‘The current pandemic has caused immeasurable suffering and disrupted so much of our everyday existence together. This is especially true for those of us who value and take part in cultural life. Because many of the important cultural sites that we take for granted are all closed – cinemas, theatres, concert houses, clubs, museums and stadiums – the only public spaces where we can move about safely together is outdoors, in the shared space of the city. It’s important to celebrate – even now – that public space belongs to all of us and that it is, in fact, very valuable.’ – Olafur @Dazed

The exhibition ‘Unreal City’ is on now through 5 January. It features 36 digital sculptures arranged as a walking tour along the River Thames, including Olafur Eliasson’s artwork ‘WUNDERKAMMER’, 2020. The sculptures, created to be experienced in AR using Apple’s ARKit, are arranged across 24 sites between Waterloo Bridge and Millennium Bridge on the Southbank. Organized by Acute Art and Dazed Media, featuring works by Olafur Eliasson, Cao Fei, Alicja Kwade, Koo Jeong A, Marco Brambilla, Darren Bader, KAWS, Bjarne Melgaard, and Tomás Saraceno.

To view the exhibition, download the free Acute Art app on your device to get the map and view the artworks.
https://acuteart.com/

What does a stone know? Or as Hugo Reinert put it in his essay ‘About a Stone: Some Notes on Geologic Conviviality’, ‘What kind of critter might a stone be? Does it have a life, or something like it? What modes of passionate immersion – or love, or intimacy – could a stone afford?’

Thinking along with more-than-human perspectives is essential to imagining possible futures, and kids are doing just that through Earth Speakr, an artwork started by Olafur and created with kids, for kids to express themselves by creating messages about the climate and their own future.

Earth Speakr is funded by the Federal Foreign Office on the occasion of the German Presidency of the Council of the European Union 2020 and realised in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut.

There have been multiple articles written recently about the future of museums and other cultural institutions in light of low visitor attendance, reduced revenue, and subsequent funding crises. To survive the current pandemic reality, we wonder, how will the museum reinvent itself? And who will do the reinventing? Will the main stewardship lie with the institutions themselves, or will it shift more towards the public?

A piece Olafur wrote about 17 years ago uncannily resonates with the situation today (notice his prescient use of ‘immune system’ and ‘virus’ metaphors):

‘As long as we have had art history, we have had the discussion about whether art should be referred to as a representational system (reflecting society like a mirror) or whether it is an integrated part of society itself. If we consider art as one of many cultural trajectories in a society, these questions are little different from asking if the weather is separable from the city. Of course the art institution is an integral part of the life of a city. Cultural institutions are among the many “immune systems” of a society’s self-reflection. When a “virus” such as the commodification of our senses attacks us, and the developing identity of the city’s life is challenged, the immune system is (or should be) active in restoring a plausible dialogue involving some sense of resistance. It is important to note here that I doubt whether art has any power to change things directly; I consider the field of artistic practice to be more like a giant laboratory, where research on multiple fields is constantly being conducted.’ – excerpt from Olafur’s text ‘Museums Are Radical’, from ‘The weather project’ catalogue, 2003

‘I think if we think of ourselves as being inhabited by organisms – or once free-living organisms [that are] now completely tethered organisms – that have their own needs, for food, for stimulation, for all sorts of sensory proclivities that I just mentioned, that we can find a continuity between living consciousness, awareness, and sensitivity, at a microscopic level and at a macroscopic level. I think that throughout biological history, fusion of different organismal types has been much underestimated as an evolutionary phenomenon, and we see this in social organization of people. We see a beehive or an ant hill as a phenomenon made of individuals but far beyond individuals and their capacity. E.O. Wilson describes Amazonian ants that stretch across many many trees and make structures with their bodies, that any of the ants by themselves could never survive, but as these massive communities, essentially cities of ants succeed in feeding and reproducing in ways that are unthinkable for the individuals. I think that that’s fundamentally the idea.’ – Lynn Margulis, Sputnik Observatory interview

How can this notion of a single organism having evolved from microscopic social organisation prompt us to reassess our fundamental assumptions about the individual? Where does the individual end and the community begin? And how can this questioning of the individual reshape not only how we see ourselves, but also how we see our place in our communities, in the more-than-human sphere, and as political agents? A beautifully detailed image of a single cell, comprised of countless, interdependent, thriving parts, seems like a good place to start.

‘It’s important to say what hope is not: it is not a belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction. The hope I’m interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act. ... Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes – you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting.’ – Rebecca Solnit, ‘Hope in the Dark’, 2004/2016

'If we focus on a simple shape as it shifts, pulsates, grows, and shrinks in a darkened space, it becomes surprisingly easy to deceive our perceptual apparatuses, to upend what we know to be true, and to fool ourselves into asking: is the shape, in fact, simply growing bigger or smaller on a flat surface or is it moving closer to us and further away in space. The quiet atmosphere of Near future living light is defined by emergence and slow transformation. A spotlight, a black box, and a wall collaborate to form a space defined by abstraction that invites us to exercise our imagination in confronting how we normally see and navigate the world.’ – Olafur

Who is we?

The WeUsed.To platform carves out space for people to share their experiences of COVID-19. Perhaps through the wide spectrum of individual contributions we can find what thoughts, feelings, realisations, and insights we have in common. When writing a statement, users choose to frame their contribution using ‘I’ or ‘we’. An ‘I’ signals a clearly individual perspective, of course. A ‘we’, however, it more ambiguous. What perspective does that ‘we’ represent? Whom are we speaking for? ‘We’ can be an inclusive pronoun, acknowledging a broader community with shared concerns. And ‘we’ can be exclusive, sometimes inadvertently leaving out groups or elevating one ‘we’ at the expense of other ‘we’s. A particular use of ‘we’ is innocent to one user but will be exclusive and even unjust to others. As WeUsed.To has unfolded, ‘we’ the project initiators have witnessed this. And the complexity of ‘we’ has afforded in-depth conversations about how to deal with the term. Not only do COVID-19-related topics appear on the platform, but also concerns related to political events and race discussions. As authors of the site, we find it important to acknowledge the potential friction in ‘we’ statements while retaining the option for users to choose their perspective. The ‘I’/‘we’ choice is an invitation to actively become aware of and reflect on the communities we participate in, their scope, and their co-existence and/or overlap with other communities – or lack of the very same. It is an invitation to reflect on who speaks and for whom, and on what these speech acts do in the world. Visit WeUsed.To

'Today, where physical distancing guides our lives, it’s as crucial as ever that we surround ourselves with things and atmospheres that really matter to us. All elements of the WUNDERKAMMER play a role in my life. Some are objects that we normally take for granted – and I feel they should be celebrated like the wonders they, in fact, are. Other elements in the collection will be more experimental, such as light sculptures and objects that are invisible to the eye until you ‘catch’ them with your hand. The artwork is about challenging our perception of the everyday and actively welcoming that which lies on the boundary between the known and the unknown. It is about creating spaces that meld the everyday and the extraordinary – spaces that evoke vivid perceptions and embodied engagement.’ - Olafur