Idiorrhythmic Imaginaries research exhibition

Introduction

What will the future look like? How can we imagine future in a time that seems determined by various crises? And what will be the role of artistic research in this? Nowadays it turns out to be difficult to provide a meaningful answer to that kind of problem statements. It seems that such a thing as a future, or imagining another world, or speculating about it, has been completely taken away from us. At this point, as Boris Groys recently stated in Philosophy of Care, our only hope appears to be that life doesn’t get any worse than it already is.

In such a consolidating era, the desire emerges to rethink ideas that were formulated and imagined in times when the possibility of positive and progressive change was still self-evident. Roland Barthes’ text, How to Live Together, written in the rather optimistic 1970s, contains a series of inspiring ideas and propositions. Barthes attributes possibilities to what he describes as “idiorrhythmic practices”: a productive form of living together where one recognizes and respects the individual rhythms of the other; the possibility of a community in which everyone would follow their own rhythms, i.e. their “idiorrhythms,” instead of being subjected to a common regulation of life that they could not choose nor oppose. These practices, Barthes noticed, made it possible to find the right balance between life for oneself and life for the others.

With How to Live Together Barthes intended to open up space and time to reflect, to fantasize, to create simulations, before the process of imagination is disrupted by compelling demands for choices and priorities. Now, fifty years later, the question is: what is the value and significance of idiorrhythmic imagination in a world that, because of increased divisions and tensions, emphatically calls for clear positions on various planetary urgencies? But also: how can the current practice of artistic research provide an impetus for a necessary reassessment of this concept?

Curatorial project

It is these questions that form the starting point of a curatorial project in the context of the 6^th Research Pavilion. This project, entitled Idiorrhythmic Imaginaries, invited (individual/collective) research projects which not only depart from the practice of individual, idiorrhythmic perspectives, but that also clearly situate a resonance with our society and/or planet from a topical post-utopian consciousness. And with that, the utopian dimension of Barthes’ imagination makes way for a contemporary perspective that can aptly be described as that of the imaginary. The concept of the imaginary has been coined by a coeval of Roland Barthes, the Greek philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis. Castoriadis introduced the imaginary as the symbolic dimension through which human beings create their ways of living together and the intersubjective ways of seeing and representing their collective lifeworld.

The term ‘imaginary’

The term imaginary here does not refer to the unreal or false, but rather to the role of projective imagining as a real force exercising itself in the world through framing conceivable practices of communication, organization, mobilization, and cohesion. In this way, the imaginary manifests itself as a mode of reality-building. It addresses the ways in which operations within the space of imagination – such as the construction of social collectivity and a re-mapping of the ontology of the lifeworld by radically challenging divisions – are part of the conditions of possibility for different imaginative modalities of pluriversal world-making. It is these conditions that enable artistic research to develop a projective framework (of discourses, images, ideas) that delimits the sense of possibility and thereby effectuate forms of radical imagination that relate to urgent planetary phenomena, such as extractivism, climate change, displacement/migration, austerity, economic dispossession, neo-colonialism, and social polarization.

The exhibition

To further investigate these topical perspectives, Idiorrhythmic Imaginaries presents itself as a platform for knowledge in the making. Experimental modes of curating (performance, discursive events, other rituals of gathering, new modes of delivery and display) are sought that understand the exhibition as a potential mode of inquiry in itself: a research process that negotiates and articulates the assumption of a possible resonance between idiorrhythms and imaginaries in the hybrid environment of an exhibition and an event space.  

Working group

Concept: Henk Slager (Visiting Professor at Uniarts Helsinki)

with:

• Amanda Beech (Resident keynote)
• Jaime Belmonte & Paola Guzman (Uniarts Helsinki)
• Sophie Durand (Vilnius Academy of Arts)
• Kerry Guinam (Valand Academy Gothenburg)
• Heidi Hänninen (Uniarts Helsinki)
• Marleena Huuhka (Tampere University)  
• Joanna Kalm (Estonian Academy of Arts)
• Noora Karjalainen (Uniarts Helsinki)
• Kristiina Koskinen (University of Lapland)
• Veli Lehtovaara (Uniarts Helsinki)
• Christian Nyampeta (Resident keynote)
• Dominik Schlienger (Uniarts Helsinki)
• Kerstin Schroedinger & Angela Melitopoulos (Uniarts Helsinki)
• Whyte & Zettergren: Rut Karin Zettergren & Orlando Whyte (Uniarts Helsinki)

The exhibition has been produced in cooperation with Helsinki International Artist Programme HIAP.