CONNECT, BTS

LONDON
BERLIN
BUENOS AIRES
NEW YORK
SEOUL
CONNECT, BTS
“We all come from different backgrounds and
use different languages, but I think that it is
very ameaningful to come together, respecting
the value of diversity, and to give out this really
positive message, so I think because of that we
are able to make this connected world where
we have all of these diversities that don’t split
us apart but actually connect and bring us
together.
6
MESSAGE
We had a chance FROM
to talk withBTS
the artists via video
conference, and what was really meaningful for
us is how these artworks are completed through
the experiences of the people who see them, the
people who participate. We also communicate
with our fans through our music and we also
feel that our performances are made complete
thanks to and with our fans. So, we found a very
common ground between what we do in music
and the art.
We also learnt a lot about contemporary art
through this project, and I think it would be
a great experience for everyone to, instead
of thinking art is something that is difficult or
complex, to focus on your own experiences,
your own emotions, and I think that will make
this a great experience for everyone.”

We had a chance to talk with the artists via video
conference, and what was really meaningful for
us is how these artworks are completed through
the experiences of the people who see them, the
people who participate. We also communicate
with our fans through our music and we also
feel that our performances are made complete
thanks to and with our fans. So, we found a very
common ground between what we do in music
and the art.
We also learnt a lot about contemporary art
through this project, and I think it would be
a great experience for everyone to, instead
of thinking art is something that is difficult or
complex, to focus on your own experiences,
your own emotions, and I think that will make
this a great experience for everyone.”
8 9
Hello. We are BTS.
CONNECT, BTS is a global contemporary art project that began in London
in January, 2020 and connected the world through the participation of
22 artists in five countries, dedicated curators and art-appreciating visitors.
As BTS, we have received more love and support than we could have possibly
imagined. We continue to be amazed by the boundary-breaking power of
music when we meet and communicate with our fans through music and
see our message resonate with them, and when we, in turn, are healed and
comforted through this process.
The same must be with the visual arts. In our conversations via video call with
artists taking part in CONNECT, BTS we were struck by how the artists spoke
of their work becoming complete when they share the experience with
the viewers of their artwork.
Our music and performance are also made complete by the existence of
our fans, and so we discovered another intersection between music and art.
We believe that art in any form shines brightest when more people can easily
access, experience and share it.
While the time we shared together was unfortunately made short by
the pandemic, we hope that CONNECT, BTS offered an opportunity to show
our appreciation to all fans and visitors and return the love we have received.
We all come from different cultures, and speak different languages.
But we are here together because we respect the value of diversity,
and to send the message that different is good.
It’s the belief that our diversity can create a world where differences do not
render us apart but “connect” us together through our uniqueness.
We hope that you can be a part of CONNECT, BTS through this shared belief,
and we hope that here is true inspiration awaiting our discovery.
 CONNECT, BTS

10 11
CONNECT, BTS LONDON
BERLIN
BUENOS AIRES
NEW YORK
SEOUL

12 13
CONNECT, BTS Essay

LONDON Daehyung Lee

BERLIN Hans Ulrich Obrist
BUENOS AIRES
NEW YORK
SEOUL

14 15
 ESSAY

COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Collective intelligence, they say, has no place in exhibition

curation. Curation is a personal creative activity, and
THE MAKING OF collaboration is nearly unthinkable unless there is a
compelling agenda that is attractive to all the potential project
CONNECT, BTS titled CONNECT, BTS, which I organised with a group of
international curators in 2019–2020, the motivations were
always clear. Over the last decade, I have had numerous
Daehyung Lee meetings with artists and curators—in cafes and on corners,
at various art fairs and biennales—that have repeatedly
touched on the question of what solidarity can be in this world
of tech-enabled hyper-connectivity. To quote the artist Naum
Gabo, “The force of art lies in its immediate influence on
human psychology and in its active contagiousness.” We want

DAEHYUNG LEE
to share art widely, not keep it in an ivory tower. Pop music, a
major driver for the CONNECT, BTS project, has a long history
of multi-generational, global appeal of a kind that art has
rarely managed to achieve.

16 17
 CONNECT, BTS
In The Martian, a recent film about an astronaut who struggles
to survive after being stranded on Mars, time is the fateful
factor. As time goes by, he is forced to make a series of life-or-
death decisions about how to produce oxygen, how to grow
potatoes, or how to overcome the time difference between
Earth and Mars to send a message. Creating an exhibition
connecting twenty-two artists in five cities—London, Berlin,
New York, Buenos Aires, and Seoul—was a not-dissimilar
experience. It was about being in five time zones at the same
time, day becoming night and night becoming day.  ability to forge a relationship between artist, viewer, the
 
Initially, everyone was skeptical. Organizing a public art
project involving five countries with five widely divergent
systems and practices in a seven-month time period was
simply not realistic. These challenges notwithstanding,
not one of us bailed out. Why? Because the project was a
collaboration with BTS. It was obvious how great it would
be to connect contemporary art with the global cultural
phenomenon created by the group and their fanbase, known
as ARMY, around a positive message of global solidarity.
Their ability to speak meaningfully to people of different
cultural backgrounds, social classes, ethnicities, genders, and
identities speaks in turn to modern art’s long-standing goal to
transcend imagined boundaries, opening up new expressive
space. The values BTS advocate, among them celebrating
diversity and engaging with the periphery of mainstream
culture, have long been central to contemporary art.
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ESSAY
What connects BTS with their artist counterparts in this global
collaboration? The definition of empathy encompasses not
only identification with another person; it also describes an
imaginative and intuitive approach to objects or works of
art, discovering in them attitudes or inclinations present or
nascent in oneself. The group of artists assembled for this
project offer diverse responses to the world around us. The
extraordinary significance of art, whether it consists of sound,
sculpture, photography or another medium, is its innate
immediate environment, and the atmosphere which encircles
and extends far beyond all of them, back into the past and
onwards into the future: a resonant, connective experience.
DAEHYUNG LEE
These works of art are strikingly different, yet they share with
each other, and with BTS, a deliberate porousness, and a
realization of the possibility of seeing the world differently.
This tantalizing proposal quickly became a never ending
series of adventures into and out of five different universes.
Administrative procedures at the Gropius Bau exhibition hall
in Berlin are not the same as those used at the Serpentine
Galleries in London. The exhibition space setup at Seoul’s
DDP and the rules for displaying public art at Brooklyn Bridge
Park in New York are as different as the Korean and English
languages. The demands of technology-based artists are
simply not the same as those of performance artists. Without
very specific knowledge, the project couldn’t move forward.
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 CONNECT, BTS ESSAY

It takes time for a curator to organize an exhibition. Thematic
research can take anywhere from one to two years, or even
longer. An additional three months are spent doing artist
research, and another three communicating directly with the
artist. Finally, at least six months are required to complete
exhibition administration for the actual preparation of the
show. For the best results, putting up an exhibition is therefore
a commitment of at least two or three years, and its curatorial
quality is a measure of the time invested. CONNECT, BTS was
completed in seven short months. This is because, with the
understanding that nobody is smarter than anybody else, we
tapped each other’s intelligence and experiences and betted
on the power of diversity. History, as we all know, cannot be
pavilion and the new building designed by Zaha Hadid. In
the end, the latter was chosen. The Serpentine’s Hans Ulrich
Obrist recommended Kay Watson in digital curation to weigh
in on a full range of questions around how to promote the
work. Finally, we were able to realise and share this immersive
installation, creating an environment through which viewers
could redefine their relationship to nature.
For Martin-Gropius-Bau, a venue made highly symbolic by its
immediate proximity to the Berlin Wall, a project involving a
large number of performance artists was planned to push
the boundaries of public art and bring greater diversity to
the overall initiative. Rituals of Care, curated by Stephanie

DAEHYUNG LEE
written by one person. Rosenthal and Noémie Solomon, is a powerful testimony
to diversity and multiculturalism, raising questions about
In London, we planned to present an extended version of agency in the contemporary moment. The exhibition focused
Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s Catharsis, a virtual rendition of an old-
growth forest in which the sun, leaves, water, and mists follow
individual timescales. Using fieldwork undertaken by the artist
and sound engineer Matt McCorkle, who captures 3D textures
and sounds in North American forests, Catharsis reflects
how Kudst Steensen’s practice explores the intersection of
imagination, technology and ecology through immersive
virtual reality ecosystems and mixed reality installations that
bridge the physical and digital worlds. Protracted negotiations
took place over the joint project with Ben Vickers, Chief
Technology Officer at the Serpentine Galleries. Kensington
Gardens and the board of the Serpentine Galleries hemmed
and hawed about the location of the installation, hesitating
between the site of the Serpentine’s annual architecture

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 CONNECT, BTS
on reconfiguring the relationship between human beings
and other creatures, taking in both the physical and spiritual
worlds through choreography. Having begun with four to
five teams from Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas, the
number grew to seventeen as more artists showed an interest
in participating. The final exhibition program featured a
wide-ranging group including Jelili Atiku, boychild with Josh
Johnson and Total Freedom, Pan Daijing, Cevdet Erek, Marcelo
Evelin, Bill Fontana, Maria Hassabi, Mette Ingvartsen with
Will Guthrie, Baba Murah and Candomblé Berlin, Antonija
Livingstone and Nadia Lauro with Mich Cota, Kennis Hawkins
and Stephen Thompson. Their performances presented
visceral bodily experiences capable of conveying what is
incommunicable through images or verbal language. Both
individually and as a group, the work explored the human
body as a site for political struggle and as a mode of being
and responding to the world with an emphasis on fluidity,
experimentation, sensuality, and togetherness. Performances
featuring naked or semi-naked bodies had to be adjusted for
different cultures.
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ESSAY
In New York, a sculpture by British artist Antony Gormley
mined the core of human existence, turning sculpture into
a critical exploration of the body not as an object, but as a
site of accumulated experience through which all human
beings can begin to question, understand, and reframe their
relationship to others, nature, and the cosmos. “When it
comes to the body,” Gormley has said, “any notion of ‘me’ or
‘mine’ is simply an inaccurate reflection of the fact that we are
all part of bigger systems, the truth of which we will never
know.” Gormley’s monumental sculpture New York Clearing is a
single line made of 18 km of metal tubing that loops and coils,
turning itself into an environment that elicits the participation
of viewers who in turn become essential to the realization
DAEHYUNG LEE
of the work. Our perception of the world and ourselves is
radically reconfigured by this piece; lying somewhere between
an object and a drawing, Gormley’s sculpture involves the
viewer physically in its disruptive dynamic. The work required
extra planning to ensure the safety of visitors; for Brooklyn
Bridge Park to approve this presentation, we had to agree
on at least three safety mechanisms, including an extensive
insurance policy and round-the-clock security to avoid
accidents and protect the work.
23
 CONNECT, BTS
Argentinian artist Tomás Saraceno envisions interdisciplinary
art and communal living projects that have an ethical and
sustainable relationship to the future. Often involving
scientists and activists, Saraceno’s oeuvre could be interpreted
as a kind of ongoing research informed simultaneously by
the worlds of art, architecture, natural sciences, astrophysics,
and engineering. His floating sculptures, community works
and interactive installations suggest new, sustainable ways
of inhabiting and sensing the environment. Fly with Aerocene
Pacha is an open-source community project to create an
aerosolar sculpture. Filled only with air, the sculpture floats
thanks to the sun warming its interior. The project description
makes clear its ambitions and the extent of its vision: “Aerocene
seeks to open up the imagination towards an emergent
cloudscape, un-tethering a new era of planetary attunement,
restoring the thermodynamic balance of the Earth, free from
borders, free from fossil fuels.” As such, Fly with Aerocene
Pacha is as utopian in impulse as BTS’s attempt to change
entrenched attitudes on a global scale—both reach for an
24
ESSAY
experience of blithe detachment, a sense of floating above
it all. The performance was planned to be carried out at the
Salinas Grandes in Argentina, a salt flat at 3,450 m above sea
level where the horizon meets the sky, and where no internet
connection or cellular service can reach. This stunning and
mysterious place is unsafe to visit without a guide and is
largely inaccessible for the general public. For these reasons,
the entire process of the work was filmed and screened at
CCK(Kirchner Cultural Centre), the largest cultural center in
Buenos Aires (in fact, the largest in South America) to allow
more people to see the performance.
Belgian artist Ann Veronica Janssens’ work investigates the
DAEHYUNG LEE
properties of space, light, radiant colour, and translucent or
reflective surfaces, destabilizing and disrupting ideas about
materiality. Her installation Green, Yellow and Pink was initially
destined for an outdoor pavilion, but was later transferred to
the indoor exhibition hall of Seoul’s DDP (Dongdaemun Design
Plaza) because mist, which is the main medium of the work,
is easily affected by temperature change. An enclosed indoor
setting allowed the artist to fully control the environment
of the work, probing the sensory experience of reality and
suggesting that all perception is fragile at best. Paradoxically,
selecting the material for an indoor pavilion was the trickiest
part. We finally settled on polycarbonate sheets to create a
hermetic structure from which no mist could escape; the move
also saved visitors the discomfort of queuing in frigid weather. 
25
 CONNECT, BTS
Yiyun Kang's Beyond the Scene came with its own set of
challenges. A master of illusion, Kang uses spatial projection
mapping to transform space and existing architectural
structures in a manner that collapses the opposition between
concepts—materiality/immateriality, reality/virtuality,
presence/absence, analog/digital, body/machine, fact/fiction,
history/myth—which are central to our perceptual orientation,
epistemic ordering of the world, and anchoring of subjectivity.
Featuring projection and dancers, the conflation of analogue
space and moving digital images in Beyond the Scene erodes
the boundaries between illusion and reality. The conditions
for such a work to be fully realized must be immensely fine-
tuned in order for the cutting-edge trompe l’oeil effect to
be achieved. The dancers—who were first choreographed
to follow BTS’s signature routines—were visible through
an illusory surface but seemed simultaneously to exist in a
volume beyond our vision. This is a work that challenges its
audience, too, by scrambling or reorienting our understanding
of depth and surface.
Ultimately, the work of these and the other artists who were
part of CONNECT, BTS shared the goal of uncovering forms
and values with universal relevance. Explicitly through their
participation and implicitly through discrete works of art and
music, they strove to transcend the particularities of time and
place in the hope of advancing humanity towards a more just
and harmonious society.
26
ESSAY
As its title suggests, this project was about connection.
Microsites (https://www.connect-bts.com) feeding the online
platform with information about activities in the various
cities played an important role in its success, as did the AR
docent program by BTS. From the outset, we tried to have a
clear vision about our collaboration after analysing the past,
present and future of artistic collaboration, agreeing that we
must avoid seeking superficial unity through the design and
visual aspects. We decided to explore a shared vision of the
future achievable through different art forms, genres and
styles—music and fine art, performance and sculpture, analog
and digital—and despite their differences. Rather than making
judgments, when the artists and BTS met on video conference
DAEHYUNG LEE
calls, they respected and saw originality in each other and
cheered one another.
From a curatorial point of view, CONNECT, BTS was significant
in that it was a celebration of art that spanned the world, from
one end to the other, made possible through an encounter
between artworks and the positive message of BTS and
ARMY. Meanwhile, this project has helped further the reach
of BTS’ music beyond the pop culture context by helping the
global cultural scene discover the breadth and depth of their
philosophical inquiry and the blueprint of the future contained
within it. I was also impressed by the sincere desire of BTS to
communicate with international audiences. They insisted on
subtitling all the content in four languages—Korean, German,
Spanish and English.
27
 CONNECT, BTS
Amazingly, the project was covered by over 1,200 media
outlets worldwide. This, to my mind, is a triumph of collective
intelligence. Artistic messages from five corners of the world
came together to “connect” a world that has been divided by
national egotism, divide-and-rule politics, communication
technology and environmental damage. Our planet is facing
existential threats that put into question the very sustainability
of humankind. Needless to say, the project would not
have had the same impact without the mammoth cultural
phenomenon that is BTS. If one thing is certain, it is that this
project was a wakeup call for contemporary art, because it
successfully communicated the values art has long strived
to convey to people in all parts of the world. Throughout the
course of this project, many remarked that contemporary
art—whose expressed goal is to transcend boundaries and
affirm diversity—may have become a prisoner of its own
elitism and dogmatism and lost touch with the world.
28
ESSAY
CONNECT, BTS brought contemporary art closer to existing
and potential audiences in the hope that the democratic
expansion of creative experience will help individuals and
society as a whole to view the world in a more inclusive and
tolerant way. This is why we need art. New definitions of
artistic creativity are required in order to expand its audiences,
moving beyond the notion of art as a collectible asset for the
wealthy few and transforming it into an experience sought out
and shared by many. Throughout history, art has addressed
a deep human need, providing diverse ways to respond to
the world, and varied means to understand it. If art is seen by
others, then perspectives can be shared, and perhaps trigger
a response in turn. The process is not unlike a chain reaction
DAEHYUNG LEE
(though it might go in all directions), and can be a source of
empathy contributing to a broader understanding of where
we come from, what we are (and are not), and where we might
be going—together. 
* Part of this essay is adapted from the article published in the online platform TheArtro.
29
 ESSAY

CONNECT, BTS Embedded within the title of the curatorial experiment,

CONNECT, BTS, is the fundamental impetus of the project:
to connect with others, to work together across disciplines
and dissolve the boundaries between them. The Serpentine
Hans Ulrich Obrist Galleries’ collaboration with the South Korean boy group
BTS began from a conversation with curator Daehyung Lee,
whom I have known for many years. Daehyung had the idea
to bring together multiple institutions across the world in a
project involving twenty-two artists in five cities across four
continents. We are delighted that this collaboration with BTS
came about from our initial conversation almost two years
ago, and that it brought together so many amazing artists,

HANS ULRICH OBRIST

projects and institutions: in London, the Serpentine presented
the work of Danish artist, Jakob Kudsk Steensen; in Berlin, the
Gropius Bau organised the group performance series, Rituals
of Care; on 28 January 2020 in Buenos Aires, Tomás Saraceno’s
Fly with Aerocene Pacha and its pilots took off on a voyage
from Salinas Grandes; in Seoul, two projects were launched
with Ann Veronica Janssens and Yiyun Kang, and in New York,
Antony Gormley presented his sculpture, New York Clearing, on
Pier 3 of Brooklyn Bridge Park.

