Agreement Window
Wood used window (glass removed), concrete and paper
140 x 100 x 7 cm
View at Die Balkone, curated by Övül Durmusoglu and
Joanna Warsza, Berlin 2021
“Reality cannot be changed unless you agree with it” said once Thomas Hirschhorn on Andy Warhol. “To agree means to confront reality as it is”.
With the protection measures against the pandemic, this ethos of agreement with reality seems to be suspended. Given the evident potential for contagion, normal gestures of expressing agreement and mourning, such as hugging, kissing or shaking hands, can no longer be performed. Less evident is the fact that such gestures do not denote any specific meaning, but instead produce realities such as failure and fame; they engender desires such as love, recognition and forgiveness and, ultimately, they render death some meaning. Far from forming the repertoire of an outdated etiquette, they are gestures – coincidences between language and the body – that in the banal and automatic flavor of the everyday establish and regulate social life.
The forced interruption of this automatic gestures could produce, due to the sudden shock of the pandemic, a snapshot of the current state of the world, which could lead to its assessment and overcoming. However, in spite of the initial optimism, what has actually happened is not an interruption, but rather an acceleration of the digitization of social life.
When algorithmised, reality loses its thickness and opacity. Yes or no, accept or reject, 1 or 0: the binarism of the code controls the messenger, rather than the message. Reality starts to inhabit the small circuit between the origin and reflection of this image of the subject. There is only a sign if it is appropriable: not even the dead are free from this, given that digital rites present themselves as another opportunity to capture attention for themselves, often an imaginary appropriation of the qualities of the deceased, paid for using the currency of gratitude and of likes.
Any sorts of realism, as aesthetic programs, come up against the exhaustion of their own possibility: how to sustain an ethics of agreement and confrontation with a reality that became an echo?
(Published in A Glossary for the Edges of Fiction, Edited by Marta Mestre, Centro Internacional de Artes de Guimarães, Portugal, 2021)
matheus rocha pitta 