SOS - SOUL OF SUSTAINABILITY
Starting from the analysis of the artist-in-residence condition we focused on the concept of sustainability, as part of the main discourse in cultural organizations. The prevalence of this new term relies on the fact that art and culture are seen as indispensable though until recently disregarded instruments in the larger policy of sustainable development. But what does sustainable development actually sustain?
The Bureau of Melodramatic Research has spotted how its very own object of study - emotion, sensitivity, pathos – is instrumentalized with the purpose of saving the soul of sustainability (Sustainability also needs a soul, Dr. Hildegard Kurt, from "Art as Seismograph", KulturKontakt Magazine, Autumn, 2009). Artists regarded as bearers of subjectivity are the main “agents of the soul”, the missing link of a self-contained chain of sustainability, which the Bureau has identified as being a strategy of actually sustaining the power of capital owners.
The red “heart” and the sensitive “soul” are put to use in a new surgical operation co-opting what was left out, mainly the typical know-how coming out of “arts and culture”. Further, “humaneness” is defined, like all natural resources as an exploitable non-renewable fuel, as a limited commodity. We see this directly in the accumulation of a capital of pain that is being amassed and stored for further use.
View from the ArtPoint gallery of KulturKontakt here
BMR & Stefan Tiron
Charles Darwin/ "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals"
FIG. 20.— TERROR, from a photograph by Dr. Duchenne
The Discovery of America, 1575, Jan van der Straet, naked indian princess welcoming Christopher Columbus as she reclines on a hammock
"...Flaubert's situation of strength in relation to Kuchuk Hanem was not an isolated instance. It fairly stands for the pattern of relative strength between East and West...", "The West is a man, the East is a woman" Edward Said, Orientalism, 1978
Sketch of a nuclear device by an unknown German scientist
According to Rainer Karlsch/ "Hitler's Bomb", 2005
Nazi supporters take to the streets of Vienna to welcome Adolf Hitler who merged Germany and Austria in a coup on March 11, 1938 known as the "Anschluss." (from www.spiegel.de)