“The world needs togetherness, not separation. Love, not

suspicion. A common future, not isolation.” These words by
visionary poet, essayist, and visual artist, Etel Adnan, connects
to what the music of BTS does. In the last seven years, they
have continuously sought to send out a positive message to
the world and to create more solidarity. We at the Serpentine
felt that this was very urgent and important, and chimed with
the programming ethos that we have been developing for
some time. For BTS, the act of connecting is about embracing

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 CONNECT, BTS
diversities across the world, whilst also speaking about many
different references within their work that go beyond the
realm of music. For example, they often refer to literature and
alternative universes in their storylines. With many people
noting the correlation between their hit song, Spring Day, and
Le Guin’s short story, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,
published in 1973. It’s not just world-making too, it very
often involves personal and socially related content, such as
issues of youth, mental health, and psychology in particular
Carl Jung’s The Red Book. Several of these references, namely
Ursula K. Le Guin and Carl Jung, resonate wonderfully with the
work of Jakob Kudsk Steensen and his project Catharsis.
32
ESSAY
For CONNECT, BTS, Steensen continued to draw on his ideas
about “slow media”, whereby digital technologies can foster
attention to the natural world and create new narratives
about our ecological futures through a digital simulation of
a re-imagined old-growth forest, a forest that has developed
undisturbed over hundreds of years. Set up as a single
continuous shot that moves from the watery underground
roots to the surveying viewpoint of the canopy, Catharsis
becomes a digital portal that offers audiences access to past
and present natural environments, slowed down and up close.
Based on fieldwork undertaken by Steensen and his primary
collaborator Matt McCorkle, the work’s virtual ecosystem
HANS ULRICH OBRIST
and synchronised audio comprise 3D textures and sounds
gathered from several North American forests, the audience
is immersed in a digital simulation of a very old, reimagined
forest that’s grown – maybe over centuries – undisturbed.
As an experience of public art installed outside, we thought
33
 CONNECT, BTS
it would be amazing to connect it to the architecture of the
Serpentine Galleries and make the connection between a
virtual forest and our location within the park, surrounded by
trees. Not only were visitors able to see the trees in the park,
but they could also see Steensen’s virtual trees. The visitor is
immersed in the forest, going on a journey from the watery,
wet underground, from the roots to a viewpoint of the canopy.
You make that movement – that’s the catharsis, a gradual
experience that slows you down. This sense of slowness fits
perfectly with the idea of making connections that is at the
heart of the BTS project. And by streaming Catharsis to Twitch,
we were also able to open up the project to a global audience.
34
ESSAY
Steensen’s project is very much part of an ongoing thread
within our programme at the Serpentine, which is centred
upon the intersection of art and advanced technologies.
Marshall McLuhan has noted the ability of art to “anticipate
the future.” In the foreword to his book Understanding Media,
McLuhan calls art “an early alarm system,” which is pointing
us to new developments in times ahead and allowing us
“to prepare to cope with them.” He says: “Art as a radar
environment takes on the function of indispensable perceptual
training.” In 1964, when his book was first published, the artist
Nam June Paik was just building his robot K-456 to experiment
with the technologies that subsequently would start to
HANS ULRICH OBRIST
influence society. He had worked with television earlier,
challenging its model of consumption, and later made art with
global live satellite broadcasts to use the new media less for
entertainment but to point us to their poetic and intercultural
capacities (which are still mostly unused today). The Paiks
of our time of course are now working with the internet and
CGI technologies – and aerospace, artificial intelligence and
synthetic biology. Their works and thoughts again are an ‘early
alarm system’ for the developments ahead of us. BTS fit within
the mode of thinking that characterises Paik’s experiments;
through their music they bring together people and ideas on
a global scale.
35
 CONNECT, BTS
Steensen’s project is one in a chain of projects inspired by
Billy Klüver's Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). In
close conversation with CTO of the Serpentine, Ben Vickers,
we have adopted this as (N)EAT – New Experiments in Art and
Technology – a programme that seeks to reconnect artists with
innovations in science, engineering, technology and industry,
enable exchanges and encourage mutual influence and
inspiration. This line of programming has so far encompassed
the translation of paintings by Zaha Hadid into virtual reality
spaces; Ian Cheng’s BOB – our first exhibition with a central
nervous system; Pierre Huyghe’s use of a deep neural network
to construct visual representations of human thought in the
exhibition Uumwelt, and Hito Steyerl’s augmented reality
app for data visualisation, Actual RealityOS, and series of
video sculptures created using artificial intelligence trained
to predict the future as part of the project, Power Plants.
The intersection of art and technology has also manifested
through the Serpentine’s series of digital commissions: Cécile
B. Evans: AGNES; James Bridle: Cloud Credit; Suzanne Treister:
From SURVIVOR (F) to The Escapist BHST (Black Hole Spacetime),
Jenna Sutela: I Magma, Steensen’s The Deep Listener, which
was produced with Google Arts & Culture and David Adjaye
OBE and, of course, this project.
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ESSAY
As Ben Vickers, who co-curated the project with Kay Watson,
stated at the press conference launching this project with
BTS: “We feel at this very moment in time that it is important
to work with artists at the intersection of art and technology,
because it is important that we work with difference and
acknowledge that we are at a moment in history in which
there’s something of a monoculture around technology
and that artists can play a critical role in reshaping that.”
Embedded within this thinking is a desire to make connections
across the realms of art and technology, rather than allowing
for these spheres to remain separate.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST
BTS’s words speak to the acts of bridge building and
connecting people through countries, energies and
generations. In our current climate of ecological, social and
political crises, this push towards togetherness over isolation is
more important than ever. Our world today is still segregated
into bubbles, especially within the realm of culture: the music
world, the art world, the museum world. In order to enact
change, we must break down these silos and find overlap,
meeting points, or, as J. G. Ballard would say, create “junctions.”
As Daehyung Lee said during the Serpentine press conference:
“We are losing solidarity; we have forgotten how to connect
and talk with each other.” The truth is that the major issues
of the 21st century will not be solved if we remain enclosed
within our own caves of knowledge and experience, and in
this sense CONNECT, BTS seeks to break down these barriers
and to transcend borders.
37
 CONNECT, BTS
It is important to note that BTS are not just interested in the
idea of solidarity and community in and of itself, but they
are also building these communities through the ARMY and
the different groups and collectives that they cultivate. ARMY
stands for “Adorable Representative M.C. for Youth”, and
functions as a unique model that goes beyond the standard
notion of fandom, bringing together people from all over the
world in a special community based on trust, support and
respect. More recently BTS has been at the centre of a tide of
young people worldwide united by their love of K-pop, using
their social media platforms in order to combat the racist
rhetoric. Amidst the context of global protests against the
police killing of George Floyd, many K-pop fans used platforms
such as Twitter in order to disseminate anti-racist messages.
BTS championed their fans, writing to their 26 million
followers on Twitter: “We stand against racial discrimination.
We condemn violence. You, I and we all have the right to
be respected. We will stand together. #BlackLivesMatter.”
BTS themselves have also donated to the Black Lives Matter
movement, which is part of their wider awareness of various
socioeconomic issues.
38
ESSAY
CONNECT, BTS mirrors the interdisciplinary nature of how the
band work. They have a unique curiosity that extends through
their fanbase and collaborations with others, simultaneously
touching upon so many interests. After we launched Catharsis
at the Serpentine, we had many fans coming to the gallery
from lots of different backgrounds, which reflects the diverse
ways in which visitors can approach this project. Someone
who is into music, pop or K-pop can be interested in their
work, while someone who’s into art can be interested in their
work. Someone who’s into psychology, social issues and
inequality can appreciate their work. BTS wonder about the
social construct of art. Their fans are diverse. Each of these
HANS ULRICH OBRIST
meeting points has made for an exciting and unexpected
encounter, proposing new modes of connection and ways of
working across disciplines.
39
CONTENTS

MESSAGE FROM BTS 7

ESSAY INTERVIEW 338
15
TYPEFACE 348

LONDON BIOGRAPHY 354

49
BERLIN CREDIT 402
105
BUENOS AIRES 169
NEW YORK 217
SEOUL 281

Daehyung Lee 16
Hans Ulrich Obrist 30
Ben Vickers, Kay Watson 50
Stephanie Rosenthal, Noémie Solomon 106
Thomas Arnold 266
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CATHARSIS

Jakob Kudsk Steensen

14/01-15/03/2020
Serpentine North Gallery
28/01-15/03/2020
Kensington Gardens
28/01-31/05/2020 Interview
Streaming at Catharsis.live

Docent

Jin

SUGA

*D
 ue to the ongoing crisis caused by the V
pandemic, there has been a slight change in
exhibition dates.
THE WORLD, AT THE TIME
Ben Vickers, Kay Watson
The year is 2320. Selver is on a reconnaissance mission to the Earth's
atmosphere. They are testing current radiation levels and retrieving data from a
satellite in its lower orbit.
On their way back home to Ehshta, Selver chooses to read an article from the
Earth’s civilisational archive backup.
Entitled “The World, at the time” the frontpage report was published in The New
Yorker magazine, 22nd of April, 2031.
In 2019, the writer and academic
Alenda Y. Chang published a book that
called for greater understanding of the
potential of games to have not only
aesthetic but “sociopolitical relevance”
with respect to the environmental
sciences and humanities. Playing
Nature: Ecology in Video Games
proposed an interdisciplinary
perspective: game researchers,
designers, ecologists, scientists
and activists could draw from each
others’ modes of inquiry to forge ‘a
collective, multispecies and multiscalar
awareness that promises hope in
the face of ecological precarity.’ Fast
forward twelve years and no one,
Chang or otherwise, could have
imagined the movements that would
unfold in the following decade. So
how did we get here? To celebrate
our annual Earth Day, I would like
to take you on a journey through
a wonderfully eclectic tale that
contributed so much to the Glass Bead
Complex as we know it today.
1　Solarpunk is a science fiction genre that has focused on renewable energies, such as solar and wind power, as well as
technology as a whole, to envision a positive future for humanity. Drawing on permaculture and decentralised approaches
to political expression. It has continued to be a science fiction movement established more through action and invention
than literary creation.
in an uncanny event called CONNECT, game landscape, shown within the
BTS. gardens of the Serpentine on a colossal
screen that blended the landscape of
CONNECT, BTS was, in its making, a Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens
with the pixel world of Kudsk
coalition of international projects and
Steensen’s imagined forest. This site-
new artistic works organised by the
specific work was streamed live online
curator DaeHyung Lee. CONNECT, BTS
via Twitch, as a meditative form of slow
launched in London, in what was still
media that provided significant relief
the United Kingdom, with a project by
to those suffering cabin fever during
the Danish artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen
the first wave of 2020’s pandemic
at the Serpentine, an art gallery known
lockdown.
internationally at that time for its
architecture, exhibitions and education
Catharsis, the title of the artwork, was
Prior to the global pandemic that swept programmes more than its later
exactly that in its meditative, calming
through the world in 2020, triggering engagement with video games and the
form and effect—but it also presented
the chaos that made the twenties metaverse. At the opening event BTS
another, more serious, proposition for
one of the most challenging and were live-streamed in, and as part of
the reimagining of technologies and
turbulent periods of history, a series of their closing remarks RM stated, 'We
game platforms in an age of extinction.
cascading events irreversibly changed still believe in the power of art, that
CONNECT, BTS
As an artwork it posed a series of
humans' relationship to the natural it can help to change the world.' It's
difficult questions: what if these virtual
LONDON
world. One of these auspicious events, hard to know now if back then there
worlds were to become the only way
at the beginning of 2020, sowed the was any way of anticipating that this
to preserve the disappearing natural
seeds of a particular kind of cultural particular artwork would play such a
world? What if this is the only way to
shift, when K-pop phenomenon BTS significant role in changing the world.
see, hear or feel nature in the future?
sought to bring together the worlds
The prospect seemed ludicrous at the
of art and music. While there are The artwork in question was a
time. Though there was a consistent
many interweaving currents that have reimagined old-growth forest built
trace of this thinking that ran like a
contributed to the Glass Bead Complex from digital textures gathered from
shadowy current of a future warning
as it currently exists—from Epic Games’ research trips to the magnificent
throughout Kudsk Steensen’s work,
defeat of Apple, to solarpunk1, to the Redwood forests of North America
from the reanimation of extinct species
collapse of Westernised ideas of self- prior to the acceleration of forest fires
to the experience of hearing the last
hood, and the chaotic metastasising that devastated the United States and
Kaua’i ‘ō’ō bird mating call in virtual
of democratic systems of governance wiped these ancient, wise specimens
reality, despite the digital medium of
into the new global governing from the earth. These digital textures,
expression, it was clear that the artist
structures we have today—those together with field recordings and
was deeply concerned with what was
stories have been examined and told a audio work created by sound artist
happening to biodiversity and life
thousand times. I want to zone in on a Matt McCorkle, resulted in a complex
around the world.
thread of history that hasn’t been well and beautiful immersive simulated
documented to date, and its genesis forest. That was then transformed into
In late 2021 the first annual META-CON
a visual and aural journey through
took place exclusively online. This was
what could be described as a video
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the inaugural international gathering
convened to explore, discuss and
experience early experiments in the
formation of a collective metaverse,2
known more commonly today as the
Glass Bead Complex. As part of the
VR programme, Kudsk Steensen and
McCorkle chose to restage Catharsis,
but this time as more than a live
stream. It was a world that one could
inhabit; a playable version of Catharsis.
This virtualised space became a stage,
a place of profound engagement,
where a series of authors, poets and
musicians performed in response to
the virtual landscape that surrounded
them, drawing on principles of
mindfulness, such as the deep
listening approach pioneered by
Pauline Oliveros. This series of events
played out over the course of a week,
night and day, and hundreds of virtual
visitors attended each gathering. It
was this experience, this new nonplace
for coming together, that was perhaps
most formative for what followed—
but it was also the actions of a few
talented and anarchic ARMY fans that
really catalysed the wild invention and
coalitions that ensued. Captivated
by the quiet magic of the Catharsis
forest, and in protest of the time
limited controlling format that was
so common to exhibitions and online
events during that period, a small
group of participants pirated and
downloaded the whole of the Catharsis
experience to their own computers;
models, maps, digital textures and
2　The originating concept and technical imaginary that led to the construction of 1:1 virtual overlays on the Earth and
standalone simulated space that we now know as the Glass Bead Complex. Envisioned as a space where people could come
together to socialise, play and transact. Coined by the science fiction writer Neal Stephenson in the novel Snow Crash (1992).
3　Sony coined the term ‘Zen Gaming’ in 2008 to describe the video game Flower .
all. In much the same way that early that spent their free time expanding to protect and prevent the loss of the
MMOs had been copied, redistributed and experimenting with Catharsis, natural environment. Fantasists that
and coordinated as player-run staging their own events, modifying are nothing more than a 21st-century
servers, Catharsis quickly became an the world and introducing new species cargo cult attempting to dream the
entirely community-run sensation, a of plant life and matter into the virtual past into the future through the
multiplayer world, persistent, online environment. It was those same construction of a dangerous fiction.”
24/7, in which you could be alone caring community members, that Though much of this criticism was
together with others in a wilderness later became known as Catharsisian countered by psychologists and mental
where your only objective was just to Stewards, that were the first to health specialists who at the time
exist; a new form of Zen gaming3. respond pragmatically to the criticism were carrying out extensive studies
that inevitably came as the world grew on virtual space and those that had
What Catharsis offered was not new, in popularity. dedicated significant periods of time to
in the sense that before it there had Catharsis, early research demonstrated
been many eco-simulation games Most criticism focused on the amount that despite the synthetic nature of
and artificial life systems prominent of computational power and energy the experience, time spent in the
in 1990s video game development required to run the servers that world showed a strong correlation
and digital art practices. But it was kept the simulated forest alive; the with the same mental health benefits
the circumstances, the conditions and stewards responded to these criticisms of communing with “real” natural
confluence of alliances that made by crowdfunding the production of a environments, and given the deep
CONNECT, BTS
Catharsis different. The maturity of series of player-run servers powered wave of depression and the broader
an idea whose time had come, in part exclusively by solar energy. Their mental health crisis that was affecting
LONDON
through desire, but critically from the next move was the creation of a the global population due to the
necessity borne of perpetual cycles centre dedicated to the recycling and pandemic, Catharsis was seen by most
of pandemic lockdown. This drove upcycling of discarded computer parts as a net positive to its users. Many
a desperation to reconnect with the to create the Catharsis portals that still in the Catharsis community, though,
natural world. litter people's homes. However, the heeded these criticisms, and were
most searing criticism was ideological. quick to respond. They wanted to do
Many participants of this world Many accused those that dedicated more than simply attempt to reconnect
would do more than simply log themselves to the worlds of burying and rethink their relationship with the
in daily, treating it as an ambient their heads in the sand, escapists that natural world through a simulation.
mirrorworld that was omnipresent sought to liberate themselves from Spurred by this desire and coinciding
in their lives, fashioning dedicated the destruction of the 'real world' with COP29,4 a fork of the Catharsis
screens throughout their homes that that was taking place outside. At the world was established by those that
served as window-like portals into its time, there was certainly truth in wanted to do more. Promoted as
daily happenings, a shrine to what these criticisms. One New York Times a convening space for more than
was being lost. It was community- columnist was unflinching in his just a quiet gathering of minds, this
made inventions and open-source critique: “Catharsis worlds, and those fork was championed as a space
collaboration that perhaps best that declare themselves Catharsisian for discussion for the role of the
characterised the attitude of those Stewards, are a scourge upon the metaverse in promoting awareness
urgent action needed in this moment and active engagement with the
4　COP stands for Conference of the Parties, and was attended by countries that signed the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) - a treaty agreed 1994.
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accelerating climate emergency and
emergent social justice movements.
The world gathered ecologists,
engineers, activists, philosophers, field
biologists, game designers, artists,
solarpunks, ARMY and economists
together for a 3-day long co-creation
hackathon, intended to invent new
approaches and practical ideas for
how the metaverse could play a more
fundamental role in addressing the
ecological crisis.
This event birthed the idea of the
‘Ecoverse‘ (EV), a core component
and operating principle of the Glass
Bead Complex, which continues to be
facilitated by the Eco-Worlding Alliance
and its factions of world builders that
unified during COP29. The alliance
that formed during that heady week
of exchange, disagreement and
compromise was the same that laid
down and chose to organise around
a set of guiding principles. It was
accepted even in that moment as
an imperfect but a necessary step if
decisive action were to be taken; if
there was to be a metaverse that did
more than simply create a blindfold for
civilisation. This defined a move away
from the idea of an isolated, simulated
version of reality that ignored the
destruction that was taking place on
earth.
Guiding Principles for the Ecoverse
to come:
1. The ecoverse is not a place, it is all
places.
2. No Worlds without the World.
3. Connect to connect, never to
disconnect.
4. All worlds powered by the sun, never
the Earth.
5. All life is simulated, all simulations
require stewardship.
6. Play to protect.
7. Simulate all that is lost before it is
lost.
While these principles at first appeared
esoteric and cryptic, to those that
followed them they formed a critical
starting point and orientation line for
the rearticulation of world-making in
the most practical sense, and it was
the actions that flowed out from their
following that prompted the most
dramatic transformations.
CONNECT, BTS
There were perhaps two pivotal events
that first emerged from the writing
of the principles. The first was the
“Gaming Rebellion”, a series of large
scale protests that began to emerge in
existing virtual worlds, such as Animal
Crossing, Fortnite, Pokemon Go, World
of Warcraft and Minecraft. The initial
demand arising from the principle 'All
worlds powered by the sun, never the
Earth' called on each company, the
guardians of these spaces, to relocate
their world’s servers to ones exclusively
powered by solar energy. At first
these protests were enacted through
communal gatherings in-world and the
distribution of downloadable placards
in Animal Crossing and so forth. These
initial attempts were found to be highly
ineffective and for the most part were
ignored. It was, perhaps, this common
disregard for the company’s impact
on the environment that triggered
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the economic warfare that followed.
Thousands of players began cancelling
their subscriptions and deleting their
accounts, and in quite quick succession
each of the companies responded to
the demands, and so signalled the first
major win of the EV movement, which
saw its size swell innumerably.
The second major event was as a
result of the actions of Jakob Kudsk
Steensen and his collaborators, who
throughout these developments had
seen his artwork go from a simple site-
specific installation to a virtual global
movement, which in large part was
to the credit of the ARMY. Steensen
had continued, during this time, a
quiet dedication to the refinement
of tools for tracking, preserving and
simulating the natural world and
having established a large network of
ecologists who drove this innovation,
he played a key role in the COP29
gathering. Yet it was the decision to
open-source and freely release the
toolset he had created for making his
artworks that accelerated real change.
In a very short space of time, those
that had pledged themselves to the EV
were able to play an active role in the
construction of new worlds that acted
as containers and carriers of natural
life. The EV movement began to divide
itself into specialist subgroups, each
focused on specific biomes of the earth
and families of different species. Much
of this work took direct inspiration
from the Biospherians who, from 1987-
1991, constructed a large closed loop
environmental system in the Arizona
desert called Biosphere 2.
Over the course of the next few
years the EV expanded exponentially,
advancing far beyond a self-contained
simulation of an old growth forest,
to encompass something more akin
to both a technical protocol and
an ethos. It changed from a simple
game world to a set of principles that
permeated all aspects of the planetary-
scale simulation and metaverses
that were being built. By 2028, the
metaverse was much more than a
vision and patchwork of experiments;
it was becoming real and it was big
business, due to the fact it was fast
becoming the predominant sphere of
commerce as a result of the lack of a
vaccine that could produce sustained
immunity from COVID-19. As such, the
EV movement had grown beyond a
movement of people in virtual space,
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and had itself become the fabric of
virtual space. There wasn’t a single
world being built that didn’t at least
implicitly follow the guiding principles
set out at COP29. In the intervening
years major global charities, NGOs
and big tech companies had seized
on these transformations and worked
with various factions of the EV to
develop initiatives that brought closer
alignment between the Earth and
what was then formally recognised
as the Glass Bead Complex; the space
and practices that connected the
worlds. The most innovative of which
was, without question, the knitting
together of the virtual and earth
environments, through a planetary-
scale sensor network that tracked the
quality of real soil, air and water in
specific regions. If Earth areas were in
55
decline, the real world effects would move into this new decade. It is difficult
be felt and expressed within the virtual to imagine now that it all began with a
landscapes of each world—and it simple artwork, but this fact remains a
was this necessary embedding of an testament to the powerful words that
ambient awareness of environmental were spoken back at the beginning of
destruction that perhaps did most for 2020 by BTS on their unwavering belief
transforming global action. Though in “the power of art, that it can help to
this invention was hugely significant change the world.”
for its consciousness-raising, what
should unquestionably be recognised
as the most impactful of the EV’s
actions was the pressure it mounted on
the governing body of the Glass Bead
Complex to implement a reparations
tax on all in-world transactions, which
were directly funnelled into the buy-
back and repatriation of Indigenous
lands on Earth.

