We Are All Curators: A Conversation with Cristina Lucas and Cuauhtémoc Medina
Cuauhtémoc Medina (CM): How did The People That Is Missing come to be?
Cristina Lucas (CL): It was a commission from two Norwegian institutions, the Office of Contemporary Art (OCA) and Artica, to conceptualize Svalbard, one of the northernmost places on Earth, which has a very special history. It was first settled as a whaling colony, and then for coal mining; with the passage of time, it became a site of geopolitical importance. Norwegian sovereignty over the archipelago was recognized under the Svalbard Treaty, which nevertheless gives citizens of the 46 signatory countries equal rights in terms of the exploitation of its natural resources. It is also a very geostrategic place. Big profits are expected as the Arctic Ocean melts: on the one hand, a maritime route through the North Pole is an old dream, as it’s the shortest path between Europe and China; on the other, the melting of the ice cap will allow access to new fossil fuel deposits, which all of the treaty’s signatory countries are anxious to exploit. The archipelago is inhabited by many scientists based at the Norwegian Polar Institute, because it is where we see the first consequences of climate change, which will affect all of us later on. It’s a preview of many contemporary situations around the world, as has also occurred with the current pandemic.
This is the time to identify with the entire planet and to see globalization as something more than just a concept: to really feel that the world is your homeland, that it is a very small place in which everything is connected. This is what I thought I could see there.
CM: A couple of months ago, we saw each other in Madrid at the Arco art fair, and you asked me to watch this video. I know that you are very proud of your work, but I had never seen you so insistent that I see one of your pieces. I was amazed by the idea of a piece in which it is the world that questions the spectator, and even humanity itself.
To explain it to people, one could define your work as “an act of thinking.” Each piece is an intervention in images that proposes an intellectual and affective operation that goes beyond the visual experience. In this case, it is applied in a superlative fashion: you took key phrases from a multitude of thinkers, centered around a concept that Gilles Deleuze obsessively borrowed from the early 20th Century Swiss painter Paul Klee, that of the people that is missing. In your piece, you make the landscape speak to us through these quotes. How did you reach these conclusions? Because it’s truly an extraordinary chain of ideas.
CL: The process was quite torturous. I don’t remember ever having such a hard time conceptualizing any other project as this one. It was quite complex, even revealing because, until that point, I had never really read about globalization and climate change. There are many texts worth mentioning, such as Bruno Latour’s book We Have Never Been Modern, or the fantastic essay The Ends of the World by Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, among many others. The first thing you feel is panic at understanding that the system is so fragile, and that it’s part of a chain that’s about to break. It’s not only a political or economic revelation, but also a moral and sociological revelation, one that functions on many levels. On the emotional plane, we have to go back to ancient values, to reconnect with our animal side, to think of the planet as a place of and for all. So I began to read more and more, and finally I understood what I had to do in a place that lives off of coal mining and whaling – as they still traditionally eat whales in Norway, even though they’re legally protected – which is also a place with a large number of scientists per square meter analyzing climate change. I brought together everything I had been reading as a sort of draft and I tried to structure it as a poem formed out of the words of others, but that will be of use for us all. I understood that it was actually a translation of some very clear signs that we still don’t know how to resolve, but that we must nevertheless keep constantly present.
CM: The notion of signs is something that amazed me, ever since the first conversation we had about this piece. There’s a prediction, a representation of a future that lacks meaning because, to say it technically, one is “negligent,” in the strictest sense of the word, in terms of not being able to read it. On a technical level, your video contains images that I assume have been altered, as well as others that implied tracing letters in the landscape. Could you talk a little about the production? How did you create this piece?
CL: The production was very tense because nature rules in Svalbard. It was a very complicated shoot because you never knew what the weather would be like. I had hired a camera crew and they were there for a week, but if the sun came out or not, if it snowed or not, if it was windy or not determined if we could shoot or not. There were many things in the script we were unable to shoot, and so they were incorporated in postproduction. We were able to resolve almost everything, since the poem was a type of unifying thread to which I was able to add or subtract elements.
