Let’s talk botany. The contemporary world, by orchestrating the material conditions of movement, facilitates our transplantations. Flowerpots, nurseries, greenhouses, open country. Is it only coincidence that modernism was from start to finish a tribute to the root? It was radical. In the course of the twentieth century, artistic (and political) manifestos appealed for a return to the origin of art or of society, to their purification, with the aim of rediscovering their essence. It was a matter of cutting off useless branches, subtracting, eliminating, rebooting the world from a single master principle that was presented as the foundation of a liberating new language. Let us wager that our own century’s modernity will be invented precisely in opposition to all radicalism, dismissing both the bad solution of re-enrooting in identities as well as the standardization of imaginations decreed by economic globalization. For contemporary creators are already laying the foundations for a radicant art - […] To be radicant means setting one’s roots in motion, staging them in heterogeneous contexts and formats, denying them the power to completely define one’s identity, translating ideas, transcoding images, transplanting behaviors, exchanging rather than imposing.
Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant, 2009Let's talk Botany
Invitations to contemplate these words and play with your thoughts
Collections that include this source
Keep exploring
Paradoxes in the quest of an origin
Well, where does the Danube has its origin?
It seems that, against the age-old controversies between specialists, it stems from the source of the river Breg, but the water that irrigates the meadow from which the Breg rises comes from a pipe, planted straight into the ground.
An old woman who lives in a house on top of the meadow has attached a hollow trunk to the pipe, which forms a kind of gutter. Is it therefore necessary to conclude that the Danube originates from a gutter? In this matter the first foundation is missing, the base that holds everything together; even the gutter that feeds the spring is fed by the spring]
Anonymous
The Danube that both is and is not, that is born in several places of several parents, reminds us that, thanks to the complex, hidden fabric to which we owe our existence, each of us is a Noteentiendo [a form of not understanding you], as are the people from Prague with German names or the Viennese with Czech ones. But on this evening, along the river which they tell us sometimes disappears in summer, the step which treads with mine is as unmistakable as that watercourse, and in the flow of it, as I follow the curve of the banks, perhaps I know who I am.
Claudio Magris, Danube, 1986
What if we are looking for the source of a river and we find out that it is a gutter, collecting rainwater?
Invitations to contemplate these words and play with your thoughts
Collections that include this source
Keep exploring
- When governments pursue growth as a goal in itself, they undertake desperate and damaging measures to make it happen. They chase cheap energy and keep issuing licences for fossil fuels and opening coal mines. They say they're cutting red tape in the name of business innovation, but they end up unde …
of our Imagination