CONNECT, BTS
Whilst it would obviously be an
inappropriate overstatement to

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attribute the major events of the
last year such as the international
treaty agreement on the Half-Earth
Project, the ExxonMobil trials and the
formation of the GTA5 exclusively to
the EV and adjacent movements, I
hope it has become clear within this
charting of a lesser-known area of the
Glass Bead Complex’s history that the
EV has very quietly, over the course
of a decade, played a critical role in
altering the chemistry of the soil in
which all change has since grown. By
reshaping the norms and motivations
that underwrote the creation of what
came to be the primary space for
socialising, commerce and play, the EV
profoundly shifted our priorities and
focus in subtle ways that will hopefully
continue to have positive effects as we

5　Global Terraforming Alliance

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 CATHARSIS
Experience Catharsis by letting and flower in the virtual landscape It speaks, not through human
the slow rhythm of leaves, water are created by digitizing real world language, but through textures
and wind hypnotize you. Enter organic materials. Multiple species of trees and remixed natural
the forest, and let the forest have been combined in Catharsis, sounds, transformed into ASMR
enter you. Set up as a continuous resulting in a forest that is equally sensations.
Catharsis is an installation by Jakob Kudsk Steensen that shot that moves from watery real as it is imagined. It feels and
underground roots to the forest’s looks like a single ecosystem, but The virtual artwork explores ways
immerses audiences within a simulation of a re-imagined old- canopy. Catharsis is a large-scale, it is in fact composed of multiple of thinking about technologies
immersive installation that pulls overlapping worlds. as systems capable of expanding
growth forest, a natural forest that has developed undisturbed audiences into a digital simulation our physical senses, ears and
over a long period of time. Based on field work undertaken by of a re-imagined old-growth
forest.
As a philosophy and a practice,
‘slow media’ uses digital
eyes, into natural environments
- and beyond. Emotions,
Steensen and his primary collaborator Matt McCorkle, the work’s technologies to draw attention senses, technology and natural
This imaginary forest has existed to the natural world and create ecosystems come together.
virtual ecosystem and synchronised audio comprise 3D textures undisturbed for hundreds of years, new narratives on our ecological Catharsis takes viewers on a
free from human intervention futures. Collapsing various meditative journey through a
and sounds gathered from a wide array of North American and suffused with birdsong. ecological timelines, the work holistic new world, slowed down
forests. Set up as a single continuous shot that moves from the It was developed through
fieldwork conducted by Jakob
operates as a digital portal to a
virtual forest. Leaves, wind and
and up close.

watery underground roots to the surveying viewpoint of the Kudsk Steensen and his primary
collaborator Matt McCorkle,
canopy, Catharsis draws on Steensen’s conception of ‘slow media’ and its virtual ecosystem and
synchronized spatial audio were
whereby digital technologies can foster attention to the natural built from 3D textures and sounds the landscape, follows impossible
world and create new narratives about our ecological futures, collected in a number of North
American forests. Every tree, leaf
through a simulated journey that gives audiences access to past
water follow different time-scales;
the water runs slow. The wind is
fast, and the time a day, revealed
by sunbeams moving through
rhythms. Catharsis invites you to
change your psychological state.

CATHARSIS
LONDON

and present natural environments, slowed down and up close.

Catharsis
Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Simulation with
sound by Matt McCorkle, 12 min. 2019-2020
Outdoor installation at the Serpentine Galleries

Jakob Kudsk Steensen Courtesy of the artist

Photo: Hugo Glendinning

b. 1987, Denmark
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Catharsis
Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Simulation with
sound by Matt McCorkle, 12 min. 2019-2020
Courtesy of the artist

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 Credits

Jakob Kudsk Steensen Head of Communications Additional CGI

Roisin McVeigh Tom Wandrag and Gabriel
Sound Artist Stones, Werkflow
Matt McCorkle Digital Content and
Social Media Editor Web Design and
Special thanks to Nadja Coyne Development
Elizabeth Kircher and James Wreford,
to the Forests of North Head of Media Relations Blackshuck Coop
America Jesse Ringham
AV Installation and
Serpentine Galleries Head of Brand and Consultants
Curated by Ben Vickers, Audiences Josh Love, Ant Marlow,
CTO and Kay Watson, Erica Boyer Sara Smith and all at ADi
Arts Technologies Curator
with Eva Jäger, Assistant Head of Corporate Installation
Arts Technologies Partnerships Photography
Curator; Sarah Shattock, Emma Reyburn Hugo Glendinning
Producer; Alexander
Boyes, Producer. Corporate Relationships
Manager The first version of
Artistic Director Duncan Welsh Catharsis was originally
Hans Ulrich Obrist commissioned by
Head of Events PinchukArtCentre.
Artistic Director Shuki Sen
Bettina Korek With special thanks to
Events Manager The Royal Parks, Lady
Chief Executive Officer Alexandra Russell Arabella Lennox-Boyd,
Jo Paton Chucs Serpentine, AECOM
Events Manager and WEIL.
Chief Producer David Wimhurst
Julie Burnell
IT Consultant

CATHARSIS
Head of Construction & Claudia Iorio
Buildings
LONDON

Kat Coxon-Kiorgaard Visitor Experience

Manager
Facilities Manager Olga Hart-Antoniadou
Sophie Netchaef,
Strategic Projects Visitor Experience Team
Leader
Manager Jordan Page
Victoria Ivanova, R&D
Visitor Experience Team
Strategist Leader
Mike Gaughan Youssra Manlaykhaf

Gallery Manager Visitor Experience Team

Joel Bunn Leader
Rossella Cancelliere
Installation and
Production Manager Visitor Experience Team
Rose Dempsey Leader and all in the
Visitor Experience Team

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 BERLIN
RITUALS OF CARE

Jelili Atiku, boychild, Pan Daijing,

Cevdet Erek, Marcelo Evelin,
Bill Fontana, Maria Hassabi, Mette
Ingvartsen, Baba Murah and
Candomblé Berlin, Nadia Lauro and
Antonija Livingstone with Mich Cota,
Stephen Thompson and others Interview

15/01-02/02/2020
Gropius Bau
Docent

Jung Kook

Jimin

j-hope

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RITUALS OF CARE
Stephanie Rosenthal, Noémie Solomon
At the beginning of 2020, a host
of people assembled in the atrium
of the Gropius Bau, Berlin for an
interdisciplinary performance
programme. Rituals of Care unfolded
over three weeks in the frame of the
Gropius Bau’s ongoing investigation of
pressing contemporary issues around
the body and the land, violence and
repair. The collection of experimental
choreographies, healing practices
and sonic installations resonated with
the history, location and physicality
of the building itself, which still bears
the marks of wartime damage and its
mending through carefully restored
traces. Gathering diverse gestures and
audiences, Rituals of Care explored vital
conditions for coming together and
tending to environments, to physical
and spiritual worlds and to other
beings. They shared a range of somatic
techniques, queer re-imaginings and
indigenous perspectives, which, as
a whole, proposed many radical acts
of care and possibilities of repair
– a rehearsal for assembly across
difference and in movement.
Two sound pieces accompanied the
program throughout its duration.
Cevdet Erek’s Left Right, Stereo is a new
art installation conceived specifically
for the Gropius Bau’s. Allying the sonic
and the architectural, the artist
extended his thorough investigation
into the trades of form and history
around the Pergamonaltar and
its famous frieze of gods and
underground giants that was displaced
from Turkey and relocated in Berlin in
the late 19th century. Left Right was
situated on the façade of the exhibition
hall and featured two large banners
that at once marked and blurred the
divide across stereophonic sound
production and political spectrums
against the classicist and symmetrical
CONNECT, BTS
architecture of the Gropius Bau. The
colossal “L” and “R” signs framed the
entrance, offering uncanny echoes
with the imposing Abgeordnetenhaus
standing across the street, home to
Berlin’s State Parliament. In the foyer,
Stereo featured Erek’s own sound
system from his high school years
that mediated and amplified a newly-
made stereo mix of the beat pattern
and guttural voice from the sound
composition of a previous work,
Bergama Stereo. Together, these visual
and sonic interventions emphasized
the threshold between the outside and
inside, prompting a new ritual that
invited us to shift our perception of the
space – its vibrations and ghosts – as
we entered the building.
Landscape Sounding River Echoes, a
recent sound sculpture by Bill Fontana,
could be heard in the atrium in-
106
between the different performance
events and gatherings throughout
Rituals of Care. Drawing on his long-
time practice of working with human
and natural environments as living
sources of musical information,
Landscape Sounding River Echoes
was developed from a recording of
a cluster of giant sequoia trees near
the Kaweah River in Sequoia National
Park, California. The vibration sensors
or accelerometers were mounted
on these ancient trees to pick up
the rhythmic energy and resonating
echoes of the moving river across the
landscape. Distributed across the space
of the atrium, the sound sculpture built
a common zone of listening, bringing
within the museum’s walls a sensuous
world with echoes of the more-than-
human.
On the opening weekend,
Marcelo Evelin presented a recent
choreographic creation in the atrium,
A Invenção da Maldade (“The Invention
of Evilness”), a work that came into
being in Teresina, Brazil, his hometown
and base of his platform for artistic
experimentation, Demolition
Incorporada. A Invenção da Maldade
is a raw and forceful meditation on
corporeal rites and political tensions
in a social context of precarity and
rising violence, as well as a growing
intolerance toward artists and
minorities. In a sparse setting made of
branches, leaves and bells, the seven
naked performers – all coming from
different somatic and geographical
backgrounds – enacted a series of
body states and moments of trance
that evoked rage, pain, joy and chaos
in turn. Transposed in the atrium of
the Gropius Bau, the performance
stunned, seduced, guided – in short
choreographed – its audience, creating
an immersive situation; an affective
battlefield of sorts in which the
spectator became witness, protagonist,
caretaker.
Interdisciplinary artist Jelili Atiku
created The Night Has Ears, a
performance project that consisted
of a public procession and healing
ritual. Atiku worked with three
Olosha priestesses from Nigeria and
guided a group of 61 participants
to interact with and carry small
wooden sculptures created for the
event, while wearing specifically
designed costumes. Beginning in
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the atrium of the Gropius Bau, the
performance proceeded with Wiwe
(sacred bathing) of the wooden
sculptures and continued outside in
the adjacent streets before returning
to the exhibition hall. The procession
addressed charged memories of
violence still held in the building of
the Gropius Bau and its surroundings.
Returning into the atrium, the group
performed simple ritual actions with
the sculptures as a form of community
healing.
Mette Ingvartsen presented three
of her works across the space of
the Gropius Bau. With the drummer
Will Guthrie, she performed the
duet All Around in the atrium, as the
audience encircled a performance
space inhabited by a drum kit, a
107
moving light and the performers’
bodies. Using a minimal and repetitive
vocabulary – acts of spinning and
turning, variations of rhythm and
speed – the performance built
towards an ecstatic and trance-
like intensity. With evaporated
landscapes, Ingvartsen created an
artificial world behaving according
to rules of evaporation, dissolution
and transformation. Departing from
ephemeral materials and matters like
light, sound, bubbles and foam, the
performance carefully constructed
various moving landscapes. Here,
choreography departs from the site
of bodies and their organisation
toward the unexpected relationship
between the ephemeral elements,
as they magically materialise, float
and dissolve in space and time.
Finally, Manual Focus proposed a
precise, uncanny choreography by
three women – Ingvartsen along with
Manon Santkin and Kajsa Sandström
– performing naked except for masks
of old men on the back of their heads.
They moved across a series of shapes
and situations that alluded to animals,
headless humans and other uncanny
and disorganised creatures. Through
a series of uncanny and monstrous
associations, Manual Focus generated
an unfamiliar gaze at and relation with
the bodies we think we know.
Baba Murah, spiritual leader of
Berlin’s Candomblé Temple Ilê Obá
Sileké situated nearby the Gropius
Bau, performed a theatrical work
and a purification ritual with a group
of dancers, drummers and singers
in honour of the divinity of disease
and healing, the Orixá Obaluaiê.
Practitioners of the Afro-Brazilian
religion Candomblé worship the
supreme creator Olorun and the
Orixás: West African deities that form
a link between the human and the
spiritual world. One fundamental
principle of this matriarchal religion
is the balance of forces: between
human and nature, the spiritual and
the material world, this life and the life
hereafter. Imbalances are considered
an illness to be rebalanced by healing
and cleansing rituals. The first part of
the event featured Olubajé – Banquet
of Healing, a large-scale performance
in the atrium that built on Candomblé’s
complex mythology of tales, known as
CONNECT, BTS
Oríkìs, which are passed on primarily
through drama, dance, singing,
percussion and pantomime. The
second part of the event enacted a
healing ritual in which popcorn was
used as a way to recall the myth of
disease and healing, and as a remedy.
Members of the audience were
welcomed with songs and popcorns
rubbed across their bodies as they
entered the atrium, where they could
contemplate and linger with different
sacred tableau vivants: the altars of
Obaluaiê, Oxum, goddess of beauty,
love and freshwater, and Xangô, god
of justice and fire, formed part of the
ritual.
On the second weekend of events,
Maria Hassabi presented TOGETHER,
a duet between herself and dancer
Oisín Monaghan in which the two
evoke images of togetherness through
108
slow, minimal movements that
produce a range of emotional states.
The work draws on Hassabi’s distinct
choreographic practice involved
with the relation of the live body to
the still image, utilising stillness and
the velocity of deceleration as both
technique and subject. Located on an
intimate platform in the middle of the
atrium, the performance oscillated
between dance and sculpture, as the
bodies embraced and disentangled,
always moving at the limits of
perception, folding the surrounding
space against the contours of the
body. TOGETHER therefore proposed
a forceful choreographic meditation
on methods of affecting and being
affected by each other; on ways of
living with and next to another.
With les étudues (hérésies 1-7), Antonija
Livingstone and Nadia Lauro staged
a queer symposium for rare presence
and endangered practice at the
intersection of performance and visual
arts practices. A visit to a chimeric
library with caretaker kin; for the
duration of a storm, a space to take
refuge together in a serene nomadic
habitat. Livingstone and Lauro worked
in close collaboration with Stephen
Thompson, as well as with guest artists
Mich Cota, Malik Nasha Sharpe, An
Thorne, Elpida Orfanidou and animal
creatures to welcome an intimate
public where visitors could join forces
in listening and reflecting upon the
dissident potential of the slow and the
polyphonic. On the Saturday evening,
Antonija Livingstone and Mich Cota
collaborated with wild companions
to activate the atrium with a critical
disturbance of territory, natures and
cultures. Smoke, Water and Earth
cooperated with the artists in the work
of unsettling. CHAUD included sound
design by Berlin-based composer
Brendan Dougherty (Economy &
Failure) and featured an electronic
music song cycle performed by Cota in
English and Algonquin language with
her own dances.
On the last weekend of Rituals of
Care, Pan Daijing presented her latest
work, Dead Time Blue, composed
specifically for and against the spatial
and acoustic characteristics of the
atrium at the Gropius Bau. Daijing
wrote and directed the work using the
operatic voice as an instrument for
architectural intervention. Through
BERLIN
the duration of the performance, the
atrium became a breathing organ,
simulating a biological environment
and connecting the work with the
performers, audience and built space.
The work was delivered by Daijing
alongside dancers and opera singers
who became the hosts of sounds. In
a dense climate filled with smoke,
slowness and a vibrant yellow light,
Dead Time Blue pushed experimental
storytelling into experiential and
psychological dimensions, narrating a
place in which the audience could take
shelter.
109
The program culminated with Tosh
Basco’s (aka boychild) new creation,
Untitled Duet (the storm called progress)
conceived in close collaboration with
dancer Josh Johnson and DJ and
sound composer Total Freedom.
Departing from Paul Klee’s drawing
Angelus Novus (1920) and its angel
propelled backward into the future
while contemplating the past’s
catastrophes, Basco proposed a
forceful choreographic meditation on
the nature of improvised movement
as it presses against a linear unfolding
of time and of representation. Taking
place over 5 hours, the performance
featured the two dancers starting
at one end of the atrium and
making their way to the other over
ways of gathering and caring with each
other – and with our troubles – across
difference and in movement. As such,
what Rituals of Care’s collaborative
and feminist ethos proposed at the
beginning of 2020 – a rehearsal for
assembly – is still urgently prescient
for navigating our uncertain times. The
works affirm acts of relation and of
intimacy that fold in various forms of
critical distance, while scoring possible
ways for us to move, be and care with
each other as well as with the worlds
we weave and inhabit in time.

CONNECT, BTS
the duration of the work, moving
backward across the space through a

BERLIN
series of dazzling gestures and shifting
velocities. Untitled Duet (the storm called
progress) unfolded in sheer darkness
except for two spotlights chasing the
moving bodies and their unexpected
trajectories, capturing their fleeting
gestures or trailing behind to highlight
a trace of past presences. Against the
atmospheric soundtrack improvised by
Total Freedom, de- and recomposing
a “history of music,” the dancers’
emanated an affective plane made of
kinesthetic virtuosity and somatic care.

To remember these far-ranging works

a few months later – their many
affects, concerns, forces, shapes –
manifests a diversity of practices
negotiating encounters, tensions,
textures and variations. These
interdisciplinary performances offered

110 111
 The performance programme Rituals of Care spanned
experimental choreography, healing practices, sonic
environments and collective gatherings. These interdisciplinary
works and practices explore the necessary conditions for
coming together and tending to environments, to physical and
spiritual worlds and to other beings. Through a range of somatic
techniques, queer re-imaginings and indigenous perspectives,
these performances offer radical acts of care and repair.

RITUALS OF CARE
BELRIN

Marcelo Evelin
Jelili Atiku
boychild
Mette Ingvartsen
Antonija Livingstone
Baba Murah
Cevdet Erek
Maria Hassabi
Pan Daijing

112 113
 A Invenção da Maldade
Marcelo Evelin
16-17/01/2020 20:00
Atrium
In January 2020 I arrived in Berlin
with the dancers of Demolition
Incorporada, my platform of work,
to present our last piece on a
festival called Rituals of Care. The
festival was taking place not in a
theatre venue but in a museum,
the famous Gropius Bau, a
beautiful and imposing building,
situated near the Checkpoint
RITUALS OF CARE
Charlie, a political historic area in
the city. The building has partly
survived the destruction of war
and the glass roof, which has
been completely damaged, was
now reconstructed entirely for our
delight. Just a few meters from the
main entrance we could still see
the remains of the berlin wall, and
I could not stop thinking about
this radical line of separation
almost taking over the steps of
the staircase giving access to the
building.
The piece we presented is called
A Invenção da Maldade (The
Invention of Evil) and it can be
understood as a ritual, in which
the body takes the central place.
For me a performance is always
a rite marked in time and space:
a communal ritual among the
dancers, and a ritual of proximity
and share among artists and the
unknown spectator.
It caught my attention as the
name of the festival, Rituals of
Care, which seemed to me like a
reminder of the fact that care and
love — to each other, to buildings,
to art and to the world we live in
— is a necessary and urgent thing
to consider nowadays.
On the day of our general
rehearsal they launched in
London the press conference
to announce the Festival, a
collaboration with BTS, a very
famous South Korean boy group
with a vast number of fans around
the world. While in the museum
we were arranging the last details
of the performance and hanging
the 70 delicate ceramic bells that
form part of the scenography and
sound installation of the piece,
the museum was invaded by an
enormous number of teenagers
boys and girls, dressed colorfully
with their bleached hair and metal
accessories. They wanted to see
the members of the band and
were there to be close to whatever
would take them to BTS.
Two months after the
performances in Berlin a virus
shut down the world. Schools,
offices, theaters, bars, churches
and museums were closed to the
inhabitants of cities in the five
continents of the globe. Borders
between countries were sealed
and airplanes disappeared from
the skies. Hospitals were full,
even overflowing with people of
all age, gender and race. Home
became shelter, the Internet
the only possible habitat and
movement was only happening
on the motorcycles driven by
114
delivery boys around the cities.
Poverty and inequality raised
up tremendously among the
humans, revealing the privilege
of some against a total abandon
of many others. Our planet was
sick and death took over with an
A INVENÇÃO DA MALDADE
implacable ferocity.
What are the meanings of a ritual
and what can we understand as
care in the fragile days of our
current existence?
The Festival in Berlin was for me
a premonition, a subtle sign,
a strange omen digging in the
realms of the unknown. The
confirmation that art can reach
beyond what we can see, hear,
touch and understand as concrete
reality.
And now all what is left is Life.
Life in all living creatures, in all
forms of nature. Life on a word,
a sigh, a smile. Life on the eyes
reaching towards the other. Life in
the imagination, in the belief that
something else might come and
in waiting passionately for that to
come.
And I will just keep dancing,
dancing, dancing, dancing…
115
 A INVENÇÃO DA MALDADE
RITUALS OF CARE

A Invenção da Maldade
Marcelo Evelin, Gropius Bau, 2020
© Eike Walkenhorst

116 117
118 119
 The Night Has Ears

Jelili Atiku

18/01/2020 12:00
Atrium
In 2019, as the world was
approaching the last month of the
decade, few human rights issues
became a perturbing cases for
humanity to resolve or overcome.
The cases appeared to have been
a recurring of the past's horrific
events in the world. These
cases range from the homicides
and a group of 61 participants
to wear specially designed white
costumes, interact and transfer
their personal healing energy into
the sacred wooden sculptures that
were created for the performance.
The performance was created to
begin in the atrium of the Gropius
Bau, to infer the energy of light
(change agent), and the caressing
the sculptures by audience and
participants (co-performers),
the energy fields were implored
to open for pure exchange of
positive energy with self, sacred
objects, and the environment — a
form of community healing.

