September 27. Luis Berríos-Negrón. Anarchive: memory #02 ‘A Crème de Menthe, a Rusty Nail. Why Intransitive?’

Thursday, September 27, 19:00
Luis Berríos-Negrón
Anarchive: memory #02 ‘A Crème de Menthe, a Rusty Nail. Why Intransitive?’

…will be an open reenactment and collective planting. I have asked performance artist Callum Harper to reenact with me a dialogue between video artist Paul Ryan and anthropologist Gregory Bateson. In doing so, we will then review with you the moment where Ryan and Bateson come to discuss Ryan’s notion of ‘intransitivity’, one I feel presents significant possibilities for ‘art as research’. We will set the enactment around a table I will be installing with Lorenzo and Ben (co-directors of TIER), using some existing materials and props from previous exhibitions by Lorenzo and TIER. The ‘intransitive table’ will become another social pedestal where, during the reenactment, we will plant seeds and cutlings of medicinal plants (datura, rosemary, brugmansia) harvested in the ANARCHIVE and place them unto the table. The table will therefore become a sort of ‘wardian case’ for new plants to be be incubated and grown at TIER to be later transplanted back to the ANARCHIVE in Denmark by caravan in the summer of 2019.

In regards to ANARCHIVE… Jacques Derrida states in Archive Fever that — “If repetition is thus inscribed at the heart of the future to come, one must also import here, in the same stroke, the death drive, the violence of forgetting, superrepression (suppression and repression), the anarchive, in short, the possibility of putting to death the very thing, whatever its name, which carries the law in its tradition: the archon of the archive, the table, what carries the table and who carries the table, the subjectile, the substrate, and the subject of the law.”

I take forth this dimension of memory proposed by Derrida to be one of a series of works dedicated to the deposition of ‘greenhouse’, as display of natural history, and as superstructure to secure food and survival. Following works such as Earthscore Specularium (2015), Looming Greenhouse (2014), and Immediate Archæologies Two (2008), ANARCHIVE takes the form of a medicinal garden that I am growing in collaboration with my partner, curator Maria Kamilla Larsen and our daughter Freia Pilar from Aug.2018 to Oct.2019 in Denmark. ANARCHIVE, is about questioning the future of natural history. It is about forgetting and remembering global warming as spectral and physical trauma. It is not about dissociating an innovative future of ‘greenhouse’, but about remediating the superreppressed colonial memory within the greenhouse: as traumatic experiences we never lived nor desired; strengthening biodiversity; and resisting the counter-intuitive counter-intelligence that is now amongst us. ANARCHIVE is the final component of my doctoral work at Konstfack / KTH titled ‘Breathtaking Greenhouse Parastructures’ to be disputed and published in the fall of 2019.

Luis Berríos-Negrón (Puerto Rico, 1971*) explores unforeseen forms and forces of global warming through ‘social pedestals’. Most recent exhibitions include ‘Impasse Finesse Neverness’ (Museum of Ethnography and Archeology of Bahia, 2017), ‘Collapsed Greenhouse’ at ‘Undisciplinary Learning’ (District, Berlin, 2016) and ‘Earthscore Specularium’ (Färgfabriken Konsthal, Stockholm, 2015). Previous exhibitions include the 3rd Biennial of Art of Bahia (2014), the 10th São Paulo Biennial for Architecture (2013), as core-collaborator with Paul Ryan at Documenta13 (2012), and “Future Archive” at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (2012). He is the founder of the Anxious Prop art collective and the Paramodular environmental design group. He is doctoral candidate and tutor at Konstfack and KTH Royal Institute of Technology, holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from Parsons New School, and a Master of Architecture from M.I.T. Berríos-Negrón lives and works between Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Berlin.

Callum Harper (Australia, 1993) works with notions around LGBT culture, and combines discourse around reality and online life to create dialogue around the disparate differences of communication IRL vs URL. Primarily working with text, video and performance, Harper travels to varied destinations of contrasting political values toward LGBT citizens, and internalises locals opinions and his personal experiences on acceptance and daily life. The amalgamation of this collected experiential information and research data informs the medium and personal responses to experiences within differing contexts. Harper holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Monash University in Caulfield, Australia, and a Master of Fine Arts from Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden. http://callumharper.squarespace.com/