Highly reactive
The materials of modernity have aged, and yet we have nothing fresh at our disposal. On entering the artificial aluminium world of Sabina Holzer’s which zones in TQW’s Studio 3, you find yourself confronted with the by now somewhat dated shimmer of the notional aura of the best of all worlds. Modernity’s promises of a smooth, readily available world lie partly crumpled, partly scattered on the ground in Medusaesque shapes that are at once inviting and repulsive. As an uncanny ambiguous image, this miniverse seems like a promising world of glitter and a cold realm of the dead at the same time. The performer’s body is torn between the two opposites. Shrill, laughing almost frantically, the sometimes animal-like creature portrayed by Sabina Holzer delights in the prismatic mirrors of the aluminium world. With jerky, hesitant movements, her legs, arms, hands, head and torso dart into ever new formations. The packaging of Buddhist ritual bowls, beer cans, ice cream, Covid tests and “natural” crisps are lying next to each other indiscriminately. At the same time, the body keeps remembering that, in spite of all its twitching, it cannot be entirely without organs.[1] Lacking a tangible space, an organic order calls for something that cannot find a foothold in this world of reflective smoothness: a twitching becoming-an-animal, becoming-a-surface, becoming-a-disco, becoming-Medusa, becoming-a-wall, an attempt at breaking free that might not even want to recognise itself as such in this world. In a kind of repetitive ritual, the memory of a logos, of “human reason”, peels itself from the performative body. Then the spine straightens and keeps asking Elisabeth Schäfer, who is writing and wearing a titanium aluminium dress, politely: “Well?” The invariable answer: “Great!” The words slip off their materialised promise of freedom. It’s great, incredibly great. Much of the light in the room comes from projectors whose images are refracted by almost infinite aluminium folds onto the wall. Like a whisper holding the secret of their conditions of production, the images promising smoothness are distorted and inadvertently show the complexity of the worlds behind their appeal. “Hallo Alu, where are you coming from?” is a question the performer asks in a human tongue that remains unanswered. Cut, cut, cut – there are cuts, breaks and refractions everywhere in this world that reflects so many unwittingly. The red soil of the Caribbean, the primitive “Third World” ‒ which, according to Mimi Sheller, are hidden behind shapes of streamlined efficiency that signal progress ‒, the poisoning behind purity and cleanliness – all this flares up unseen here.[2] It’s on the tip of the tongue, harsh, somewhere between the deep bass and the crackling of the aluminium foil, which is passed to the audience by Holzer with an extreeemely friendly smile (a promise of transhuman orgies?). Aluminium is present everywhere, but it’s always messy: the third most common element on earth is “highly reactive”, forms compounds spontaneously and everywhere. To counteract this adulterated intractability, modernity has erected gigantic dams all over the world to force the aluminium into a pure form. Massive amounts of electricity deny eight percent of the earth its desired reactions. The sounds of war, exploitation and the expulsion of other living beings are pushed into “second”, “third” and “fourth” worlds – like bestial arithmetic operations only appearing to be ticking away quietly under the smooth surface. The reactions thus inhibited by wires spanning the globe carry before them the corrosive scent of the one major reaction that is being produced while every effort is made to delay it. The human, no-longer-only-human assemblage, portrayed by Sabina Holzer with impressive precision, knows: the dam will break, perhaps it already has. The reactive metastability of the Holocene has lost its balance due to its exaggerated lust for cleanliness.[3] With a voice aspiring to approximate ultrasound, Holzer laments the impending absence of forests, animals, butterflies, mango fruits and bees. All of this is “not cool”. The aluminium world, however, which is most definitely cool, continues to shimmer in the background regardless. Does the human body really have to take in all the extinct ethologies of a formerly pluralistic multiverse in the cold aluminium world? Can it? Sabina Holzer explores these questions and unites the ambiguity of our world on the brink of collapse as an immersion that enables openness. Without being taken in by the allure of the simple answers spread out everywhere, Holzer stays both with the trouble[4] and highly reactive. And at the end, she finds her way quite casually to the light switch and the window. With the window open, normal evening light shines into this vibrant artificial world in an instant. Is it a way out or a showcase for what we usually refuse to acknowledge in our artificial normality? In Sabina Holzer’s piece, content meets form and form meets content. And precisely because these separations, which suggest purity and clarity, are being resolutely helped along the way to collapse, a path to an openness beyond emerges. There will always be a little silver-smooth shimmer among the earths of the future.
[1] According to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus, 1980) there is always a tension between an organism and a body without organs (BwO). In every organism there is a desire for a body without organs, which often suggests freedom. At the same time, Deleuze and Guattari warn: You can only approach the state of a BwO gradually, in the correct dosage, otherwise the organism threatens to mutate, be overcoded by microfascisms or simply turn against itself.
[2] In her book Aluminum Dreams (2014), Mimi Sheller shows that aluminium is not only a central building material of the material culture of modernity but also of its imaginations of progress, freedom and frictionlessness. However, according to Sheller, in an obscure codependent dynamic this dazzling aluminium world simultaneously creates a “primitive” world in the Caribbean and other regions of the global South, which are ideated as “wild” and “uncivilised” to readily enable their exploitation by the so-called “developed countries”.
[3] In her book Against Purity (2016), Canadian philosopher Alexis Shotwell analyses that ‒contrary to modern intuition ‒ purity and cleanliness are not the solution but a cornerstone of the current socio-ecological toxicity of the environment. Keeping oneself pure and clean, unharmed by the toxicity befalling all of the human world therefore establishes a continuation of exploitative practices, even though it would be preferable to live through them, acknowledging their irresolvability, in the sense of Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble.
[4] In reference to Donna Haraway’s hard-to-translate, now-famous dictum and book Staying with the Trouble.
Kilian Jörg works as an artist and a philosopher on the subject of ecological catastrophe and how its transformative forces can best be conceptualised and utilised. In previous publications, he has dealt with club culture, the political backlash from an ecological perspective and a speculative religion of wastefulness. He currently conducts research in the Collaborative Research Centre “Affective Societies” at FU Berlin on the car as a metaphor of our toxic entanglement with modern ways of life. kilianj.org. Kilianjoerg.blogspot.com