THE NIGHT HAS EARS

RITUALS OF CARE

involving African-American male (the ray of the day light) as it

juveniles in America to the Chinese
arbitrarily holding over one million
Muslims in detention, which they
referred to as ‘political education
camps’ – where the Muslims
were subjected to intrusive mass
surveillance in Xinjiang; to the
massive displacement in Northern
Nigeria and North West and South
West of Cameroon – where about
3.8 million people were internally
displaced due to violence in
the Boko Haram insurgence
that characterized abduction of
children, arbitrary detention,
killings of civilians e.t.c; to the
catastrophe in the burning and
attacking of villages respectively;
to the fragility of multinational
democracy. As such cases
pervaded the world, there was a
definite feeling that project the
human impulses driven towards
the quest for healing.
As a performance in public space,
The Night Has Ears responds to
the need for the healing of the
human archival bodies in the
world. It consists of a procession
and healing rituals with three
Olóṣà priestesses from Nigeria
descends through the transparent
roof of the Gropius Bau; proceed
with Wìwẹ̀ (sacred bathing) of the
wooden sculptures and the artist’s
head; and continue outside in the
adjacent streets before returning
to the exhibition hall. The sacred
bathing used the squeezed leaves
The Night Has Ears
and employed the healing and
symbolic contents of renewal Jelili Atiku, Gropius Bau, 2020
energy, affection and friendship, ©Eike Walkenhorst
peace, and eternal life inherent
in fir, ivy, palm and red spinach
leaves and Falsa as they bring
scared energy of healing to the
wooden sculpture and power
of Àṣẹ (power and energy of
manifestation) to the head of the
artist.
The procession, rituals,
movements, actions and the
recitation of Ọfọ̀ (sacred poetry)
in the performance are sources
intended to address the charged
heavy memories/history of
violence at Niederkirchnerstraße,
which was formerly known as
a thoroughfare, Prinz-Albrecht-
Straße and its connotation with
Nazi and its killing machine. By the
repetition of the word, Àlúpàyídà

120 121
 RITUALS OF CARE

122
123

THE NIGHT HAS EARS

 RITUALS OF CARE

124
125

THE NIGHT HAS EARS

 Untitled Duet (the storm called progress)

Tosh Basco(a.k.a. boychild)

01-02/02/2020 12:00-17:00
Atrium
My wing is ready for flight,
I would like to turn back.
If I stayed timeless time,
I would have little luck.

- Gerhard Scholem, Gruss vom Angelus

A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to
move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth
is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is
RITUALS OF CARE

turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe

UNTITLED DUET
which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like
to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing
in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel
can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his
back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we
call progress.

- Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, IX.

Untitled Duet (the storm called “into the future to which his
progress) is a new performance back is turned,” facing the piling
by Tosh Basco (aka boychild) wreckage and catastrophe of
conceived with dancer Josh the past. Against this dense
Johnson along with DJ and background, she imagines an Untitled Duet
sound composer Total Freedom. expansive performance that (the storm called progress)
Experimenting with techniques works with distinct forms: a
of improvisation and pressing durational composition of shifting
boychild with Josh Johnson and Total Freedom,
against a linear unfolding of relations across sound, music and Gropius Bau, 2020
history, the performance is movement. © Eike Walkenhorst
both an excerpt and expansion
of boychild’s work with the
collaborative band Moved by
the Motion. It takes Paul Klee’s
drawing Angelus Novus from
1920 as an opportunity to reflect
on the nature of improvisation
as it relates to what Walter
Benjamin might call the chaos of
history. Klee’s angel is propelled
backwards without foresight

126 127
 RITUALS OF CARE

128
129

UNTITLED DUET
 RITUALS OF CARE

130
131

UNTITLED DUET
 RITUALS OF CARE

132
133
 All Around
evaporated landscapes
Manual Focus
Mette Ingvartsen
19/01/2020 17:15, 18:45
18-19/01/2020 16:30, 18:00
Room1
18-19/01/2020 19:30
Atrium
RITUALS OF CARE
During the Rituals of Care program
at the Gropius Bau in Berlin, I for
the first time presented three of
my smaller scale performances in
a combined program, that visitors
could experience in different
chronologies. The pieces were
put in relation, perspective and
connection, to create a larger
body of work englobing my very
first and one of my (at the time)
very last performances — a time
span of more than 15 years of
work.
Manual Focus (2003) is a
performance in which three
women perform with the masks
of old men on the backside of
their heads, and by that transform
their bodies into androgynous
beings. The monstrous connection
between their naked skin and the
masks pose question about how
we look at (gendered) bodies and
how binary oppositions such as
masculine/feminine, old/young,
or artificial/real, or naked/masked
could potentially be overcome.
evaporated landscapes (2009) on
the other hand is a performance
that entirely does away with the
presence of the human performer.
A miniature scale model landscape
where materials and non-human
actors like light, sound, fog and
color perform in close proximity
to those watching. The work turns
the museum into an “natural”
environment, and creates an
artificial garden for wondrous
contemplation.
134
ALL AROUND, evaporated landscapes, MANUAL FOCUS
In All Around (2019), the public
gathers in the Atrium of the
Gropius Bau in a large circle
around a drumkit played by
Will Guthrie. Together with
Will we work on developing a
mesmerizing trance-like state,
built from rhythmical and
repetitive patterns of movement:
an excess resonance between
sound, light, architecture and
our bodies to be absorbed by the
audience.
The singular sequencing of
these works and the dialogue
evoked by it reveals an ongoing
fascination with intertwining
dualities: proximity ‒ distance,
alienation ‒ recognition, nature ‒
culture, human ‒ non-human, all
processes of entanglement that
run through my choreographic
research.
135
 ALL AROUND, evaporated landscapes, MANUAL FOCUS
RITUALS OF CARE

All Around
Mette Ingvartsen and Will Guthrie, Gropius Bau, 2020
© Eike Walkenhorst

136 137
 ALL AROUND, evaporated landscapes, MANUAL FOCUS
RITUALS OF CARE

evaporated landscapes
Mette Ingvartsen, Gropius Bau, 2020
© Eike Walkenhorst

138 139
 ALL AROUND, evaporated landscapes, MANUAL FOCUS
RITUALS OF CARE

Manual Focus
Mette Ingvartsen, Gropius Bau, 2020
© Eike Walkenhorst

140 141
 Les études (hérésies 1–7)
Antonija Livingstone
and Nadia Lauro

LES ÉTUDES (HÉRÉSIES 1–7)

RITUALS OF CARE

Les études (hérésies 1–7)

Antonija Livingstone and Nadia Lauro, Gropius Bau, 2020
© Eike Walkenhorst

142 143
 The Magic of Healing
Baba Murah

THE MAGIC OF HEALING

RITUALS OF CARE

The Magic of Healing

Baba Murah and Candomblé Berlin, Gropius Bau, 2020
© Eike Walkenhorst

144 145
 RITUALS OF CARE

146
147

THE MAGIC OF HEALING

 Left Right, Stereo
Cevdet Erek

LEFT RIGHT, STEREO

RITUALS OF CARE

148 149
 LEFT RIGHT, STEREO
RITUALS OF CARE

Left Right, Stereo

Cevdet Erek, Gropius Bau, 2020
© Eike Walkenhorst

150 151
 TOGETHER
Maria Hassabi
RITUALS OF CARE

TOGETHER
TOGETHER
Maria Hassabi, Gropius Bau, 2020
© Eike Walkenhorst

152 153
 RITUALS OF CARE

154
155

TOGETHER
 Dead Time Blue
Pan Daijing
RITUALS OF CARE

DEAD TIME BLUE

Dead Time Blue
Pan Daijing, Gropius Bau, 2020
© Eike Walkenhorst

156 157
158 159
 Credits

Berliner Festspiele/ Artist and Performers Bill Fontana Antonija Livingstone

Gropius Bau Landscape Soundings with Mich Cota & guests
A division of Jelili Atiku CHAUD
Kulturveranstaltungen The Night Has Ears Maria Hassabi
des Bundes in Berlin Performers: Jelili Atiku TOGETHER Programme
(KBB) GmbH with Taiwo Agbede Performers: Maria Mieko Suzuki
Babatunde (Osun Hassabi and Oisín Why Be
Artistic Director priestess), Kafilat Ajoke Monaghan Prem Krishnamurthy
Dr. Thomas Oberender Dada (Obaluwaye
priestess), Biliki Asake Mette Ingvartsen
Managing Director Adeyemi (Obatala evaporated landscapes
Charlotte Sieben priestess) and 65 Manual Focus, performed
participants by Manon Santkin,
Director Gropius Bau Kajsa Sandström, Mette
Dr. Stephanie Rosenthal boychild Ingvartsen
with Josh Johnson and
Rituals of Care Total Freedom Mette Ingvartsen and
Curated by Stephanie Untitled Duet (the storm Will Guthrie
Rosenthal and Noémie called progress) All Around
Solomon
Pan Daijing Baba Murah and
Produced by satis&fy Dead Time Blue Candomblé Berlin
Head of Production Performers: Pan Daijing, The Magic of Healing
Constanze Soeder Shade Therét, Jia-Yu Performers: “The Sons
Corti, Thibault Lac, Steve and Daughters of Ilê Obá
Team Katona, Marie Gailey, Sileké” (os filhos do Ilê
Nora Bergbreiter Anna Davidson Obá Sileké)
Ellen Clemens Musicians: Juninho
Annie-Claire Geisinger Cevdet Erek Quebradera, Leosinho
RITUALS OF CARE

Luis Kürschner Left Right, Stereo Percussivo, Valdir Juvenal

DEAD TIME BLUE

Katharina Küster Dancers: Murah Soares,
Clara Meister Marcelo Evelin Meryl Prettyman, Carolina
Katrin Mundorf A Invenção da Maldade Schneeberg, Virgínia de
Simone Schmaus Performers: Bruno Medeiros
Bert Schülke Moreno, Elliot Dehaspe,
Natalie Schütze Javé Monte Uchoa, Maja Antonija Livingstone and
Eva Winkeler Grzeczka, Márcio Nonato, Nadia Lauro
GROPIUS BAU FRIENDS Matteo Bifulco and les études (hérésies 1-7)
Rosângela Sulidade Created and performed
Externs Team: Andrez Ghizze, by Antonija Livingstone
Felix Ewers (Video) Daniel Groß, Gui & Nadia Lauro in
Eike Walkenhorst Fontineles, Humilde collaboration with Kennis
(Fotograf, extern) Alves, Regina Veloso, Sho Hawkins and Stephen
Marius Wenker (Grafik, Takiguchi and Sofia Matos Thompson; Guest Artists:
extern) Mich Cota, Malik Nashad
Katerine Niedinger Sharpe, An Thorne
(Übersetzung, extern)

160 161
CONNECT, BTS

BUENOS AIRES
BUENOS AIRES
FLY WITH AEROCENE PACHA

Tomás Saraceno

Exhibition
21/01-22/03/2020
Film Screening
31/01/2020, 15/02, 29/02, 14/03
Centro Cultural Kirchner (CCK) Interview

Sarmiento 151, C1041 CABA,

Buenos Aires, Argentina

Docent

SUGA

Jimin

*D
 ue to the ongoing crisis caused by the RM
pandemic, there has been a slight change in
exhibition dates.
CONNECT, BTS
BUENOS AIRES
Daehyung Lee

Argentinian artist Tomás Saraceno at the Salinas Grandes in Argentina,

envisions interdisciplinary art and
communal living projects that have an
ethical and sustainable relationship to
the future. Often involving scientists
and activists, Saraceno’s oeuvre could
be interpreted as a kind of ongoing
research informed simultaneously
by the worlds of art, architecture,
natural sciences, astrophysics, and
engineering. His floating sculptures,
a salt flat at 3,450 m above sea level
where the horizon meets the sky,
and where no internet connection
or cellular service can reach. This
stunning and mysterious place is
unsafe to visit without a guide and is
largely inaccessible for the general
public. For these reasons, the entire
process of the work was filmed and
screened at CCK, the largest cultural

BUENOS AIRES
CONNECT, BTS
community works and interactive center in Buenos Aires (in fact, the
installations suggest new, sustainable largest in South America) to allow Fly with Aerocene Pacha, 2020
ways of inhabiting and sensing the more people to see the performance. A project by Tomás Saraceno for an Aerocene era.
environment. Fly with Aerocene Pacha Produced by the Aerocene Foundation and Studio Tomás Saraceno.
is an open-source community project Supported by CONNECT, BTS, curated by Daehyung Lee.
to create an aerosolar sculpture. Filled First exhibited at CCK, curated by Veronica Fiorito.
only with air, the sculpture floats © Tomás Saraceno
thanks to the sun warming its interior.
The project description makes clear
its ambitions and the extent of its
vision: “Aerocene seeks to open up
the imagination towards an emergent
cloudscape, un-tethering a new era
of planetary attunement, restoring
the thermodynamic balance of the
Earth, free from borders, free from
fossil fuels.” As such, Fly with Aerocene
Pacha is as utopian in impulse as
BTS’s attempt to change entrenched
attitudes on a global scale—both
reach for an experience of blithe
detachment, a sense of floating above
it all. The performance was carried out

170 171
HORIZONS FROM AN
AEROSCENE WORK
Maristella Svampa
The Aerocene-Pacha project, by
Tomás Saraceno and involving a rich
community of people with diverse
passions, is an invitation to follow new
paths and to explore different cultural
horizons, compatible with a new way
of life.
During Anthropocene times or
terricide, as Moira Millan (the
mapuche referent), names it, Aerocene-
Pacha project aims to visibilize other
languages giving value to territories,
relational cosmovisions linked to
indigenous people, and particularly to
the rising protagonism of women in
the strike for the defense of our planet.
These voices remind us that when
thinking of our relation with nature,
native people, ecofeminism, and
communities, undoubtedly accomplish
a major role.
Thus, Aerocene-Pacha in an artistic
project that has built bonds and
bridges between different worlds,
looking to open up dialogues and
to build trust among the sublime
scenery of Salinas Grandes, a primary
landscape located 4,000 m over the
sea, in the North of Argentina, where
today local blind spots and global
conflicts take place.
1. The ancestral and ecofeminist key
As a civilization and artistic project,
Aerocene-Pache has the capacity to
bind different communities and
messages. The first message is local
and it refers to the role of kollas´
communities, those ancestral and
low voices inhabiting the salt lake,
which oppose lithium extraction, and
propose another way of life on Earth
and in the territory, caring about water
CONNECT, BTS
sources, and traditional economic
activities which are threatened by
the expansion of mineral extraction.
These are communities who propose a
relational and immanent cosmovision
between humans and nature. The
theme “water and life worth more than
lithium,” shown in bold letters on the
Aerocene globe, encloses something
else than a negation, it is a stand for
life sustainability.
The second message is global: it
underlines the necessity to abandon
the current paradigm based on
fossil fuels. It had women as main
protagonists. Therefore, it was no
coincidence that Tomás Saraceno and
his team decided to have a woman as
a pilot, the only one certified for flying
globes in Argentina, to be elevated
up in the air. Thanks to Pacha’s good
job, and after three consecutive days
172
of rain, January 25th, the day chosen
for the flight, turned sunny and clear.
Finally, Leticia Marquès raised up and
piloted the globe setting a new global
record, with no fossil fuel, nor lithium,
or helium. It was just with the help of
the sun and deoxygenated air from
white salt lakes.
In this scenario, there were also
women from indigenous people,
including knitters and leaders like
Verónica Chávez from the Tres Pozos
community. For decades in Latin
America, so as in other regions of the
Global South, women have had a great
protagonism in social struggles and
collective self-organization processes.
Their contributions helped to rethink
the relationships between the human
and the unhuman, through a relational
cosmovision, that questions the
notion of “autonomy” conceived in the
modern scientific vision of the world.
And holding instead notions such as
interdependence, care, reciprocity
and complementarity in the centre.
This reveals essential in the context
of pandemia we are living in, which
has shown ourselves naked and
vulnerable.
2. Lithium, territory and transitions
Debates about the role of lithium in
the energy transition that shows global
powers re-positioning, began to have
an impact in South America where
Lithium’s ABC (Argentina, Bolivia and
Chile) are. Situated in Atacama´s salt
lakes, North Chile, Uyuni salt lake in
Bolivia and Salinas Grandes’ salt lakes,
Olaroz Cauchari and Hombre Muerto in
Argentina, are the zones concentrating
more than half of the total of lithium
reserves in all the planet. In both brine
lithium and minerals’ deposits such
as Spodumene, what is extracted are
inputs from the first step of the value
chain: lithium carbohydrate. Although
this is not a rare or scarce mineral, and
neither unequally distributed, the most
profitable way to extract it is from the
Andine Salt Lakes.
This increases the global and national
pressure over the Atacama’s region of
the salt flats.
Lithium is an alkali metal that
oxidizes rapidly with water and air,
and possesses differential properties
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in relation to heat and electricity
conductivity. Therefore, it is considered
a key element for the transition of
clean and renewable energies, with the
objective of a post-fossil society.
Having said that, some will think that
these premises mentioned above
are contradictory: it is not possible
to say no to lithium extraction while
proposing the transition to a non-fuel
society, using clean and renewable
energies. All of the contrary, we
need to problematize this matter. It
is undeniable that lithium batteries
(present in our cellphones, computers
and feeding our electric cars), have
a role in the energetic transition. But
there is not only one path nor only
one definition of energetic transition.
And the one reflected in the increasing
exploitation of salt lakes in Argentina
and Chile is clearly the wrong one.
173
Although it differs from metal macro
mining, since it does not remove tons
of mud and dynamite mountains,
lithium’s main problem is that it is
mainly based in water extraction.
Therefore, its dead salt extraction
requires an unsustainable amount of
water extraction from a dry region,
jeopardising the desert’s fragile
ecosystem, its wildlife and the human
beings living there (mostly indigenous
people). This is fundamentally what
is going on in the Atacama region of
Chile and Argentina. Due to water
use, lithium extraction threatens the
rupture of the water system's fragile
equilibrium. This activity usually
dries up the water pipes and water
reserves in those areas already too
dry, which suffer from hydric stress.
Furthermore, it competes with water
used by indigenous communities
for farming, risking biodiversity. A
research conducted by Antofagasta
University for Chile, indicated that for
every ton of lithium produced in the
Chilean Atacama, 2,000,000 L of fresh
water are spent. Therefore, “226,000,000
L of water and brine are extracted
from Atacama’s salt lake.”1 The impact
caused by lithium minery has even
been one of the topics discussed
during the International Court on
Nature Rights held in Santiago de Chile
during December 2019.2
We know that there are no pure
transitions, nor linear journey. Neither
a Q&A’s guide to follow, and even less
1　http://www.chilesustentable.net/cada-tonelada-de-litio-requiere-la-evaporacion-de-2-mil-litros-de-agua/
2　https://www.rightsofnaturetribunal.com/tribunal-chile-2019
174
within the climate emergency we are
facing. Now, pandemia has added
a new thick layer. Nevertheless, it is
not possible to keep enrolling in an
unsustainable transition, as the one
proposed for the Atacama’s salt lakes
in association with transnational
corporations. With the aim that this
will conduct the territory to a “clean”
energy model, these companies
are running over territories and
indigenous people communities,
reproducing the domination system
on nature and populations. This
would reproduce one and again, a
false solution, helping to guarantee a
corporate energy transition benefitting
central and rich countries, over
southlands and south people.
CONNECT, BTS
Also, the post-fossil transition cannot
be an excuse to consolidate or to
keep maintaining an unsustainable
consuming model. There is no planet
who can hold on, nor enough lithium
to keep the track if we do not change
our mobility system. Because changing
fossil fuel cars for electric ones is
not enough, it is necessary to reduce
consumption, and to pursue public
and shared mobilization systems, for
them to become sustainable.
In this sense, the socio ecological
transition is a greater horizon that
should serve to ask ourselves more
radical questions about what kind
of society do we want to live in and
about the developing systems we are
proposing for the future. It is clear that
there is a need to abandon the fossil
fuel based energy matrix, since not
only is it highly contaminating, but also
threatens life on Earth. Still, energetic
transition cannot conduct us to choose
false solutions which keep pushing
communities out and strengthen social
and territorial inequalities, within the
current international labour division.
Transition must be complete in its
approach to change. It is not only the
extraction and production matrix that
has to be transformed, but also the
consumption and circulation matrix
with its due waste system. Moreover,
transition needs to be fair, both from
a social and an environmental and
geopolitical point of view.
Overall, lithium’s role in the change
of the system is not determined nor
fixed. Therefore it does not escape to
fears and doubts, obliging us to adopt
an integral and multidimensional
perspective on our societies’ metabolic
profile related to their environmental
costs, its territorial and social
dimensions, inhabitants’ human rights,
nature's rights, State’s limits, scientific
knowledge, and research.
3. Art as a portal
Expressing that art can be conceived
as a portal to different new worlds,
is undoubtedly not new. Moreover,
it constitutes a truism. Nevertheless,
this adds a new meaning during
these complex civilizatory times.
And, moreover, in a moment in
3　See Graciela Speranza, Present Future: Perspectives from art and politics about Climate Crisis and the digital world [Spanish:
Futuro presente: Perspectivas desde el arte y la política sobre la crisis ecológica y el mundo digital] (Buenos Aires: Siglo,
2019), XXI.
175
which political languages and
emancipatory narratives seem sealed.
As Argentinean Art critic and writer
Graciela Speranza3 points out, for a
long time art has promoted a dialogue
in Anthropocentric terms, mixing
with other disciplines that go beyond
epistemological barriers. This allowed
art to build up a dialogue of different
knowledges.
In this line of thought, Tomás
Saraceno’s art proposes us not only
with a reflection about the crisis and
Earth assasination, but also with an
invitation to dispute our senses in
the middle of the system’s collapse
we are living through. It is an art that
becomes political without being openly
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or directly political. The same way that
happens in the dialogue among the
communities of indigenous people and
women fighting against neo extractivist
expansion. This dialogue aims to make
visible other social practices proposing
a bond between Culture and Nature
from a relational cosmovision keeping
resilience, biodiversity and respect for
other cultures in the centre.
It seems paradoxical that it is from the
arts and not from political and social
thinking holding social and human
sciences, that this counter hegemonic
and relational narratives begin and
expand. This is related to the fact that
social and human sciences are trapped
in environmentally illiteracy, also
carried by a productive, developing,
and epistemic blindness blocking
“the principle of hope.” As Ernst Bloch
would say, this is the possibility to
generate concrete and mobilizing
utopias. The epistemic blindness
contributes to accelerate the global
and local economic system collapse,
exacerbating capital’s war with nature
and life, whose last part we are living
now. On the contrary, cognitive
liberation, contributing to abandon
fatal positions and the ruling science
of collapse, lightens the possibility of
other alternative civilizations.
Aerocene aeroglyph of the world record setting flight of Aerocene Pacha.
176
In this aerocenic XXI Century, in which
ancestral, ecofeminist and ecologist
struggles have become big sources of
inspiration, a fair horizon of transition,
signaling a different social system
of relationships, and another way of
relating with nature must be redefined
and thought. Because, as Climate
Justice movements have been saying
for a long time, the objective is to
“Change the system, not the climate.”
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CONNECT, BTS
Letter from CADEA noting Aerocene’s planned Certificate announcing the 32 world records to
world record flight. Leticia Marqués for Aerocene and the flight of Aerocene Pacha.
177
 FLY WITH AEROCENE PACHA
FREE THE AIR. Heated only by the sun, the air cars) intensifies, the vicuñas,
within the sculpture started to
For the air, for the climate, for the plants, and local communities
futures. warm and gently lift Leticia with struggle to live in balance with the
the earth. With each new step into salt lake’s ecosystems.
I have to confess, I was shedding the air, pacha in its cosmovision
A project by Tomás Saraceno for an Aerocene era. tears of emotion behind my connected what lies below and On that day, there were family,
glasses. I was nervous, the above the Earth’s surface with the friends, spiders, air, mountains,
Wiphala (the emblem of the furthest reaches of the cosmos, and BTS fans singing in Korean
Andean Nations of South America) uniting space and time. in the far north of Argentina.
On the 25th of January 2020, 32 world records, ratified by was waving too much. When Her first steps on air not only Everyone gathered spontaneously,

