## Metadata - Author: [[labofii.wordpress.com]] - Full Title: An Open Letter in the Dark - Category: #articles - URL: https://labofii.wordpress.com/2014/10/28/an-open-letter-in-the-dark/ ## Highlights - Many of our artists and intellectual friends fly from biennial to festival, from one city to another to make “radical culture”. It’s all part of the “rights” of the hyper mobile cultural class, a global generation that that has been uprooted from any material place, ripped from local communities, distanced from contexts where they might have some agency in transforming the material world. It suits the status quo that the radical thinkers and makers don’t have a territory, belong to nowhere and float in an abstract vapid world where no solution is graspable, where radical thinking has no anchor in action. But as John Berger says “to improve something, you really need to know the texture, the life story of that thing”, and knowing the story of somewhere takes a lot longer than a festival or a residency, according to some farmers it can take a thousand years to know a place. - We are witnessing a non stop psychic war of images and information waged by capitalism over life, which is having a deep psychic affect on our lives. Like the burdening of our atmosphere with too much CO2, our synapses cannot keep up with the mass of information, our psychic landscape has been transformed by weapons of mass distraction in the war for profit and growth. We no longer have time for attention, the overload leads us to paralysing panic, where changing our world feels as out of reach as true joy. “The economic crisis” Franco “bifo” Berardi writes, “depends for the most part on the circulation of sadness, depression, panic and demotivation.”4 For the Labofii “paying attention” is an inherently political definition of art, because a moment of “attention” is an act of disobedience and desertion from the chaos of a society of mass attention deficit disorder. - “A certain discipline of attention”5 is how The Invisible Committee describes communism, in their manifesto CALL, which celebrates a radical exodus from the metropolis. To “pay attention” to the world is communicating with it, its a tool against separation and distraction, its a weapon of reciprocal relationship. It means observing the world in the same way an artists observes her material, the cook his ingredients, the dancer her gestures, the gardener her seeds, the hacker her code. Its an act of focused sensing, not just with the eyes, but with the entire sensible mind and body. - As artists and activists working towards a postcapitalist culture, we want to live the world we talk and dream about in the present moment, we want to have coherence between our thoughts and our acts. All our work involves non hierarchical processes, we have set up an organic farm and commune and we have not taken a flight for ten years. None of this is to be pure but simply to be coherent, to not separate our aesthetics from our ethics. And none of this is enough unless we are also engaged in dismantling the system of capitalism and domination that is at the root of the crisis. - For us the redefining of art, or what Joseph Beuys would call “expanding the concept of art”, is a central question in the age of the Anthropocene6. In such an age, the ancient distinction between natural history and human history, between culture and nature collapses and so must art must change radically. We must unshackle ourselves from representation, tear down the walls between art and life and re distribute creativity to everyone. - For us at the Labofii the goal can be summed up in a sentence: to remove the ability of the rich to steal from the poor and dismantle the ability of the powerful to destroy our biosphere. The role of art for us is to make this process as creative, desirable and effective as possible – to stop the war of money against life in the most beautiful way possible - Perhaps in an age of extreme ecological and social crisis, the key questions artists and curators need to ask themselves are: Can these the institutions of culture be machines for amplifying our potential to transform the status quo, or are they palaces carefully engineered for us to play the fool in, whilst outside the kings and queens continue to play Russian roulette with our future whilst enriching theirs.