith and technology are components, but it is clear that our genius will not exceed Nature, and that it is a matter of readjusting to her rhythm. Nature stays; We are the ones that go.

VS: What do you think are the possibilities of art as a weapon to change (and improve) the world?

LBN: Well, this is a controversial matter in the art world. There are purists such as Richard Serra that I think, ironically, fear the amplification and evolution of art, saying that art is 'purposefully useless'. However, what happens when he makes a massively printed and disseminated illustration based on the events at Abu Ghraib with the words 'STOP BUSH'? So in the end art has the capacity to be useful, morally and ethically. I'm not interested in the slightest to dedicate myself to this because I find it didactic and boring. But I do believe that artists have the right and ability to position themselves in public, to provoke questions within an audience, to think about what does it mean to live consistently in the future. For this we need much more continuous and relentless discourse bringing this conversation and its factors to the public table.