FAI(Fédération Aéronautique Internationale) were set by the Pachamama ritual began,

the wind was blowing strongly, I
Aerocene Pacha with Leticia Noemi Marquès, flying with the thought we were never going to
take off. That day everyone was
message “Water and Life are Worth More than Lithium” written prepared to take off, to turn the
nightmare of flying into a dream
by the communities of Salinas Grandes, Jujuy, Argentina. The again.
represented a milestone in the
history of aviation; one which
inevitably brought to mind the
direct inverse of Neil Amstrong’s
moon landing, but also marked
an urgent turning point. To fly in
communion with the air, the sun
dancing, singing, eating, as a new
ritual began to emerge. We were
celebrating other possible futures.
Fly with Aerocene Pacha was
the first of many takeoffs that
took us into an era of the air:
the Aerocene. This inaugural

flight of Saraceno’s aerosolar balloon took place completely free We were at an altitude of over
and the communities we moved
beyond the weight of patriarchal,
act was both a gesture and a
demonstration, where one small
from fossil fuels, batteries, lithium, solar panels, helium, and 3,600 m and the thin air was heroic, fossil-fuel capitalist, step in the air, became a giant
hard to breathe. My 10-year-old colonial narratives, subverting the leap for this planet and its climate.
hydrogen. It marks the most sustainable flight in human history,

FLY WITH AEROCENE PACHA

nephew Manuel kept throwing up. accelerating pace of the depletion To fly against the extractivist
If I had known, I would have told of the planet. attitudes and hyper-consumerist
and one of the most important experiments in the history of him to slow his movements, to societies and adapt to other

aviation. swim at the bottom of an ocean of “Water and Life Are Worth More
air; to begin to move as fast as he Than Lithium” read the sculpture,
rhythms. Without a change in
habits, there can be no equitable
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could towards this slower rhythm. while rising in solidarity with the
“It's going to be alright,” said
Veronica from Tres Pozos.
“The first thing is to thank the
Pachamama,” began Néstor and
Rubén. There with a ritual of
gratitude to the Pachamama, we
presented food, drink and coca
leaves to Mother Earth.
local indigenous communities
and their long-lasting struggle for
land sovereignty. For every ton
of lithium that is obtained from
the salt flats, 2,000,000 L of water
are needed. As the recent rush to
mine lithium and data from our
unsustainable connectedness
(laptops, mobile phones, electric
energy transition.
As Leticia took off, we too rose
with her — with our heads in the
clouds but our feet on the ground.
That day (for the first time in
history) we (all) flew with Mother
Earth.

aerocene.org

Tomás Saraceno
b. 1973, Argentina
178 179
 FLY WITH AEROCENE PACHA
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Salinas Grandes, Jujuy, Argentina.

180 181
 FLY WITH AEROCENE PACHA
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Two million liters of water are needed to produce one tonne of lithium.
This leads to water shortages, pollution and biodiversity loss as community rights in
Salinas Grandes continues to be exploited by unsustainable extraction practices.

184 185
 FLY WITH AEROCENE PACHA
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Veronica Chavez, community leader of Tres Pozos with Tomás Saraceno.

Writing together with the communities of Salinas Grandes.

186 187
 FLY WITH AEROCENE PACHA
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“Water and Life are Worth more than Lithium”

188 189
 Aerosolar journeys trace aeroglyphs—signatures of and for the air—
towards the planetary declaration of independence from fossil fuels in
support of global environmental justice.

FLY WITH AEROCENE PACHA

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Preparing for the flight of Aerocene Pacha.

192 193
 FLY WITH AEROCENE PACHA
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Daehyung Lee and Tomás Saraceno are testing Aerocene Backpack.

194 195
 FLY WITH AEROCENE PACHA
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Aerosolar sculptures from the Aerocene Backpack.

196 197
 FLY WITH AEROCENE PACHA
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Members of Salinas Grandes, Aerocene,

family, and friends united in the struggle
against unsustainable extraction practices.

198 199
 FLY WITH AEROCENE PACHA
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Leticia Marqués wears the Wiphala Flag, an emblem representing some native peoples of the Andes region.

200 201
 BUENOS AIRES

203
 FLY WITH AEROCENE PACHA
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Heated only by the sun, carried only by the winds, Leticia Marqués
flew 667.85 m high for a duration of 16 minutes with Aerocene and the
communities of Salinas Grandes.

Aerocene Pacha, the most sustainable flight in human history and the history of aviation.

206 207
 Tomás Saraceno would like to give special thanks to:

The 33 communities of Salinas Grandes represented by Tres Pozos, Tres Morros, Pozo Colorado & San
Miguel del Colorado, especially Verónica Chávez, Lali Chalabe, Andrés René Castillo, Ruben Chino
Galian, Natividad Vilte, Leandro F. Galian, Wara M. Galian, Abigail Galian.

And many thanks to pilots, friends, family, supporters, filmmakers and colleagues, especially
Leticia Marqués, Carlos Niebuhr, Igor Mikloušić, Joaquin Ezcurra, Maximiliano and Olivia Laina, Julia
Solomonoff with Canal Encuentro, Diego Belaunzarán Colombo, Matías Tarrés, Gastón Solnicki, Marcelo
Campitelli, Guillermo Eduardo Leniek, Jorge Vidal Sarmento, Maristella Svampa, Veronica Fiorito, Hans-
Ulrich Obrist, Alicia de Arteaga, Graciela Esperanza, Trisan Bauer, Maria Cohen, Eduardo Marengo,
Jorge Fernandez, Sofia Lemos, Lars Behrendt, Claudia Meléndez, Manuela Mazure Azcona, Sarah Kisner,
Sarah Greenberg, Mariana Lumi Azcona, Alice Lamperti, Roxanne Mackie, Erik Vogler, Georgi Kazlachev,
Jazmin Schenone, Javier Rosenberg, Saverio Cantoni, Dario-Jacopo Laganà and Familia Saraceno.

To all the members of Studio Tomás Saraceno, the Aerocene and Museo Aero Solar communities.
A thanks to Orly Benzacar and Mora Bacal of Gallery Ruth Benzacar, Buenos Aires.
And Andersen’s, Copenhagen; Pinksummer Contemporary Art, Genoa; Tanya Bonakdar, New York/Los
Angeles.

The sculpture for Fly with Aerocene Pacha was made possible with the generous support from Christian
Just Linde.

And a very special thanks to Daehyung Lee, BTS and the fans of BTS who opened their minds and their
hearts to the Aerocene era.

Thank you!
Gracias!

FLY WITH AEROCENE PACHA

BUENOS AIRES

Following a premier at CCK, Buenos Aires, Argentina,

the film series Fly with Aerocene Pacha is screened at Odeon Theater in
Florence, Italy as part of Tomás Saraceno's exhibition Aria at Palazzo Strozzi.

208 209
 NEW YORK
NEW YORK CLEARING

Antony Gormley

04/02 - 27/03/2020
Brooklyn Bridge Park, Pier 3

Interview

Docent

RM

*D
 ue to the ongoing crisis caused by the j-hope
pandemic, there has been a slight change in
exhibition dates.

216
 WHIRLED WORLD:
ANTONY GORMLEY'S
NEW YORK CLEARING
W. J. T. Mitchell
“And it’s buzz!” quoth the world, as on she whirled
And away with the world went we.
— Charles Leland
When I was a child growing up in the
high desert foothills of the Sierra Nevada
mountains, “dust devils” would suddenly
whip up the dirt into miniature tornadoes.
One of the great playground pleasures was
to chase the devils and leap into them. If you
were lucky, one would envelop you briefly in a
whirlwind of dust before breaking up.
Antony Gormley’s Clearing works evoke such
a memory. The irresistible temptation for the
inner child is to leap into Clearing and revel
in the vertiginous structure it imposes on
one’s own bodily space, held in a stable, but
quivering and resonant form. A snapshot of
an earlier installation of Clearing in London at
the Royal Academy of Arts reveals precisely
that: [Fig. 1] the blurred figure of a boy leaping
through the whirlwind of aluminum coils, in
the kind of ecstatic abandon sure to
Figure 1
terrorize the watching parents. I can almost
hear anxious grandparents saying, “Is that
safe what he’s doing?”
If this image of Clearing in a safely enclosed
architectural setting elicits just a hint of terror
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for the body that might leap into it, what
happens when, for the first time, this work
is installed outdoors? And not just outdoors,
but in an expansive and symbolic setting, Pier
3 on the Brooklyn Heights waterfront, with
commanding views of the skyline of Lower
Manhattan, and an expansive vista towards
the Statue of Liberty and the convergence of
the Hudson and East rivers to the southwest.
Instead of the blank walls of a gallery, New York
Clearing whirls the beholder into a perspective
that embraces the icons of American freedom
and capitalism, Lady Liberty and Wall Street, in
a glance.
And it is this new affordance of Clearing that
Figure 2
makes one feel that this was always the proper
location for this work, where it wanted, even
needed to be installed.1 For it is not just a
thing to be seen, but to be seen through, as a
station within which one could stand and see
the new world newly. I don’t want merely to
look at this work, but to look at the world from
the point of view of the work, and the team
who assembled it.
218
What exactly is being “cleared” in Clearing?
Is the title a noun or a verb? A place or a
process? Gormley tells us that the object being
“cleared out” or “cleared away” is the body,
specifically his own body, which occupied the
center of the work in its earliest iterations. In
New York Clearing he has cleared away any hint
of his body in order to open a space for your
body, or any body that wants to behold or be
held within the interior of the work.
Clearing began with drawings in ink and
sculptures in metal that portrayed a vortex of
strokes, cycles, and circles within as enveloping
or emanating from a body form.
The body that has disappeared from Clearing
reappears, then, when a beholder enters
it. Not Gormley’s body, but yours, mine,
anybody’s. Are the swirling lines drawn
with ink or metal felt within or without you?
Gormley’s ink drawing Trajectory Field 5 [Fig.
3] makes it perfectly equivocal, the ambiguity
we always feel in the experience of vertigo:
interior sensations of the inner ear are
translated into exterior forces, “the room
spinning about me.” The body in this drawing
can be seen as whirling in a spasmodic dance,
Figure 3
his movements leaving traces and trails in the
air around him, or subjected to external forces,
a whirlwind of energy/matter that twists the
body into its awkward, pigeon-toed position.
In this drawing we see what W.B. Yeats meant
when he asked, “How can we know the dancer
from the dance?”2
Answer: we cannot.
I get the same feeling imagining myself
NEW YORK
enveloped in New York Clearing. I have to
imagine it, because I was not able to see it in
person, since it was assembled at exactly the
moment when a global pandemic was arriving
in New York City. An uncanny convergence of
images: an virus swirling through airplanes
circling the world, and clearing bodies from
the streets of major cities all over the world.
While New York Clearing was being assembled
in January, the virus was arriving invisibly at
JFK, La Guardia, and Newark airports. By the
time of its disassembly, the streets of New
York were empty, an apocalyptic clearing of
urban space reminiscent of the empty streets
of Melbourne and San Francisco in the film On
the Beach, showing the post-human world of
a nuclear holocaust. All these swirling forces,
traces, and cycles echoed by an 11 mile long
collapsed, entangled aluminum slinky. Has
there ever been a more uncanny coincidence
of an image-form-object and a historical
moment?
No wonder then that the response of
a beholder to this work is completely
219
 intermingled with fear right alongside
admiration at its virtuosity as a tour de
force of structural engineering. In the most
technical and traditional sense, New York
Clearing is a sublime work, that species of
aesthetic pleasure that Edmund Burke and
Immanuel Kant associated with a certain
“delight” in danger. New York Clearing looks
a bit dangerous. It is impossible to suppress
associations with the coils of barbed wire as a
modern icon from the trench warfare of World
War I to the lethal borders that hem in or keep
out displaced persons and illegal immigrants
all over the planet today.3
The touch of delight comes with the
understanding that this wire has been de-
fanged, and is completely permeable, a
detournement of lethal fencing. But then,
there is a secondary threat: suppose all those
bindings, spigots, and braces should suddenly
give way and one were caught in the collapse
of this thing? When my boyhood dust devil
dances began, the whole point was to collapse
the tiny tornado. But this turbulent structure
is of another order—twenty-four foot long
aluminum beams bent and bound in intricate
forms of stress and resistance, like a giant
spring that might spring at any moment. If
New York Clearing is an open barrier, it is also a
sprung trap, escapable. And unlike most traps,
it does not camouflage or bait itself, hiding
the “spring” that will be triggered if one enters
it. It shows us the springs and coils that could
sweep up and entangle us if the ligatures gave
way.
Figure 4
Gormley’s drawing Trajectory Field 10
[Fig. 4] of a mass of tangles around a shapeless
center is, to me, a much better image of the
Coronavirus than the plastic crown that has
Figure 5
become the norm. This is a drawing of the
border between death and life, the boundary
of outer sensation and inward dissolution that
we experience at the moment of falling asleep,
or dying. Is it an image of dis- or re-integration
of energy and mass? As a sculpture, it would
be a kind of degree zero limit of New York
Clearing’s ambition.4 Perhaps a structure of
snakey wires emanating from a solid ball of
black rubber sheathed wires. Entry and exit
impossible for any body.
Much of what passes for sublimity today is
linked directly to the ridiculous and even
hilarious because it so transparently aims to
shock and terrify, as in the best horror films
and carnival rides. Nothing wrong with those
pleasures, but that is not, I think, what New
CONNECT, BTS
York Clearing provides. Instead, one enters
the vortex of tension and turbulence as an
enveloping matrix that trembles, quivers,
gleams, and resonates with the wind off New
York Harbor. In video recordings, a windy
day turned New York Clearing into an Aeolian
harp that roared with static and thunderous
white noise, the perfect sound-image for a
whirlwind of resonant aluminum. We are not
literally swept off our feet, but figuratively,
imaginatively, and sensuously. The tangle of
beams on the ground present a kind obstacle
course that challenges the walker to move
with extra care, to gambol through it like the
agile boy of Feeling Material XXVIII [Fig. 2], or
the pigeon-toed pirhouetter of Trajectory Field
5. [Fig. 3]
So far, I have been imagining what it must
have been like to enter into New York
Clearing, immersing oneself into it as a bodily
environment, close at hand, even touchable.
But what about seeing it as an object, a form,
an image? I have already suggested that
we can hardly resist seeing it as an image
of turbulence and tension, a whirlwind of
220
energy stabilized in a quivering structure, as
an evocation of barbed wire on the one hand,
and an atmospheric vortex on the other—a
storm of metal that evokes another memory
of the Great War, Ernst Junger’s Storm of
Steel. Beyond that, it evokes for me one of
the most enduring motifs in British art since
the eighteenth century, the “metamorphoses
of the vortex” that link Hogarth to Blake
to Turner to the Vorticists of the Twentieth
Century.5 [Figs. 5-6] “Energy is Eternal Delight,”
says Blake, and “The Nature of Infinity is this:
that Every Thing has its own Vortex.” Hogarth’s
serpentine “Line of Beauty” and spiraling
“Line of Grace” opens the way to Turner’s
sublime whirlwinds in Steamer in a Snowstorm
and to Edgar Allan Poe’s “Descent into the
Maelstrom.” Everywhere in New York Clearing
we feel what Gormley calls “the will of the
line,” a phenomenon familiar to anyone who
spends time in the space between doodling
and drawing. Blake called it the “bounding
line,” capturing in a single verbal image the
convergence of binding and leaping, restraint
and energetic resistance in the material form
of New York Clearing.6 Beyond the British
tradition we find the vortex as an obsessive
motif in a range of artists, from Leonardo da
Vinci to Jackson Pollock and Cy Twombly.
[Figs. 7-9]
Hogarth traces the artistic fascination with
the spiral line to antiquity, specifically the
legendary “Signature of Apelles” which is the
credit of masterful control and freedom in
drawing. Pliny the Elder tells the story of a
visit by Apelles to the studio of Protogenes, in
which the artists competed to see who could
draw the finest line atop the others’ line. The
resulting work had a “vast surface containing
nothing else than the almost invisible lines, so
that among the outstanding works of many
artists it looked like a blank space.”7 New York
Clearing is “blank” in the sense that it has
eliminated any figure from the composition,
opening a space where figures might appear,
assembled as a sculptural palimpsest of
this foundational tradition in the visual arts,
from the origins of drawing in the free-hand
“scribble” to the rigorous control of energy and
form.
New York Clearing starts with a turbulence, as
if tracing forces that spin around or emanate
from a moving body. If one thinks of the
curved beams of the coiled environment as
tracks of motion, a strange effect occurs.
One suddenly sees the work as the most
spectacular roller coaster ever designed,
filled with eleven miles of loops, plunges, and
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breathless ascents that would surpass the
challenges faced by a fighter pilot or video
game jockey. The sudden swerves and orbits
mimic the motions of a virtual Tilt-A-Whirl, or
the animated renderings of the labyrinthine
cyber-race tracks and circuits of Tron, the
cinematic precursor to so much of video game
animation. The association with my favorite
childhood toy, the slinky, is unavoidable, as is
the inevitable deconstruction of that toy’s tight
spiral cylinder into a chaotic tangle of circles.
Figure 6
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Figure 7
With the blink of an eye, however, other
forms of “seeing as” impose themselves. The
tangled lines of airline routes circling the
globe, converging on hubs, and fanning out
across continents, emblems of speed and
circulation—soon to be mimicked by maps of
viral itineraries. Or, to simplify, the ur-unit of
New York Clearing, a pair of overlapping ovals
within a larger oval, framing the winter sunset.
I was told that this was the first completed
section of Clearing, and that it collapsed shortly
after this photograph was taken. [Fig. 10]
It is important, I think, that these are not
perfect circles, but ovals: linear egg shapes
that postulate a logic of uniting and dividing
in a single, almost hieroglyphic icon of the
whole structure—circles within, without, and
across circles. Particularly notable is the hint of
a Venn diagram at the heart of the emblematic
form, so that both included and excluded
“middles” are diagrammed against the sunset.
If one untethers visually the ligatures that bind
the two inner circles, the image begins to shift
to the three-dimensional, a sphere with portals
rather than circles within a circle. It becomes a
bubble that one could slide into and be carried
away by, as I obviously am here.
So there is an abundance to look at in the
bodily objecthood and image presented by
New York Clearing. The work is lucky in having
worthy photographs that document, not only
how it looked, but how it was assembled. The
structural engineering of this work is obviously
a crucial element of what it meant and means.
The photographs of equipment and workers
are especially telling in this regard. What skills
are required to spigot eleven miles of twenty-
four foot lengths of aluminum tubing while
Figure 10
bouncing up and down in a cherry picker on
a windy winter day? What was it like to dis-
assemble New York Clearing in the final days of
March, as the plague descended on New York
City?
This brings me back to my original question. in New York Clearing’s role as a frame for
What does it mean to see through this work perception.
rather than looking at it. Here are two views
framed by New York Clearing, both involving Am I going too far in allegorizing the wild
workers. Shot at sunset, with the Statue of scribbles and cycles as framing the iconic
Liberty on the horizon; the wall of skyscrapers forms of liberty and capitalism? If so, you must
in Lower Manhattan, seen in early morning as forgive a perspective on this work that comes
the workers seem to be taking a break. Allow only through photographs, and is written
me a leap of the eye into the distant horizon: in quarantine as a plague flies around the
the cleared human figure reappears within the world, encircled by the tracks of the pandemic
matrix of New York Clearing, in the tiny, distant and the collapse of the global economy. The
figure of Liberty; the orthogonals of interior virus is a creature of freedom incarnate,
CONNECT, BTS
installation reappear in the architectural grids unstoppable by borders or any vaccine. It
of Wall Street. Architecture, the body, and flies through the air among the essential
the epicyclic vortex of the frame re-converge workers laboring on the front lines. New York
Clearing mimics the clearing of pollution from
the planet’s atmosphere, and the whirlwinds
of information and disinformation that fill
cyberspace at the same time.
The biocybernetic significance of New
Figure 8
York Clearing is confirmed by Gormley’s
characterization of the final stage of assembly,
when the “free radicals” of single, unbound
beams were attached to larger, more stable
structures.8 Free radicals—typically the product
of a weak immune system and environmental
pollution—are unstable molecules that can
damage the cells of a body. In the final stage
of assembling New York Clearing, the loose
ends were tied up, the work stabilized for
human immersion, for bringing a body—
any body—into the clearing as beholder and
Figure 9
beheld. Joseph Conrad provides a perfect
admonition for both the workers who
assembled the work, and the beholders: “in
the destructive element immerse.”9 Is this not
the daily experience of “essential workers”
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today in hospitals and grocery stores who
must brave the viral storm around them?
For the lucky beholders viewing the finished
work (or the hermit scholar viewing it from
afar through photographs), New York Clearing
provides kind of homeopathic medicine for
the new convergence of humanity and nature
in the storms of this pandemic. Conrad’s own
tale of a seafarer who fancies himself a “fine
fellow” who is exempt from danger and risk
is further reinforced by his narrator when he
puts it as a lesson for life itself: “A man that is
born falls into a dream like a man who falls
into the sea.” Antony Gormley admits that the
assemblage of New York Clearing “was all a big
risk”:
“We had never done anything like this
Figure 11
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scale and weight (some of the coils
weighed over 1,000 lbs) and never in
these conditions: outside, without the
support of a building and under public
scrutiny. We were working at times in
rain, snow and ice. Ashley, Ocean and
Oliver of my team were already exhausted
from having worked very hard on taking
down my exhibition at the Royal Academy
a few weeks earlier. The tension was high
because the contractor Torsilieri (who
had done many installs at the Rockefeller
Centre—like Anish Kapoor’s Sky Mirror
and Anselm Keifer’s Uraeus) were looking
to us for guidance but we were making it
up as we went along.”10
Gormley describes the work inspired by
the collaboration with the Korean pop
sensation BTS as a symbol of steadfast
223

