17 June 2016

Text by Babis Venetopoulos for COME CLOSER: EXPERIMENTING WITH A WUNDERKAMMER OF VANITIES.



Taunt no man with his misfortune
for fate is common to all and the future is a thing unseen.
Isocrates


At the dawn of our brave new world humans stand proud, untouchable and magnificent in their prosperity and cultural evolution.
Dazzled by their own achievements and the blinding screen images, they are ceaselessly building the Tower of Babel while sinking into oblivion. One disordered cabinet of wonders or non-wonders, a digital Babel of fragmented knowledge, an incongruous pile of information, images and disintegrated ideas. If the scaffolding collapses on their remnants, they will continue building upon as doing for centuries now. They will continue building upon corpses.
A civilization is emerging through group burials, hostage torture, violence, ghetto formation and oppression; a civilization that deifies wealth, tolerates and reproduces inequality, discrimination and racism. While camps stench hasn’t faded away yet, new crematoriums are being built, scentless by superior technology.
The longing and struggle for creating a society of knowledge and spirit, equal rights, respect and freedom rapidly vanish before our very eyes.
Nowadays people are continually exposed to their own virtual Wunderkammern. These are being composed by people’s occasional stream of thoughts and semi-guided by search engines foresight. Civilizations worldwide build up their profiles upon the valid and the invalid system supported knowledge, upon the propagandas of their times. The agony of a global merging is urging societies towards the question of conquering. It’s a way to save one’s identity.
Classifying species, artifacts and knowledge in Renaissance Europe had begun as an attempt to see through the world and the mysteries of life. When discovering visible or hidden similarities among civilizations, people are brought to a deeper understanding of their surroundings. They are trying to conceive the inconceivable, the violence and the punishment, the insignificancy and the vulnerability of life; rising up from the past as today’s new regularities.
Until the leading masses in politics, economics and culture realize their relation to the rest of humanity, future curiosity cabinets will be subject to expressions of a uniform common consciousness.



Babis Venetopoulos 2016