Hangar
In Lisbon the Sensing Salon gathered as a study group on entangled existence, in the form of a four-day meeting as a private study group (January 14-17), a screening of Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s film Serpent Rain (2016) , and the symposium “Toward a Transformative Theory of Justice ,
The study group gathered guests who took part in the symposium as well as Lisbon-based artists, activists and intellectuals. The study group departed from the question that closes Serpent Rain : “what would become of the human if expressed through the elements?” A question inspired by the sense that the grip the metaphysics of linearity (and its attendant onto-epistemological descriptors, such as separability and fixity) has on our imagination accounts for the prevalence of violence in modern global existence. From experimenting with practices and tools that presume deep implicancy (such as Tarot, Reiki, Astrology, etc.), over five years now, we found that, among other things, they create a form of sociality that does not presume the fundamental separability that prevails in philosophical, social scientific, and commonsensical representations of existence. An important aspect of these practices is that the classic elements (air, fire, water, and earth) and correspondence (or similarity) constitute their lexicon and grammar. By framing the question(ing) of the human around the possibility of describing it using the elements, we hope to create a study space to explore the possibilities that open up when similarity replaces linearity as the metaphysical basis for thinking and existing.
From Tuesday (14th) to Friday (17th) , a day was dedicated to the study of the Human through one element. Each guest — Mark Harris (Air), Jota Mombaça (Fire), Stacey Ho (Water) and Kobey Mathis/Agency ( Earth) reflected on rethinking the category of the Human through their practice and the way it relates to that element. The program also included a public screening of Serpent Rain, on Friday, and it closed with the symposium on Saturday, with a Keynote by Raquel Lima.
The project was co-produced and co-commisisoned by KADIST, Paris, in the framework of KADIST’s three-year project Not Fully Human, Not Human at All, curated by Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, together with Hangar, Lisbon and Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon. It also received the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