Figure 12
hope and courage in precarious times.
Organized as part of a global art series in
London, Berlin, Argentina, and Seoul, art
director of the project Daehyung Lee describes
the aim of the initiative as “support for
diversity, and love and care for the periphery
... to forge a relationship between artist,
viewer, the immediate environment, and the
atmosphere which encircles and extends
far beyond.”11 It would be hard to imagine a
work of art that more perfectly realizes the
commission that made it possible.
Or the time and place of its realization.
January to March, 2020, will be remembered
as the onset of a new epoch in human
history, a moment as momentous as the
wars and plagues that have beset our species
throughout its existence. In the United
States this moment has been experienced
with special intensity and intimacy. Far from
experiencing this plague as problem for “other”
continents (Asia, Africa, the Global South), the
U.S. is now the epicenter. As we look through
Gormley’s formal framework at the response
of the U.S., it has fared much worse than other
modern countries in Europe and Asia. It is
now widely accepted that the disavowal of a
national plan in the U.S. has made its behavior
resemble that of a failed state, with a tin-pot
dictator immersed in scandal and corruption.
The historical timing of this virus is uncanny,
sandwiched between periods of political
crisis and fateful decision—impeachment and
election—in this country—a crisis of legitimacy
in government, at precisely the moment when
government, the binding of the “free radicals”
by self-government and by a responsible
political order, is most urgently needed.
CONNECT, BTS
So the temporariness of Gormley’s New York
Clearing is inseparable from its timeliness.
It provides a frame for a world picture, a
sculptural snapshot of the two most prominent
icons of New York as world capital at a
historic moment when the world is enframed
in a global turbulence of cleansing and
contamination. This world whirls in Gormley’s
aluminum storm. The time of its assemblage in
the winter of 2020 marked an epoch, a world
historical event. But it also framed an epoché,
a suspended moment, a “time out of time” of
quarantine and social distancing, on the one
hand, and on the other, a state of emergency
when essential workers were mobilized to
sustain the bare life of their comrades. And to
assemble an essential work of art.
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Notes
1 I have always felt that Antony Gormley’s work has one thing in common with real estate: location is
everything. Site specificity, to invoke the jargon, has always been the secret to his most successful
works. See “What Sculpture Wants: Placing Antony Gormley,” Picture Theory: The Lives and Loves of
Images (University of Chicago Press, 2005).
2 “Among School Children,” The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (Collier Books, 1989).
3 I would contrast the coiled barrier of barbed wire with the standard barbed wire fence that I grew up
with on a Nevada ranch. Those fences only impede the movement of cattle. All the small critters can
move through them freely, and the technique of stepping on a lower wire, and raising the upper to
pass through the fence unscathed was one of the first techniques mastered by kids on cattle ranches.
Coiled barbed wire is designed specifically to block the movement of human bodies in combat, and is
calculated to wound and entrap.
4 Gormley’s series entitled Matrix might be relevant here. It takes the horizontal/vertical grid of
architectural rebar, and constructs a matrix that is permeable at the outer boundaries, but becomes
increasingly dense and opaque as one moves toward the center.
5 See my Essay, “Metamorphoses of the Vortex: Hogarth, Blake, and Turner,” Articulate Images, ed.
Richard Wendorf (University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 125-168.
6 For more on Blake’s bounding line, see my Essay “Drawing Desire,” What Do Pictures Want?
(University of Chicago Press, 2005).
7 Pliny, Natural History IX: Books xxii-xxxv, trans. Horace Rackham (Harvard University Press, 1952), 323.
8 On the concept of “biocybernetics,” see my Essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic
Reproduction,” What Do Pictures Want? (University of Chicago Press, 2005).
9 Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (Concord Edition: Doubleday, 1923), 214.
10 Email correspondence with the author, May 11, 2020. I am grateful for conversations with members
of Antony Gormley’s team who assembled New York Clearing: Ocean Mims, Oliver Beck, and Ashley
Hipkin.
11 https://untappedcities.com/2020/02/05/a-giant-slinky-like-sculpture-is-now-at-brooklyn-bridge-park/
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Index of Images
Figure 1 Antony Gormley, Clearing VII, Approximately 8 km of 12.7 mm square-section 16 swg aluminum
tube, Dimensions variable, Installation view, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2019. Photo: Oak
Taylor-Smith.
Figure 2 Antony Gormley, Feeling Material XXVIII, 4 mm square section mild steel bar, 260×195×210 cm,
2007. Photo: Stephen White.
Figure 3 Antony Gormley, Trajectory Field 5, Black pigment and casein on paper, 28.2×38.2 cm, 2001.
Figure 4 Antony Gormley, Trajectory Field 10, Black pigment and casein on paper, 28.2×38.2 cm, 2001.
Figure 5 J. M. W. Turner, Snowstorm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth, Oil on canvas, 91×122 cm, 1842.
Figure 6 William Blake, The Circle of the Lustful: Francesca Da Rimini, Engraving for Blake's Illustrations to
the Dante's Divine Comedy, Line engraving on paper, 24.3×33.5 cm, 1826–1827.
Figure 7 Leonardo da Vinci, A Deluge, Black chalk on paper, 158×210 mm, c.1517-1518.
Figure 8 Jakson Pollock, No.14 Gray, Enamel over gesso on paper, 57×78.5 cm, 1948.
Figure 9 Cy Twombly, Untitled (Bacchus), Acrylic paint on canvas, 317.5×468.3 cm, 2008.
Figure 10 Circles within circles: New York Clearing, work in progress, January 2020.
Figure 11 Assembling New York Clearing, January 2020, with the Statue of Liberty in the distance.
Figure 12 Film Still from Justin Pemberton’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2019) based on Thomas
Piketty’s book. Cycles of untethered exchange in contemporary finance capital. The stock
market has done surprisingly well during the pandemic. The game goes on.
225
 NEW YORK CLEARING
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Clearing VII
Antony Gormley, 2004
Watercolour on paper
26.6×41.8 cm
Clearing XXXXI
Antony Gormley, 2005
Carbon and casein on maize paper
45×45 cm

226 227
 Clearing LXVII
Antony Gormley, 2019
Sumi ink on Chinese calligraphy paper
98×216 cm

228 229
 Clearing I
Antony Gormley, 2004
10 km of 12.7 mm square section 16 swg aluminium tube
Dimensions variable
Installation view, White Cube, London
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Clearing VI
Antony Gormley, 2010
Approximately 8 km of 12.7 mm square section 16 swg aluminium tube
340×1530×710 cm
Installation view, Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina, Florence
pp. 232-233

Clearing V
Antony Gormley, 2009
Approximately 11 km of 12.7 mm square section 16 swg aluminium tube
Dimensions variable
Installation view, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz, Austria
pp. 234-235

230 231
232 233
234 235
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New York Clearing

Antony Gormley, 2020
Work in progress at Vale Royal studio, 2019

Clearing VII
Antony Gormley, 2019
Work in progress at Vale Royal studio, 2017

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New York Clearing

Antony Gormley, 2020
Work in progress at Brooklyn Bridge Park
pp. 238-249

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Antony Gormley, 2020
pp. 250-265 and 272

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The possibility of releasing this
work from the confines of a room
and placing it out in the elements
against the modernist grid of
downtown Manhattan was just
too exciting to resist.
 
The dynamic between object and
space starts to break down once
you begin considering space as
a material that can be sliced, tied
and activated so that you can
enter and interact with a field
rather than a bounded object. I
wonder if New York Clearing could
more usefully be considered as
an event that involves you, rather
than as an object seen from a
the inherent potential of a
play between freedom and
restraint, that has single notes
and concentrated crescendos:
trajectories that freely arc their
way through space and bound
spools of tight concentration.
 
This tangled mass tells no story.
If there is one to be had, you need
to make it. There is no beginning,
middle or end to this work. In
fact, there are no ends − just one
endless line. There is no one point
of view, no perspective, no scale:
this work wants to eat you.
Is it crazy to think of this tangle of
Maybe the biggest single cause
for excitement is that Clearing
suggests a very different role
for sculpture and rather than
stopping time with mass, it
eschews memorial to become a
catalyst for the production of the
future. Far from being a picture of
the world, this web captures us in
a process of future possibility: a
future in which every participating
consciousness is implicated.

NEW YORK CLEARING

distance.
 
I am interested in how matter
– when allowed to display its
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11 km of aluminium as generating
energy, or even joy? Well, it
certainly did in my heart when
I first saw children exploring its

inherent qualities – can, like runs, and ducking and diving

music, make you feel and think through its strands. What began
differently. It helps to think of as an idea became experienced as
Clearing as a piece of music; a feeling in a place made in and
a music that evolves out of with the work.

New York Clearing

Antony Gormley, 2020

Antony Gormley
b. 1950, UK
264 265
FREE RADICAL:
ANTONY GORMLEY AND
NEW YORK CLEARING
Thomas Arnold
For eight weeks in the cold early
months of 2020, visitors to New York’s
Brooklyn Bridge Park could experience
and become a part of Antony Gormley’s
sculpture New York Clearing. When
Gormley proposed making an outdoor
Clearing for this project, I was so
thrilled to have his work again in New
York on such a monumental scale, and
Clearing, and the inclusive intent of
Gormley’s work, so clearly articulated
the goals of CONNECT, BTS, the wider
project it is part of: a program that
intends to give exposure to new ideas
and bring substantive new artworks
to a global audience. At a time when,
in politics and culture, increasing
attention is focused on differences and
division, CONNECT, BTS celebrates
diversity, emphasizes shared values,
and seeks to build relationships among
people, between artist and viewer,
and a recognition of the environment
through art.
Broadly speaking, Antony Gormley’s
work deals with the essential
questions of the human experience.
It explores the human condition, the
relationship of the body with the space
it inhabits and contains, with the built
environment, with nature, and its
position in the order of time and space
in the universe. His works, large and
small, have been installed in locations
ranging from a beach below mean sea
level to Alpine cliffs. His permanent
public works have become landmarks
and part of the visual and cultural
identity of the places in which they are
situated.
CONNECT, BTS
Clearing is a series of works that
Gormley first began in 2004. The first
installation, indoors at White Cube
gallery in London, consisted of 7 km
of 12-mm hollow square aluminum
tubing. The labyrinth of giant coils
filled the interior space and expanded
against, and was contained by, the
walls, floor, and ceiling. The installation
obscured the dimensions and geometry
of the room, and it invited viewers to
explore it, to make their way through
the tangle of metal and, perhaps, see
this room in a different way. The goal
was, in Gormley’s words, to “disrupt the
authority of a single-point perspective,
necessitating, instead, a constant
renegotiation of the visual field.”
New York Clearing follows the same
concept, but on an enormous scale. The
Euclidean box of the gallery is replaced
by the rigid geometric structures of the
266
skyline of New York City, its bridges,
piers, and shipping cranes. The massive
overlapping and crisscrossing loops
obscure and fragment the view of city
and energize this urban space. Unlike
the rigid orthogonality of the buildings
clustered on the horizon across the
river, New York Clearing has no specific
focal point, rather the soaring loops
guide one’s eye along their path, an
infinite line with no starting or end
point.
New York Clearing is not the first in
its series, but it is exceptional in its
scale and ambition. It is a first in a
few ways: it is the first time Gormley
has brought a work from the Clearing
series outdoors and allowed it to break
free of the finite boundaries of an
architectural space; the first time the
work is not constrained and supported
by an external structure, and, at more
than 33 m2 and 17 m tall, it is by far the
largest Clearing sculpture the artist has
built.
New York Clearing is also the first large-
scale public sculpture project that
Antony Gormley has installed in New
York in 10 years. New York is important
to Gormley and he has exhibited
regularly in this city since his first major
exhibition here in 1984. In his 2010
exhibition Event Horizon, thirty-one of
his life-size cast iron body forms stood,
like sentinels, over the city, on the
edges of building rooftops and along
the avenues and cross streets around
Madison Square Park.
The same year as Event Horizon, the
first 6 acres of Brooklyn Bridge Park
opened to the public. It was the start
of a transformation of more than 2 km
of former industrial riverfront land and
commercial shipping piers into a green
space with an emphasis on recreation.
Pier 3, where New York Clearing stood,
was the final pier to be completed. The
park’s tenth anniversary was marked
by the installation of New York Clearing.
The location, in an open plaza at the
end of the Pier with its postcard views
of Manhattan was perfectly suited to
the sculpture. From the sculpture’s
position on Pier 3, one looks Southwest
to New York harbor, a broad stretch of
water that includes a view of the Statue
of Liberty framed by Governors island
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and the tip of lower Manhattan. Directly
across the river is the Manhattan
skyline, including New York’s financial
district and, to the North, the iconic
Brooklyn Bridge.
New York Clearing is formed out of
approximately 18 km of aluminum
square tubing both coiled and broadly
spiraling through space. Tightly bound
bundles of loops form the sculpture’s
structural core while single loops climb
skyward or race horizontally around
the sculpture. Despite its approximately
30,000 lb. weight, the work seems to
transcend gravity. It has no external
support and no singular structural
element; rather, all of the rings support
one another.
There is a tension between the bound
rings and the elements that are
267
unbound and that have seemingly
broken away. Tension is an inherent
part of the sculpture. The entire
structure is made from straight pieces
of tempered, square aluminum tubing
that are bent into loops that remain
under tension — a force that both
holds the work together, and threatens
to pull it apart. The work appears
to have been deposited, slightly
unsprung, on the plaza.
without feeling overpowering.
Part of the power of New York Clearing
was its unexpected presence. Just
part of the sculpture was visible from
afar above the tree line or just beyond
the wall of the plaza. Only at the last
moment, before one entered the plaza
did the full sculpture come into view.
The mystery of that approach and the
gradual reveal were an immensely
powerful moment.