CM: There’s something in the sequence of quotes you use which is both intriguing and revealing. At the beginning, you quote Alexander von Humboldt: “Everything is alive.” There’s a basis for arguing that Humboldt was the first to understand what we now know as “ecology” when he warned that exploitation produces extinction. The argument thus begins to interrogate the fate of the territory. There are a few Latin Americans – Oswald de Andrade and the poet Raúl Zurita, for example – who intervene with quotes such as Zurita’s “We are all streams from one water.” We’re left devastated by a slogan derived from popular expressions, “There is no Planet B,” and it leads us back to politics. I’m impressed by the way you connect the thinking of Viveiros de Castro with that of Félix Guattari when referring to the lack of distance between politics and nature. I imagine that it took a lot of effort to create this sequence, which functions as a brief metahistory of natural history. Was it an idea that you already had, or did it emerge through your work?
CL: It emerged somewhat chaotically. My work method was somewhat odd – in the end, what I did was jot down phrases that I felt were important. I had even more ideas, but these were the ones that I managed to bring together. I felt the need for a hopeful ending because I don’t think that making people even more afraid solves anything, not even in the worst of times. I think that it’s important to believe that there’s something we can do, even if it’s only a thought. Coming across that Paul Klee quote regarding the need for an absent people was therefore marvelous. It offers us a possible way out. Even still, I spent many days, I don’t remember how many, adding and subtracting phrases on the floor of my house and in my studio in a type of performative game: each time I reread it, I changed my position once again. I looked at my images and phrases and it was all very Frankenstein.
CM: It’s very important to emphasize that, although a large part of your work has a technical basis and video is a favored medium, there is this hands-on moment, like Williams Burroughs’ cut-ups or Dadaist poems, made with fragments shaken in a bag, which implies the necessity of physically doing. In your house, behind you, there’s a wall with the title of the video spelled out with post-it notes, which reveals your background in drawing and sculpting. It’s also tied to the fact that the political ideas of Deleuze and Guattari were based on the words of an artist like Klee.
CL: I’ve always had a great deal of respect for the contributions of others: for the work of scientists, for the vision of the authors I’ve read. As Joseph Beuys said, we’re all artists, and that’s true – but I think that nowadays we’re all curators because there’s such an enormous amount of information available. What’s the point of contributing with more information, if you can just restructure available information in a different fashion? I couldn’t not cite all those authors: I have no problems with authorship and I don’t want to stop quoting everyone that deserves to be quoted. It’s not that I’m not saying nothing in the poem. A million things have been said about Svalbard, but what’s interesting is choosing what to talk about, and in what order: Which mountains go first? Which seas go next? Which animals should I put before that? Which phrases from which author should go with which image? In reality, our task today is to use some type of legible system to articulate a flow of information that is far too diffuse, and which we sometimes have trouble understanding.
CM: Your work brings to mind Bruno Latour’s concept regarding the need to create a “parliament of things.” What needs to be represented is not just the absent people, as Klee said. Nowadays it’s also about determining who speaks for the whales and for the desert, how you produce a political space that goes beyond the dictatorship of humans over the Earth, which does not seem to be a beneficial political system.
CL: Yes, the idea that everything on the planet should have a form of expression, such as the mountains, the air, the oceans, as Latour discusses, is a very contemporary idea. It’s also something very primitive: our oldest deities were connected to this idea. That we lost sight of this had to do with the abuse of nature that has been committed since the origins of capitalism and trade itself, which began by extracting metals from the mountains; as Frederic Jameson said, “It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.” It seems that this end is very close, and ever closer, because we’re unable to imagine the end of capitalism. I myself am unable to imagine it, but this is our challenge as humans, as creators, as living beings, as politicians, as animals. In reality, this is what must be the focus of our vision and our efforts: to think of another form of existence. This is the challenge that The People That Is Missing has taken on.
CM: I’d like to thank you for allowing us to stream The People That Is Missing during the quarantine, above all because we’re seeing it at home, when it’s perfectly shot to be seen in all its splendor on the big screen.
Cristina: No, thank you, and I hope that soon we’ll be able to see it in all its splendor, and I hope that people can take the poem home with them, live with it and consider it, because that’s the fundamental idea of this project. Cheers!
