28/07/2024
NOETIC STRUCTURES
by Marit Følstad / Ole Jørgen Ness
14.09. - 15.12. 2024
consultório
Chamusca, Portugal
curated by 222T
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ROCA ARCTICA
by Marit Følstad
14.09.2024 - permanent
Lusitanus, stable and education center for horses
Golega, Portugal
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NOETIC STRUCTURES
Scandiberia 2024
As part of an ongoing Portuguese/Norwegian collaboration, pursuing the possibilities of new Scandiberian connections, Consultorio Project Room (PT) and 222T (NO), presents a site-specific double-project - Roca Arctica in Golegã and Noetic Structures in Chamusca - focusing on various noetic structures enabling human understanding, interspecies communication, and noospheric trans-mission.
Following last years presentation XIVIVIX, featuring Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Pedro Pascoinho, in Oslo (14.09.23), the opening of this year’s artistic realisations falls on the 14th of September 2024, and marks a first important Scandiberian anniversary (which fittingly also is the European horse day - Euro Equus).
(orna)Mental Responsiveness
As a response to the ongoing decimation (extinction) of animal species, their habitats, the general dwindling of human analogue crafts, and - not the least - as an expression of our deep environmental concerns - this double project’s main motivation is to move us all beyond the habitual. The quest is to establish new approaches to what art is and where it could be found.
Moving beyond the habitual to establish new approaches to what art is and where it can be found, artists like Holt/Smithson found their noospheric gateway in a dessert in the Milky Way. Some two hundred years earlier Romantic painters like Norwegian Peder Balke ventured to the Arctic’s icy cape-plateau in search of the sublime.
It is this need to go beyond the horizon, be it across a vast ocean or the edge of reason, that reveals the proto-romantic force. It should not be confused with - or reduced to - a mere historic painterly tradition or a bygone fancy.
A RELATIONAL APROACH
Mooriberians, Celtiberians and Scandiberians
The way we see it, there is a “folding”, perceptibly similar to the nooks and crannies of the meta-morph processes traceable in the stone - a folding in the way various groups and individuals (strata) interact and fuse over time. There is pressure, there is heat, and there is an abundance of “agents”, in multiple professions, interweaving and folding their lives together.
This folding of strata follows traditional (habitual) “baroque” morpho-genetic dynamics, impressed in our way of reasoning and in the way we conduct our culture.
Traces of the symbiotic, co-evolution of animals, land, and humans are still present in the pre- historical rock-carvings of Lusitania in the south, and Lapponia in the north. The Arctic reindeer and the Iberian horse are both central actors in the visual chronicles that our ancestors left behind.
Thinking of the zoomorphic creatures featured in the rock-carvings mentioned (Vale do Cóa, Portugal, and Alta, Norway), there would perhaps be no such expressive (artistic) practices without them (the not-humans):
The meaning of animals is implicit in what they do: eat, run, leap, crawl display, call, fly, mate, fight, sing, swim, hide, slither, climb, and die. One or another does each of these things with more finesse and more expertise than people. Their keenness is reflected in the shapes of their bodies and the traces they leave. Animate signs and signatures move through our dreams and imagination, evoke our feelings, portray “us” in a kind of allegory.
AS IF THE HORSES CARE
The possible impact of Roca Arctica
“The loss of all sorts of non-human others has turned Sartre’s existentialist, metaphysical loneliness, into a literal loneliness (…) The fever animals left, the more important it becomes for us to make some contact with them, not only in the sense of acknowledging them as coexisting with us on Earth, but in the more demanding sense of having the animals acknowledge us, giving us some sign that they see us and that we are important to them, meaning that there is - or could be - some reciprocity to this need, that it will play out as a meeting-halfway between different species, us and them.
Not only is this a tall order; it is fundamentally mistaken. The point is not that humans are crucial to making animals into animals: we are not. Rather, and this makes for asymmetry and non-reciprocity, animals are crucial to making us human, and they are so in virtue of being different from us, not us and not like us. They being different means that they are indifferent to us; the more indifferent the better. This is the whole philosophical point about animals being sui generis wild in Shepard’s perspective.
However…only animals that are in a position to maintain their independence from humans can be indifferent to us in the way Shepard affirms.“ (Shepard, Vetlesen 2023)
WILD, DOMESTIC, PET or FERAL?
Obviously, the horses of the Lusitanus stables are neither wild nor pets, and among domesticated animals they hold a superior position. They are “students”, athletes training to be champions.
Being respected as animals with an intrinsic identity and worth; being met for what they are in themselves, apart from what they are to us, is not only their prerogative, it is a fundamental premise for the human horse interaction. Without acknowledging their unique non-human individualities, treating them as autonomous others, how could humans expect to achieve real reciprocal communication with them?
And what about the Rock?
Roca Arctica has recently been broken free from its geo-position in the lithosphere (bedrock) near Kautokeino (Máze), Norway, where it has been dwelling since the Eucaryote revolution (evolution) some 1.500.000.000. years ago. Magnetism, as seen in the waves of Aurora Borealis, is echoed in the green waves of meandering chromium patterns revealing its cosmic charge. It is as if the northern light is impressed in the stones core.
Slice and crumble
Considering the shape of Roca Arctica, its industrially cut surfaces, the sliced planes, and its contrasting, naturally broken surfaces, the crumbled planes, they are both results of intentional (antropo-noetic) practice, but appears severely different with respect to morphological complexity, order and control.
These two kinds of planes reveal the implicate order in different ways. The sliced plane is like a precision cut in a brain-sample (or a hard boiled egg) where you see the structure like a flat image, while in the crumbled plane the implicate order is revealed by its topographically cracked and mountainous relief. (It is a matter of scale: if you get close enough to one, it will appear as the other)
Noetic Structures and the Noospheric realms
As early (or late) as 1902 William James defined the term noetic as “states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect”. Noetic states are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, emerging as a hyperobjective sphere of evolutionary development dominated by consciousness, mind, and interpersonal relationships. As creatures evolve a new biosphere emerges, and with it a new noosphere.
As a rule, entering the noosphere carries with it the realisation that there actually is some sort of implicate order at work. It gives us a sense of facing and embracing natures authority (Corpus Logos) despite its inarticulate nature.
Inspired by James, our way of investigating the world de-emphasise the importance of answering ultimate questions and stresses the means by which we attempt to answer them. The pursuit of meaning and knowledge becomes process-based, not ends-based. It embraces change as a metaphysical starting point, and captures all the dynamics of our particular world here and now, warts and all.
222T/ Marit Følstad, Ole Jørgen Ness