On the many gusty days New York
experienced during the exhibition, the
wind hummed through the sculpture
which swayed slightly, and the singular
loops — the “free radicals” — waved
in the sky and made it feel alive. The
sculpture buzzed with an energy of
The Clearing works are energy fields.
They resemble maps of the paths
of charged particles racing through
overlapping magnetic fields.
Their overall appearance is similar to
the post-eruptive loops that occur when
the sun’s magnetic field reconnects
Energy Field

CONNECT, BTS
its own. On those windy days, I felt after a coronal mass ejection event
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

like I was in the presence of a living
organism and on the cusp of a decisive
moment.
The sculpture had a very different feel
depending on one’s vantage point,
weather conditions and time of day.
From afar, it was a gleaming mass of
energy standing in front of the New
York City skyline, or, from the West,
against the pastoral setting of the lawn
at Pier 3. Its position and size meant
it was visible from all directions: the
Brooklyn Bridge, the FDR highway that
follows the Manhattan side of the East
River, the high view from Brooklyn
Heights promenade, and the East
River ferry — a shimmering vector
field, its appearance changing as one
traveled past it or as the daylight and
cloud cover changed. Seen up close,
its massive scale would dwarf a visitor,
— a release of plasma from the sun’s
corona during a reorganization of the
sun’s magnetic field.
Gormley has referred to the
Clearing works as a quantum field.
Quantum fields are the quantum
theoretical generalizations of classical
fields. Unlike classical fields, like
electromagnetism or gravitation which
can interact with matter, quantum
fields are matter as energy, so in
quantum field theory, what appears
as a particle is actually an excitation
of the field. I like this as a description
of New York Clearing. It suggests that
a visitor’s body is a part of the field
and, through their interaction with the
work, there is a transference of energy.
Image courtesy of NASA/GSFC/SDO.
Gormley has stated that New York
Clearing is “an expression of the energy
of the people who made it.” It neatly
sums up his inclusive, collaborative
approach to art making and his
intention for the viewer’s experience
of his work. The construction of New
York Clearing was a creative act rather
than an assembly of pieces molded
in a workshop. Extensive engineering
and detailed planning preceded its
construction, but the characteristics
and the very concept of this work
required that it be built on site. Its
energy and form would derive from
a response to that place and to the
evolution of the work as Gormley
discovered and responded to the
physical limits of the material and
conditions on the ground. It was an
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extraordinary challenge to develop a
work in this material that could be self-
supporting, ensure safe public access,
and remain stable and secure in the
snow, ice, and 70 mph winds that
could be expected there at the water’s
edge in New York in winter, while
maintaining the integrity, intent, and
power of the work. Antony Gormley
was drawing in the sky with aluminum
and using cranes and 45-foot hydraulic
boom lifts.
On the site, Gormley and our
international crew of as many as 23
specialists including three from his
studio were involved in bending,
attaching, and erecting the individual
elements that would make up the
whole — many working as one.

268 269
It is significant that Gormley had
never before worked with any of
these individuals, except for his
own incredibly dedicated, smart,
and resilient studio team, but such
is the power of Gormley’s energy,
enthusiasm, and personal attention
to morale that everyone was so
personally invested in this project.
Completing the construction of New
York Clearing was a starting point
rather than an ending point. Tens of
thousands of visitors came to Brooklyn
Bridge Park to explore, navigate and
ponder how and why this sculpture
came to be, and their participation
would be the element that would
complete the sculpture.
With his focus on the human
experience and use of the figure,
Gormley’s work has a fundamental
allure. The human body is ever present,
whether physically represented
through casts of his own body or of
others’ bodies, or as spaces that take
the viewer on a journey whereby he
or she might have an experience
and consider the fundamental
condition of being human. Gormley’s
approach to representing the figure
is philosophical. His figures are
not objects to be appreciated as in
Classical Greek or Roman statuary,
but agents with whom viewers might
explore their relationship to the world,
each other, and the cosmos.
It is easy to identify with, easy to
empathize with his bodies — they
invite self-reflection and in that
process the meaning of the work is
transferred from the object to the
viewer. New York Clearing creates an
opportunity for viewers to explore
their own place in time and space.
Gormley has again created not
simply an object, but a space which
is an opportunity for engagement, a
framework for interaction, and a thing
against which to measure oneself
and one’s surroundings. It invites the
viewer to walk within it, to attempt to
navigate a sometimes uncertain path,
to see the surroundings through the
frame of this sculpture, and to try to
understand their own relationship to
it. Is it comforting or disconcerting? Is
it confining or protective? The viewer’s
own body becomes the active element
in the work and that viewer’s body
then becomes a part of the sculpture
CONNECT, BTS
as viewed by others. Gormley is
interested in making the viewer’s own
experience the subject of the art, and
allowing the emergence of meaning to
shift from the object of the art work to
the event taking place.
During the work’s construction, Antony
Gormley described New York Clearing
to me as both a nest and a cage. It
can offer perceived safety within its
overarching structure, or perceived
confinement with no clear path to exit.
My experience of navigating through
the sculpture confirmed it, when at
times the path which had seemed
clear, became at once impassible and
I was forced to backtrack to find a
clearer path. Yet, within the sculpture
were clearings that felt safe and
provided an imaginary shelter where
one could feel protected.
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Thousands of visitors came to view of the artist and the CONNECT, BTS
and interact with the work during the project that strove to bring people
exhibition. New York Clearing was together in a common, positive
unexpected in the winter — a time experience through art.
when few, if any, public artworks are
opened — a landmark encouraging a
rare winter outdoor pilgrimage when
cold weather might otherwise cause
people to remain indoors. People
gathered around its perimeter, waiting
for friends or pondering and observing
its relationship to the skyline. Others
tentatively navigated the inner spaces
of the sculpture, they climbed over
and under its coils, progressed and
retreated to find a navigable space
to the other side or toward a friend
or family member. Groups of friends
and families gathered inside, some
sitting on the ground in the small open
NEW YORK
spaces in the center of the sculpture,
or they stood, talked, and observed
unique perspectives from different
vantage points. People danced within
the sculpture and a group of young
people performed a choreographed
dance at its edge. I spoke with visitors
who had traveled from other states
and from countries including Korea,
the United Kingdom, Germany and
Brazil, mostly to see the sculpture.
Antony Gormley has told us that “Art
should be a platform for connectivity
and understanding. When we have
a conversation what we are doing is
we are reforming our own experience
into a story which we offer another
person as an extension of their own
experience. That’s exactly what a work
of art is.” It is a statement that so
clearly articulates the common goals
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Antony Gormley's Acknowledgements

It had always been a dream to make a Clearing outdoors without the support of a building, and when I was
invited to be part of the CONNECT, BTS project, this was immediately what I proposed.

To make a work that is experimental, provisional, and dependent on the site and spirit of its makers, takes
a great deal of energy and cooperation.

New York Clearing could not have happened without the invitation from BTS, Daehyung Lee’s vision of
the whole project, and Thomas Arnold’s hands-on curation in New York. Neither could it have happened
without the active participation of all the studio members here in London, often working outdoors in cold,
wet weather to make the first tests of how it could be built, self-supported and be connected on-site. We
had never made a Clearing of this scale: the dedication and input of Ashley Hipkin, Ocean Mims and Oliver
Beck, and all the studio team here in London, enabled us to succeed in New York.

On site in New York in weather far more challenging than in London, it was inspiring to have the support
and active participation of such a brilliant group of collaborators. Without the engineers, the project
managers and the Torsilieri team, this would never have happened. The spirit of the work carries the spirit
of the makers. I remain indebted to all of them. January was not a normal time to be working outside on an
ambitious art piece that had never been made before, but we did it! It is a tribute to all who were involved,
and I sincerely thank them for their commitment, skill, and generosity.

Credits

CONNECT, BTS Laufs Engineering Hector Vasquez Ashley Hipkin

Thomas Arnold Design Marlon Vasquez Rosalind Horne
Daehyung Lee Justin Fabrikant Marvin Vasquez Fred Howell
Alexey Nefedov Wualmer Vasquez Adam Humphries
Brooklyn Bridge Park Pierre Jusselme
(BBP) Torsilieri Inc. Tri-State Aluminum Bryony McLennan
James Dildine Yuval Aharoni Chuck Fitzsimmons Ocean Mims
Sarah Krauss Dave DeLeon Philippe Murphy
Eric Landau Hector Hernandez Antony Gormley Studio Alice O’Reilly
Jeffrey Sandgrund Miguel Juarez Eduard Barniol Ferreres Lucy Page
Jamie Warren Elizer Montana Oliver Beck Maria Ribeiro
Carlos Ordonez Kerrie Bevis Alice Steffen
SWP Tomas Paiz Jamie Bowler
Stuart Weissman Catalino Reyes Ruby Brown PR
Elvin Reyes Ella Bucklow Finn Partners
UAP Dean Torsilieri Tamara Doncon
Alec Burney George Torsilieri Danny Duquemin-Sheil
Kevin Davey Guy Torsilieri Sam Ford
Betsy Jacobson Abner Vasquez Ondine Gillies

Photo Credits

Christopher Burke: p. 250, 262 and 265

Photograph by Valentina Muscedra. Courtesy of Galleria Continua, San Gimignano / Beijing / Le Moulin and
White Cube, London: p. 232
Ocean Mims: p. 218
Scott Rudd: pp. 238-249, 252-261 and 272
Markus Tretter: p. 234
Stephen White: p. 219 and 231

272 273
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 SEOUL
CONNECT, BTS

Ann Veronica Janssens

Yiyun Kang

28/01-20/03/2020
Dongdaemun Design Plaza
(DDP)
Interview

Docent

RM

Jin

*D
 ue to the ongoing crisis caused by the Jung Kook
pandemic, there has been a slight change in
exhibition dates.

280
CONNECT, BTS SEOUL
Daehyung Lee
Belgian artist Ann Veronica Janssens’
work investigates the properties
of space, light, radiant colour, and
translucent or reflective surfaces,
destabilizing and disrupting ideas
about materiality. Her installation
Green, Yellow and Pink was initially
destined for an outdoor pavilion,
but was later transferred to the
indoor exhibition hall of Seoul’s DDP
(Dongdaemun Design Plaza) because
mist, which is the main medium of the
work, is easily affected by temperature
change. An enclosed indoor setting
allowed the artist to fully control the
environment of the work, probing
the sensory experience of reality and
suggesting that all perception is fragile
at best. Paradoxically, selecting the
material for an indoor pavilion was
the trickiest part. We finally settled
on polycarbonate sheets to create a
hermetic structure from which no mist
could escape; the move also saved
visitors the discomfort of queuing in
frigid weather.
Yiyun Kang's Beyond the Scene came
with its own set of challenges. A
master of illusion, Kang uses spatial
projection mapping to transform space
and existing architectural structures in
a manner that collapses the opposition
between concepts—materiality/
immateriality, reality/virtuality,
presence/absence, analog/
digital, body/machine, fact/fiction,
history/myth—which are central to
our perceptual orientation, epistemic
ordering of the world, and anchoring
of subjectivity. Featuring projection
and dancers, the conflation of
analogue space and moving digital
images in Beyond the Scene erodes
the boundaries between illusion
and reality. The conditions for such
a work to be fully realized must be Green, Yellow and Pink
immensely fine-tuned in order for Ann Veronica Janssens, 2007
the cutting-edge trompe l’oeil effect © Jang Joonho
CONNECT, BTS
to be achieved. The dancers—who
were first choreographed to follow
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BTS’s signature routines—were
visible through an illusory surface
but seemed simultaneously to exist
in a volume beyond our vision. This is
a work that challenges its audience,
too, by scrambling or reorienting our
understanding of depth and surface.
Rose
Ann Veronica Janssens, 2007
© Jang Joonho
282 283
THE BODY OF PERCEPTION
Mieke Bal
No, space is the wrong world, too
worldly. The world was on the other
side of the door. Where was I? In a
strong literal sense, nowhere. I saw
nothing, with my eyes wide open. But
whereas the idea of “not” is usually
associated with darkness, the dense,
impenetrable mist packed into the
space whose limits I could not even
guess was so bright it seemed made
out of kitsch fantasies of heaven. The
kind of clouds angels sit on, little fat
putti with egg-shell skin and bodies too
appealing to be decently angelic. The
clouds of Renaissance and Baroque
painting. Except that such clouds have
shapes and this mist did not. Or rather,
whatever shape it might have had was
invisible to me. Shapes can only be
seen from the outside, and was inside
the heavenly cloud. Imprisoned in
nothingness.
After a while, ever so slowly it seemed
– but time was arrested as much as
sound – vague lines came through.
The event of their coming to visibility
was just that: an event, occurring
in time. The change in the space
consisted of a gradual, partial receding
of the absolute opacity of the white
that surrounded me and that stuck to
my skin, challenging my sense of my
own boundaries. Because when this
receding took place I became aware of
my own dissolution. Thus, the after-
effect of the event retrospectively
turned the initial experience into
an unsettling one, which it had not
been until then. Here, another event
happened, a deeply narrative one in
that it had the retroversive capacity
to change the state of what, before, I
would have called “my mind.”
Now, I couldn’t call it that any longer.
For the anxiety I did not feel at first
but which was created by contrast
and after the fact, was an anxiety
CONNECT, BTS
“of the heart.” According to Baroque
philosopher Blaise Pascal: ‘Le cœur
a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît
pas.’ The heart as the seat of a
domain of reason that reason does
not know, or that it actively ignores:
this was what I discovered. The mind-
body or the body-mind acts on its
own. What happened when I felt
the earlier possibility of fear was
a “retroversion.” Retroversion is a
narrative figure. We know such figures
from novels, not from visual art, be
it figurative, abstract or conceptual.
Retroversion is a narrative device
that requires a narrative agent, a
narrator, to manipulate the linearity
of time. Readers are given access
to a universe of events that run
through time in different directions,
crisscrossing where time thickens.
Retroversion empowers the reader
or viewer; it gives access to unknown
284
worlds. It opens our lives to manifold
possibilities that console us in our grief
of being bound, hands and feet, by
time’s tyranny. I was without sight and
blissfully coming into sight at the same
time.
The access to the visibility of the lines
was also the emergence through
the limitless cloud, of the ceiling,
plinths and corners of the room. An
emergence barely identifiable; fragile,
in permanent danger of annihilation.
Only now could I begin to see —
helped by the knowledge that it was
likely — that I was indeed in a room.
I could see its square forms and its
proportions. But lingering on my retina
— on my skin, for retina and skin were
by now abandoning their ongoing
struggle for mutual independence
— was the sensation of a moment
earlier, when no space other than the
absolute was present for me. What
was happening with and within me
was an experience of duration as an
implausibly important element of
perception.
Not only were the boundaries of my
body — my skin as protection and
site of vulnerability and access — less
obvious than I had always assumed
them to be. Not only was being inside
the heavenly cloud incompatible
with seeing it. Not only was vision a
slowly granted and slowly developed
privilege. The duration of perception
was also uneven in its rhythm, unstable
in its linearity, dense and pervasive in
its impact, and wavering in its location,
siding, now with the subject-me —
then with the object — the unstable
sight I was beginning to see. But then
again, those notions — subject, object
— and the distinction they proclaim,
lost their own boundaries, their
separate identities. They became as
vague and blurred as mist.
All this time I could not walk. I was
nailed to the floor, fearful even of
shuffling my feet forward. Walking,
even when security can be expected,
is impossible without the help of
perception. Pondering this, I heard a
hissing sound. It seemed close by, but
of course I could not gauge its distance
from me. I could not see its source, or
interpret its meaning. Perhaps it was
there for a purpose; perhaps also it
was part of the installation. But then,
perhaps it was arbitrary, part of the air-
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conditioning system of the building.
Who was to say where “the work”
began and ended, where its seams
stitched it to its environment? The
sound was not loud, but in the total
silence of the fog-cushioned space it
constituted an unsettling interruption.
Like the emergence of lines, the
hissing constructed the preceding
silence at the very moment the silence
was broken.
The room of mist is now a stage on
which I play a role I have never played
before. What kind of visuality is at
stake here? As a result of previous
visual experiences — of painting, of
installations of paintings in spite of
their installations, but also of the world
around our bodies and around the
visual object that we see and perceive
285
as “works of art” — the mobilized body,
conjured into participation qua body, is
the same body whose eyes are doing
the looking. Hence, in contrast to the
disembodied gaze we have learned
to cast on images, the gaze that is
a-temporal and does not even know it
has a body let alone a body involved
in looking, the mode of looking which
is not only desirable for this painting
but also the only one possible, the
only one that leads to seeing, is a
participatory look, one beyond that of
“participatory observation” based on
coevalness, the long-standing ideal of
anthropology.
The basic feature of participatory
observation is not friendly dialogue
and recognition of the informant
as a subject. Such condescending
democratism bows down before
“the other” but never questions that
term — “the other” — in itself, and in
its grounding dichotomies. Rather,
the real situation of participatory
observation is the co-temporality,
the coevalness, the existence of two
people whose position regarding
power/knowledge is so unequal, in
the same space and time. Locked in
Janssens’ mist, coevalness becomes a
necessity. Those other people roaming
around, or nailed to the floor, where
are their thoughts flying? I am there
with them, and can step in for the ride
in their possible worlds.
Thus, the “work of art” — how
awkwardly this phrase sits with this
installation! — drives the point home
that the debate on how to gain
knowledge is not over. This intellectual
posture, this embodied look, is not
only epistemologically indispensable,
necessary for knowledge to become
possible, as was participatory
observation for modernist, self-
conscious anthropological knowledge;
it concerns being; it is ontological.
Considering the deceptiveness
and other drawbacks of this
epistemological role, the notion of
performance seems most appropriate
for characterizing it. While I am sitting
in, standing on the stage of Janssens’
mist, this concept suddenly thickens,
on the waves of bizarrely intensified
and messy duration. Performance, in
anthropology, is the construction of
knowledge about a culture with the
CONNECT, BTS
people and through collective research
and discovery, as Johannes Fabian
argued, in a study which, loyal to its
thesis, is an account of just such an
endeavor.
Since the adventure described above,
which was my first encounter with
Ann Veronica Janssens’ extraordinary
work, I have entered in many different
versions of that mist installation. They
are not always cloud-white, but can
have different colors, challenging
the limits between one color and
the next. In Seoul the colors were
green, yellow and pink. The effects are
different, but what remains constant
is the experience that, in addition to
the unsettling of our certainties, also,
seeing is touching. Both seeing and
touching are experiential, sensual
sensations. Such a conception of
seeing has been discussed in view
286
of Deleuze’s and others’ theories of
“haptic” seeing. These date back to at
least the beginning of the twentieth
century, when Alois Riegl came up with
the idea in his article Das holländische
Gruppenporträt from 1902. It was
developed by Deleuze and Guattari in
A Thousand Plateaus (1987).
Haptic, from the Greek aptô
(“touching”) is characterized by three
primary features. It solicits proximity,
inviting viewers to caress the image
with the eyes; it is formless, and lines
change their function, from delimiting
fields to moving between points. All
these features are key to Janssens’ mist
rooms, whether these are primarily
white, as the one in Lisbon, or adding
changes of colours to the event, so
that in addition to form, transitions
from one colour to another becomes
also ungraspable.
Janssens inflects these features of
haptic seeing while maintaining them
in near-hyperbolic force. Proximity
in her work does not lead to the
impressionist fusion of foreground
and background. Instead, the works
hinder that fusion, maintaining
the intense experience of the
incommensurability of distance and
proximity. Formlessness shifts gears
as well. The spectator is part of it, as
becomes clear when vaguely, someone
else emerges from the mist. This can
be a disconcerting sensation. Finally,
while the blurry lines remain moving
between points, as haptic lines do,
their movement precludes access to
any points whatsoever. Instead of
clarity, something happens that is of
the order to the heart: what we call
moving. This is what we learn at such
moments. I would like to insist that
this word always contains a double
movement: physical or perceptual and
emotional. “Touching” would be the
right word for this.
To be inside that which one sees
is an extreme experience, but can
be considered, also, crucial to what
seeing is. In the space the object seen
and the subject seeing are together,
surrounded by and immersed in a
space we don’t even notice because it
is so obvious. It is only an assumption,
unwarranted, that seeing is an
autonomous act of distinguishing
subject from object; the subject in
power, the object available for the
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visual taking. This is a colonializing
conception of seeing, based on an
untenable but tenacious conception
that has tyrannized scholarship with a
harsh opposition between subjective
and objective, a polarization that
privileges the latter. In visual art, the
subject-object opposition has been
historically enhanced by the insistent
practice of linear perspective. The
mist rooms have no perspective
whatsoever.
And if formerly self-evident space is
indissolubly bound up with seeing,
this dimension has an inevitable
counterpart. Janssens mist works also
breach the self-evident nature of time
passing. These works foreground
the humbling need to learn to walk
again, small slow step by small slow
287
step, because nothing can be taken
for granted. Instead of visual mastery,
here there is a sense of danger, of
insecurity in relation to the act of
seeing. This is already a strong feeling,
bodily experienced. And according
to the transformation of duration
mentioned above, the slowdown the
experience enforces stands for the
need, more in general, to take the
time or give the time to really see. This
implies a lesson in art appreciation.
But even if these transformations
Beyond the Scene
of sensation change our bodily
Render of Beyond the Scene, projection mapping
awareness profoundly, the touch come
installation, 8×8×4 m, 9 min. 30 sec. 2020
in most strongly when other visitors
Courtesy of the artist
enter the space. We must conclude,
then, that Janssens mis rooms, white
or coloured, are performances of

CONNECT, BTS
tentative encounters. Fragile, touching,
moving.

