A history of the human quest for progress within the intricate system of Gaia, which has led to an ecological mutation and ideological crisis. And how, consequently, in order to survive together we have to move from a human-centered politics towards life-centered politics, representing us and the other 99,9999% of Earthlings
Research in collaboration with Martin Lok (ministry of LNV), Wouter van Dieren (Club of Rome) and Partizan Publik
Presented at and finalized after Springtij festival 2018
Critically inspired by the writings of amongst others David van Reybrouck, Bruno Latour and Yuval Noah Harari
Drawing made by Carlijn Kingma in Amsterdam, 2019
Size: 963 x 963 mm
This research and drawing aim to support the project ‘De Zandafgraving van Spaubeek’, presented in detail at the end of the research, initiated by Partizan Publik.
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'The Chronicle of Gaia' reads as a spiraling history of the intricate network of Gaia; all actors sustaining life on Earth. A history, starting in the heart of the Fibonacci sequence, up to the point where humans have become geological agents, changing the most basic physical processes of the earth. This is a story about the current ideological crisis and climate mutation, which in my view is a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.
We start in the center of the spiral, in another scale of time at the beginning of it all or the creation of light, as the story slowly unfolds along the Fibonacci sequence. From light and matter (chemistry) to the first living organisms (biology) into a world in which multiple storylines of different actors and species influence and interact with each other, create alliances, hierarchies and stories (culture).
First, we follow the multiple visions on the beginning of time through the metaphor of a tree. A world with no distinction between things existing inside and outside the human minds. A world that lacked the difference between things that presented themselves and things that represented other things. A harmonious feedback loop, or Paradise some might call it, between our mind and our body that flowed relentlessly, unbroken and unhindered. From Darwin’s theory of evolution, to a tree of fertile seeds where the fetuses of all species look highly alike for the largest amount of time before conception, to the history of the Edda and the Yggdrasil, Tzim Tzim. This world on the left side of the drawing, finally brings to mind the tale of Biblical paradise. The story tells of the Garden of Eden in which the first two humans, Adam and Eve, lived naked, in harmony with the plants, trees and animals. Eating what they wanted, resting when they felt like it. Adam and Eve’s mind did not pause to think whether what they did was right or wrong, they just did what they felt like. One day the serpent appeared and tempts Eve to eat the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. “If you taste this fruit,” the serpent tells her, “You will know what only God knows; to understand when something is right, and, when something is wrong.” Of course Adam and Eve take the apple and are exiled from paradise for doing so. Adam and Eve’s story is usually brought as the tale of original sin that led to the fall of man. The message being; it is in man nature that he is easily tempted to sin, and if he would have just obeyed God we would have still have been in paradise. But perhaps we could propose an alternative reading of Adam and Eve’s story. By disobeying God and consuming the serpent’s offering, Adam an Eve planted the divine seed of consciousness in their body. Symbolically marking the moment where we evolved from animal automatons to conscious human beings.
At the foot of this all comprehending tree, we stand in front of the flood, at the edge of a conceptual void. A void that can be read as the exile from Paradise, or as the beginning of the cognitive revolution. The moment in time where the storyline of the humankind slowly starts to prevail over the roots of the other storylines.
The price Adam and Eve had to pay for gaining consciousness was that they lost the holistic harmony with their environment. Consciousness caused the smooth flow between them and the world to stutter. The roots growing from the seed of consciousness cracked their singular world into two. They now enjoyed a world of introspection, where they could witness their own thoughts, and they had a world of out there of direct experience and presence. This small crack gradually grew into a chasm drawing the self and the world out there apart. No longer was the world an unquestioned whole. Now humans could have their own thought about it, and if it please them they could meddle with it.
The story of mankind gaining divine knowledge, or consciousness, is told by the Christian tradition a story of loss. We have lost paradise. We have fallen from an innocent state of harmony to which we can never fully return, but nonetheless we will forever desire to do so. The same story could be understood as man embarking on an adventure. By gaining consciousness he was expelled from paradise, but it made him work the land and build cities. He could now built his own world. And he could do so because he was conscious. Since one could argue that the division of the world into two realms is a prerequisite for to create anything at all. Because for a world to be experienced, imagined or made, you need at least two of them. One from where you can see the other, from where you can plan, act and make the new. And so man started to lift up their storyline, throwing shadows over the surface of the Earth. In that sense indeed man had become like a God, since now he too was a creator.
The adventure of humankind begins. From one world to the next. From the agricultural revolution, to the invention of the wheel. From an era where animism was the prevailing system of belief amongst humans, where human ideas about morality and values had to take into account the interest of other beings, like animals, plants and spirits, to the start of the history of democracy, where politics became mainly human-centered.
As the storyline of humankind develops - from the invention of ownership, to one of the first democracies in ancient Athens, to the introduction of book printing at the end of the Middle Ages and the Age of Exploration - ideological development coalesces with ecological mutation. The control of fire resulted in the burning of flora and fauna in order to create grasslands for our cattle; the age of Exploration causing the spread of deceases, bringing many species to extinct; the Industrial revolution, the beginning of the Age of Man (the Antrhopocene), where human CO2 emissions induced global warming is widely accepted as being a contributor to extinction worldwide, in a similar way that previous extinction events have generally included a rapid change in global climate and meteorology.
From the moment that humans became conscious, we slowly but steadily started to use our inner world to will things into existence. It took man from the cave to the city. It gave us a history of civilisations, building and destroying them, over and over again, one on top of the other. Eventually bringing us where we are today, the 21st century, where humans are encapsulated in a completely man-made world.
Today 83% of the territory of the earth is shaped by men. We have recently introduced CRISPR genmodification technology. The sixth mass extinction event that humankind has caused, the loss of tens of thousands of species per year, goes hand in hand with the formation of new species.
We have remade the heavens, and erased the stars. Our lights of progress have pulled a pale orange blanket over our cities, obscuring the ultimate outside of our existence, the celestial realms of the cosmos. But today it is not the stars, but our gadgets guide our way. Although we seem to feel more lost everyday. All that we can see at night on an urban sky are the blinking lights of aircraft, the occasional satellite, and one or two lonely stars. It is not just this cosmic outside that our progress has hidden from view, our man-made world is all around and deep inside us, from the clothes on our back and the food in our belly. Everything around us is invented, designed, made, managed, regulated and produced by man. Not that we really know who or what made it, where these things came from, or how they were was produced, we just know that the world we inhabit is the fruit of the aggregate imagination and labour of the mankind. An amazing but also alienating thought, since we literally live inside an environment that is completely artificial, the product of fantasy. A culture depriving the earth of it life sustaining actors and where each day more of us feel lost in an ocean of fleeting imagery and simulated realities, afraid of losing our bodily senses in the sea of mediation. A fast moving, optimized, modern media-satured world, where politics has turned in to a spectacle resulting in a democratic crisis of as well efficiency as representation.
Culture generates desires – for vehicles and appliances, for certain kinds of gardens and dwellings – that are among the principal drivers of the carbon economy. The human quest for progress and creation within the intricate system of Gaia, has led to an ecological mutation and ideological crisis. And now, consequently, in order to survive together we have to move from a human-centered politics towards life-centered politics, representing us and the other 99,9999% of Earthlings. A Parliament of Things where, as Bruno Latour states, law should not be centered around Men, but around Life. We are just one party, among all animals, plants and Things.
This research and drawing aim to support the project ‘De Zandafgraving van Spaubeek’, presented in detail at the end of the research, initiated by Partizan Publik.