VISIONARY INSTITUTE
Slow Disturbance Exhibition Model (SDEM)-
2019- ongoing project and practice of disturbance and destabilisation of conventional format of an exhibition
‘If we are interested in liveability, impermanence, and emergence, we should be watching the actions of landscapes assemblages. Assemblages coalesce, change, and dissolve: this is the story’ (Anna Tsing)
Multispecies Visionary Institute developed an ‘exhibition model’ called Slow Disturbance Exhibition Model (SDEM). This model is a permeable space, ‘not limited in terms of duration’,[1] and it reflects and is connected to the living world engaging the inner and outer of multispecies worlds with audiences through collective experience and eco-social responsibility. I drew inspiration from the practice of Pierre Huyghe who questioned and redefined the boundaries of art and challenged the format of an exhibition. He proposed the exhibition as an event that continues outside of the framework of conventional settings of the gallery or museum, saying:
An exhibition ends, but the work continues, and sometimes precedes its appearance. The things exist outside of their exhibition or extend their exhibition. The word exhibition needs to be redefined. Something varies over time; over the course of this development, something appears in time and place and then disappears. It leaks into another physical or biological r
eality. There is hesitation, pulsation, a rhythm, a vitality. Something is there and not there; it changes constantly, continues growing. An idea develops in stages.[2]
I engaged artist Pawel Althamer’s proposition that an exhibition is in itself, a work of art; a continuation of the content, a conduit to specific experience of heighten sensibility and a platform that should invite a specific way of interacting with the whole set up: The fundamental nature of this proposition is the open field of possibility that invites on the part of those who encounter such situation and, should they so choose, become part of the work itself-or, perhaps more correctly, have the work become part of them.
Anna Tsing describes slow disturbance landscapes as man-made ecosystems where disturbance results in a transformation of the environment so that many species can live together. Slow disturbance requires human intervention, as an active part in the balance with natural forces. Tsing calls Man the ultimate ‘weedy invader’ and in her view disturbance is a good tool for the layering of global, local, expert, or vernacular knowledge, for patterning, and organising assemblages, and for ‘ecosystem engineering’ analogous to organisms making intergenerational living spaces.
An exhibition ends, but the work continues, and sometimes precedes its appearance. The things exist outside of their exhibition or extend their exhibition. The word exhibition needs to be redefined. Something varies over time; over the course of this development, something appears in time and place and then disappears. It leaks into another physical or biological r
eality. There is hesitation, pulsation, a rhythm, a vitality. Something is there and not there; it changes constantly, continues growing. An idea develops in stages.[2]
I engaged artist Pawel Althamer’s proposition that an exhibition is in itself, a work of art; a continuation of the content, a conduit to specific experience of heighten sensibility and a platform that should invite a specific way of interacting with the whole set up: The fundamental nature of this proposition is the open field of possibility that invites on the part of those who encounter such situation and, should they so choose, become part of the work itself-or, perhaps more correctly, have the work become part of them.
Anna Tsing describes slow disturbance landscapes as man-made ecosystems where disturbance results in a transformation of the environment so that many species can live together. Slow disturbance requires human intervention, as an active part in the balance with natural forces. Tsing calls Man the ultimate ‘weedy invader’ and in her view disturbance is a good tool for the layering of global, local, expert, or vernacular knowledge, for patterning, and organising assemblages, and for ‘ecosystem engineering’ analogous to organisms making intergenerational living spaces.
I considered and applied this slow disturbance concept directly to an exhibition. Could an installation within a gallery space be ‘a good tool for the layering of global, local, expert, or vernacular knowledge’ and a place for ‘patterning, and organising assemblages, for the design of ‘ecosystem engineering?’
Slow Disturbance Exhibition Model is a method for display and communication. Held within a self-contained structure in the gallery space it could act as a conceptual as well as practical, and physical tool, providing a container and context for ‘positive disturbance' and a home for the practices of the Multispecies Visionary Institute, exhibitions, performance, workshops, meditations, therapy, and education to take place. The Multispecies Visionary Institute could be seen as the ‘weedy invaders’ cultivating a Slow Disturbance Exhibition Model, as a conceptual and physical space, where mapping and modelling a vision for sustainable future could take place, where ‘art objects and art ideas come to existence only in the moment of transmission.’4
Combining this idea with how Belgian artist Joelle Tuerlinckx contextualised the use of the ‘exhibition as a medium’ stating, ‘an exhibition is a perpetual redefinition of things, a sort of permanent refutation’, the Slow Disturbance Exhibition Model could also be seen as an autonomous artwork ‘in its internal organisation and coordinated address’ and as model to be explored by the viewer ‘a unified display with the manipulation of the viewer’s experience in time’.7
This exhibition model is a ‘unit of artistic significance, and the object of constructive intent’, where art as an Apparatus for Resurgence in Trophallaxis is an ongoing process. As Kaprow said, ‘art that invites us to partake wholly in the real nature of art and life’ and where everything including visitors, can grow a little in such circumstances.’ The idea was to invite audiences into a complex, synergetic system, where they would be surrounded by the artwork whilst themselves becoming an ‘activating and activated’ component of it. A space able to offer multiple experiences, ‘creative exercises’, and points of view, to be ‘penetrated’, and activated by the viewer. The viewer can ‘integrate the world into itself’, become a part of art and sense that art is a part of the environment.
Considering a Duchampian anti-formalist approach, where ‘In the organization of an exhibition, artwork should not stand in the way’ and where the whole exhibition is ‘ultimate actor’, I aspired to create a model for showing work where the techniques and style of presentation are consistent and conducive to the ideas explored. The appearance of this model needed to match the work’s potential, and power for generating meaning. It would need its own, very particular architecture that as well as creating a physical place, would provide a ‘space of imagination’. All together the SDEM manifests in opposition to waste generating unsustainable exhibitions.