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 GREEN, YELLOW AND PINK
My first “constructions,” made
during the mid-80s, were spatial
extensions of existing architecture.
These graftings at once formed
and gave onto what I call “super
Gazing into the mist in Green, Yellow, and Pink is an experience spaces”: the spaces surrounding
a given space, spaces without
with contrasting effects. It appears to abolish all obstacles space, places for the capture of
light, cement and glass cases,
including materiality and the forces specific to a given context. spaces conceived as springboards
At the same time, however, the installation seems to impart a towards the void. It is this
void that I try to set in motion,
sense of materiality and tactility to light itself. The experience conferring upon it a kind of
temporality. I always experiment
I am interested in what escapes
me, not in order to arrest
it, but on the contrary, in
order to experiment with the
“ungraspable.”
There are few objects in my work.
Engaged gestures, the loss of
control that is fully assumed and
proposed as an active experience:
my way of proceeding consists of
such loss of control, the absence
of overbearing materiality, the
attempt to escape from the
to return to reality rather than
escape from it. By pushing back
the limits of perception, by
rendering visible the invisible,
these experiences act as passages
from one reality to another … It’s
a question of thresholds between
two states of perception, between
shadow and light, the defined
and the undefined, silence and
explosion; the threshold where
the image reabsorbs itself.
* This text was originally published in the

provokes different reactions: some find it exhilarating, while with the possibilities of rendering
fluid the perception of matter or
others might experience dizziness or anxiety. By filling closed architecture which I see as some
tyranny of objects.
exhibition catalogue: ed. Nathalie Ergino,
Ann Veronica Janssens, 8’26’’ (Paris: Ensba,
Marseille: MAC, 2004)
My projects are often based on
© Author and Musée d’art contemporain
Marseille

spaces with a haze of colored artificial mist, Janssens creates kind of obstacle to movement
and sculpture. My use of light to
situations that confront visitors with their own perception of infiltrate matter and architecture
technical or scientific facts. The
resulting plastic proposition is
then akin to a laboratory revealing

GREEN, YELLOW AND PINK, ROSE

is undertaken with a view to
space, and of themselves within it. provoking a perceptual experience
wherein this materiality is made
unstable, its resistance dissolved.
This movement is often provoked
by the brain itself.
its discoveries. Cognition, reflexes,
meanings and psychology
lie at the heart of these
experimentations. The spatio-
temporal experiences are, in fact,
closer to something like hypnosis,

ROSE but with the will, nevertheless,

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Beams of light form a seven-pointed star in Rose, which morphs

between palpable geometry and amorphous atmospheric
effects as visitors move about the space. Rose is part of Janssens
Fog Star series, which explores the capacity of haze to give
sculptural form to light. Focused on fleeting and intimate
experiences of the world, the artist draws viewers’ attention
to their own processes of perception within a surrounding
environment.

Ann Veronica Janssens

b. 1956, UK - Belgium
290 291
 GREEN, YELLOW AND PINK, ROSE
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Green, Yellow and Pink

Ann Veronica Janssens, 2017
Artificial fog, green, yellow, and pink filters
Dimensions Variable
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2020

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295

GREEN, YELLOW AND PINK, ROSE

 Green, Yellow and Pink
Ann Veronica Janssens, 2007
© Jang Joonho

GREEN, YELLOW AND PINK, ROSE

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GREEN, YELLOW AND PINK, ROSE

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301

GREEN, YELLOW AND PINK, ROSE

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GREEN, YELLOW AND PINK, ROSE

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GREEN, YELLOW AND PINK, ROSE

 GREEN, YELLOW AND PINK, ROSE
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Rose
Ann Veronica Janssens, 2007
© Jang Joonho

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GREEN, YELLOW AND PINK, ROSE

 Credits

CONNECT, BTS
Daehyung Lee

Ann Veronica Janssens Studio

Esther Schipper
Emiliano Pistacchi
Joanne Kim
Julia Séguier
Amy Binding

Archive Design
Yongjoo Kim

Architecture
Sangwook Park

Construction
Incheol Kim

GREEN, YELLOW AND PINK, ROSE

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316 317
 BEYOND THE SCENE
A part of CONNECT, BTS, my
project is distinctive from other
presented works because it is
the only piece that directly reacts
to BTS. As the Seoul exhibition
Beyond the Scene is a reimagination of BTS’s signature dance is an archive of the five-city
project, my work contextualises
movements as seen through projection mapping. the underpinning philosophy of
this global project: CONNECT and
Large scale projections capture key movements in the septet’s BTS. As a Korean and an Asian
choreography, performed by dancers behind white fabric. female artist who lives and works
in London, watching BTS grow as
The figures’ limited silhouettes might appear anonymous a ground-breaking cultural figure
is thrilling. Through my work, I
and abstract, but with time shapes and forms are brought want to express how the septet
from Korea transformed the
together to populate the space—like a metaphor for how the almost Anglo-centred ecosystem
seven band members build BTS together with the support of of the pop industry by connecting
millions of people around the
their fans, known as ARMY. This projection mapping work may globe. I believed that this success
has resounding meaning in our
be understood in terms of either “persona” or “identity” because lives today.
of the way it simultaneously conceals and reveals. At first, I wondered what
caused BTS to become such a
sensation. After the extensive
research, I realised that this
success wasn’t built in a day
SEOUL
Yiyun Kang
b. 1982, Korea
318
and the symbiotic relationship
between BTS and ARMY, the
unique fandom is the key to their
massive success. I wanted to
meet ARMY to hear their stories.
The final stage of my research
was, therefore, the personal
interview with fifteen London-
based ARMY of diverse ages,
genders and ethnicities. Despite
their differences, I could identify
that their dedication is deeply
rooted in the band’s philosophy,
which embraces diversity. It was
quite unique to see how the
message collectively extends its
influence in a rhizomatic way on
a transnational scale. Thus, BTS
and ARMY are growing together,
being the light and hope for each
other, completing each other
in solidarity. Not to mention
BTS’ music and performance, I
realised that this hyper-connected
structure that generates positive
energy lies at the heart of BTS’
singularity, and this is how they
have metamorphosed from
319
a K-Pop boy band to a global
sensation. I decided to incorporate
this unique entity, ARMY, in my
work to capture BTS through the
lens of art. All my conversations
with ARMY have become the
pivotal element that enabled
me to portray the aesthetic and
philosophical qualities of the
band. 
I found this phenomenon even
more meaningful at this particular
time and space, where the current
political, financial, environmental,
social and racial scenes have
reached almost breaking point.
We are living in a highly precarious
era. We need to work together to
go beyond the current scenes and
become connected again, to make
the world more inclusive and
sustainable. It is thus inspirational
to see how BTS moved beyond the
BEYOND THE SCENE
subculture scene to the centre of
the world, overcoming hardships
and struggles. Together, BTS
and ARMY manifest that it does
 not require power or authority
to reach new heights. Reflecting
this, I titled my work as Beyond the
Scene, which is also an extended
identity of the band.  your perception and emancipates
I created an immersive audio-
visual environment that is
entirely wrapped by large-scale
projections that capture the traces
of human movements. Inspired
by BTS’ choreography, I have
examined and reinterpreted their
movements with a choreographer
and contemporary dancers.
These abstract, yet dynamic and
intense movements fill the space,
just like how the seven boys built
BTS together with the support of
ARMY. These imageries are then
mixed with digital animations,
opening up an imaginative
dimension as they expand
beyond the external facade. The
the physical and virtual and the
material and immaterial as well as
between surface and depth. This
multi-sensorial space challenges
your dichotomous thinking by
immersing your corporeality.
Beyond the Scene leads you to
be acutely aware of yourself;
the orientation of you as well
as the others. This piece cannot
be fully appreciated without
acknowledging the relationship
between yourself and the work,
you and the other audiences and
space. In this environment, every
movement, time and space fold
and unfold in a synchronised
flow. Through this work, I wanted
to reveal that we are cohabiting
and connected. As a whole, my
work illustrates how BTS and
ARMY pushed the boundaries to
means to us in the present time.
CONNECT, BTS project involves
multiple layers of collective
intelligence. Curators, institutions,
artists and collaborators around
the world have worked together
to complete this project. Like a
living creature, it has grown by
connecting creative practices in a
non-hierarchical and rhizomatic
way. As part of this project, I
wish my work could generate a
resonating moment to think about
how we can move beyond the
current scene together.

BEYOND THE SCENE

resulting environment is bereft of move beyond the existing scenes.
boundaries. Viewers can navigate And more importantly, my work
between the analog and digital, questions what this phenomenon
SEOUL

Beyond the Scene

Render of Beyond the Scene, projection mapping
installation, 8×8×4 m, 9 min. 30 sec. 2020
Courtesy of the artist

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BEYOND THE SCENE

 Acknowledgements

Firstly, I would like to express my gratitude to BTS and Daehyung Lee, who have presented much-needed
vision and message through the lens of art.

Being the only Korean artist participating in this global project has been an honour and a challenge
simultaneously. From inception to completion, from London to Seoul, it would have been impossible to
realise my dream plan without these people to whom I am indebted. I am grateful to ARTPLACE team,
Kathleen Kim, Sangwook Park, Dohyung Kim and Abe Chung who have collectively created CONNECT, BTS
project and Seoul exhibition. Thanks to Basictech, the projection engineers for their perfectionism.
Beyond the Scene could not have happened without the performance team; Changho Shin, Jangho Kim,
Taeyang Lee, the amazing performers from K-Arts and the brilliant filming staffs. Their support and creative
input enabled the exquisite outcome.

Last but not least, my sincere thanks go to the ARMY I met in London. It was not easy at first to build the
underpinning concept of Beyond the Scene which is the only project in CONNECT, BTS that is directly
related to the BTS. Every ARMY I met was willing to share their thoughts and stories, which allowed me to
shape this work.

All of these “connections” are the most important value to me in the pursuit of this project. I truly appreciate
all the connected people for their commitment, inspiration, and creativity.

Credits

CONNECT, BTS Light Research Contributors

Daehyung Lee Jaepil Jeong Ashley Hackworth
Jong-geun Yun Chunyoung Yang
Choreography Emma Kanyakamin
Changho Shin Performer Irene Cajaraville Souto
Byungchan Lee Lashai Ben Salmi

BEYOND THE SCENE

Filming Set Design Doohyun Zo Nilza Anibal
Taeyang Lee Inwoong Ryu Nneka Anyimukwu
Jiwan Jung
Camera Minseo Kim
Jangho Kim Seokhyun Kim
SEOUL

Jinsung Jung Sunghyun Hong

336 337
INTERVIEW Yiyun Kang
Daehyung Lee

338 339
A CONVERSATION
I did not mention that this project in age, from teenagers to those in
was related to BTS when discussing it their 60s. Most of them were British or

WITH YIYUN KANG

Yiyun Kang, Daehyung Lee
Daehyung Lee
CONNECT, BTS, an exhibition that
connected five cities around the world
ended successfully. In organizing the
exhibition, I thought a lot about who
to invite as the participating artist of
the Korean edition of the exhibition.
I wanted to invite a Korean artist, at
least for the Seoul exhibition, who can
comprehend the artistic value behind
BTS’ philosophy and the septet’s world
Yiyun Kang
My practice has always been rooted
in various research. Sociological and
humanistic research, in particular,
constitute the core foundation of my
work. As a matter of fact, I did not
have a clear understanding of BTS’
philosophy at the outset of the project.
So, I had to conduct research in a lot
of different ways. I studied the existing
research papers and books and read
with the people I sought to meet. This
made it hard to organize interviews
in the early phase. I was working in
the United Kingdom, so I sought help
from the Korean Culture Centre UK,
yet, it was challenging, nonetheless.
But when I finally got to sit down and
speak with one person, it was a breeze
from there. I was able to connect with
others and expand my network easily,
as a tree branches out. That experience
itself made me think about ARMY as a
network.
I ended up meeting with 15 members
of ARMY for in-depth interviews.
ARMY is a single fandom, but it is not
European. I wanted to meet with BTS
fans from diverse backgrounds, not
just Korean fans.
Looking back, I tended to take a
heavily academic approach in the
research I did for my work. But this
time, I learned so much more from
speaking directly with members of
ARMY than from any text. I was able to
understand BTS more deeply through
them. In other words, the work I
presented at CONNECT, BTS was
possible, thanks to connecting and
engaging with members of ARMY.

CONNECT, BTS
of music in depth, and then reinterpret through related media coverage and a homogenous group. I met with a

that value into visual language. I also
thought it would be wonderful if I can
work with a female artist who breaks
away from traditional art forms and
can flexibly engage in new experiments
by crossing back and forth between
space and media. I wanted the
resulting work to be more than just a
glamorous visual piece that facilitates
visual interaction; I wanted it to be
fundamentally based on sociological
attitude considered in actually meeting
and engaging with people and for it to
go on to show the process of adopting
a philosophical perspective on history
and the future.
INTERVIEW
news content. I did a lot of research wide range of people in ARMY: men
on YouTube too. However, I felt that and women, young and old, ranging
this kind of research was far from
sufficient.
Then it crossed my mind that I should
try and meet with people. As I was
working on my research, I became
interested not only in BTS but also in
the boyband’s fandom, ARMY, because
BTS fans connect with one another
beyond borders, constantly expanding
the fanbase. ARMY was an interesting
community, but more than that, I
was curious to understand how the
phenomenon they create is possible.
How to find answers to my question
was straightforward. I simply had to
meet with ARMY.

340 341
Lee
Could you share in further detail who
you met?
Kang
As I already mentioned, I met a diverse
group of people, among them a few
who stand out. One of the fans was a
woman in her 60s. She was an ordinary
housewife who had lived only in the UK
and had forgotten about “herself” over
the years as she looked after her home
and the family. She said that message
from BTS about self-esteem impacted
her greatly. I came to realize a few
things as I was speaking to her. One
of the interesting findings was that in
the Western culture, where people are
individualistic and liberal, you rarely
experience someone directly saying
those things to you.
Another fan I spoke with was a
fairly young woman. She had been
struggling with depression and gotten
used to being treated with medication
because she didn’t really have
someone to lean on, until she came
across BTS. She found hope in BTS’
lyrics and their relentless effort, and
she found them helpful.
I remember another fan’s story. That
fan wasn’t Korean, but she knew
K-pop inside out. Because she knew
other Korean boybands and girl
groups, she was able to compare BTS
to them. She said that BTS is distinct
from other K-pop groups because the
boyband continues to send messages
of sincerity and hope, which is unlike
CONNECT, BTS
other bands and groups, who change
their messages so they reflect the
market trend. I had thought that BTS is
just another idol group, but I was able
to confirm through my conversations
with ARMY that the sincerity of BTS was
reaching and directly influencing the
lives of individuals in totally different
cultures.
342
Lee
I think the stories you shared convey
the key idea behind the curatorial
concept of CONNECT, BTS. The project
was essentially about connection
and cooperation. The key question
I kept returning to in curating the
exhibition was, “What will come after
this collaboration?” There were already
many ways in which popular culture
and contemporary art had been
brought together, but I thought about
how I can demonstrate a different
kind of collaboration between the
two. I was confident that BTS can truly
function as a connective catalyst rather
than simply being considered a subject
matter or content of contemporary art,
because BTS and ARMY were already
demonstrating connection at large, like
organic beings. It was more important
to have that “connection” be extended
to contemporary art than have BTS be
used as a subject or theme of art.
Interestingly, many misunderstand
this project as an unsuccessful
collaboration between BTS and
contemporary art because the septet
was not explicitly conveyed in the
works presented in the exhibition. That
is because CONNECT, BTS exhibited
a different kind of collaboration.
The project could have been a risky
adventure, so I was surprised that
BTS and Big Hit Entertainment
immediately understood the curatorial
concept and willingly supported it.
Contemporary art and pop music
may look like they belong in entirely
different industries, but they are not
different in that they are both art that
helps people understand each other
by bridging the diversity of people and
different cultures. Convergence at the
surface level, achieved through the
combination of subject matters is not
particularly challenging. I did not want
the value of diversity that BTS pursues
to be delivered merely as a superficial
message; I had hoped to see that value
percolate throughout the entirety
of the project, from the planning
stage and the project progress to the
resulting works and exhibitions. I am
glad to see that what I put a lot of
thought into is clearly reflected in how
your work was made.
Kang
I have always argued that dichotomous
boundaries and dualistic thinking are
INTERVIEW
invalid. Reality and imagination, plane
and depth, myth and history, man
and machine—no value can easily be
divided into two. I believe our lives
are truly meaningful and rich only
when we embrace the differences and
potentials that exist between the two
extremes. This belief is supported by
the increasing number of discussions
on philosophy concerning objects, so-
called object-oriented ontology (OOO),
and even theories including quantum
physics. In a world where even gender
is no longer bound by dichotomy,
the exclusion of and disrespect for
differences should be blamed as the
main culprit of today’s fragmented
society.
343
As I said, I was able to identify a
common thread that ran through all
the conversations I had with members
of ARMY I met in London. The common
thread was that the sincere, candid
and concise messages of BTS reached
its fans beyond language barriers and
borders. The fact that these messages
transcend borders and reach “beyond
the scene” is what creates meaning
beyond the boundary of the music
industry.
Lee
Yiyun, your projection mapping goes
above and beyond mere technology
that subverts the boundary between
2D and 3D, analog and digital, and
image and background. I assume
this is because of your unique
philosophical perspective and long-
standing contemplation on light and
space that have accumulated over
the years you studied and majored in
painting.
Kang
Light is the most important art
material for me. My practice can be
described as the process of sculpting
space with a single layer of light from
the projector. That is why I call my
CONNECT, BTS
work sculptural paintings. Traditionally,
light has been associated with gods
and goddesses and it has also stood
as a metaphor for the possibility of
perception and human intellect. Today,
light is considered in relation to digital
technology or network systems. In
fact, we are living in a network created
by tons of data transactions that take
place through systems built with fiber-
optic cables. In that sense, digital light
is the most important media for me,
both in concept and in form.
344
As I brought up earlier, I explore
what falls between the opposites of
dichotomies. I have presented a work
titled Deep Surface in the past. As
denoted in the title, depth and surface
are critical concepts to me and they
coexist without contradicting each
other. To me, an architectural space
is like a canvas that I will overlay with
video. Spaces are simultaneously
unidimensional and architectural,
meaning they are three-dimensional
in nature. When video is projected
on a surface, the space in which that
surface lies transforms into a space
with a narrative. The story thus gains
depth and that is how surfaces become
“deep surfaces.”
In the work I presented at CONNECT,
BTS, I captured the movement of
the human body behind the fabric
and connected the movement to the
issue on the surface. The relationship
between the fabric’s surface (skin) and
the human skin is established through
the way the fabric surface stretches.
In this projection, human bodies are
made abstract through silhouettes,
marks, and shadows rather than each
individual turning up distinctly. In
presenting the human body this way, I
recalled the form of ARMY, a network
of many individuals.
I don’t use flat and standardized
screens in my work. I map existing
spaces or subject or I create the space
myself to project my video. I view my
work as “environmental” videos; in
other words, I use video to connect
the space and subject. The space-time-
specific piece is brought to completion
through the visitor’s immersive
experience in the given context and
environment. This too, is where the
project’s key idea, “connect,” was
conveyed.
I don’t think my work is object-based;
rather, I see it as experiment-based
art. So, I engage different senses
to create immersive spaces where
experiences different from already-
existing ones can emerge. That is why
INTERVIEW
sound becomes an important element
and I pay a lot of attention to visitor
flow that moves in alignment with
the video. Visitor experience begins
as soon as they step foot into my
architectural space, so sometimes all
the thinking starts from how I want
to design the entrance. Ultimately,
the work’s theme and form must be
aligned to deliver a highly immersive
experience to the audience.
345
Lee
Understanding ARMY as the audience
is critical in this project. The director
of Gropius Bau in Berlin contacted me
directly to share that the museum’s
visitors sent flowers. She said it
was the first time in her career as a
curator to get flowers from visitors. It
was members of ARMY from Berlin,
particularly those of African or South
American descent who thanked her
for organizing such an exhibition and
performance. The director also added
that she is starting to see new kinds
of visitors at the museum. Those who
apparently visited the contemporary
art museum for the CONNECT, BTS
stayed around in the galleries for a
long time, seriously taking in the work.
Some have questioned whether the
messages being offered by BTS and
this exhibition weren’t overly simplistic
or naive. However, if you really
think about it, a great deal has been
invested in contemporary art in the
past decades but it has never really
translated its simple values into serious
practice. You rarely find cases where
art’s philosophical message, which
may appear naïve to some, has truly
been shared in reality. The greatest
achievement of this project is that this
huge wave created by BTS and ARMY
has helped us invite more people to
take part in contemporary art that
was somewhat distant and introduced
them to see the humanitarian values
in it.
Kang
Now, I have come to reflect on the
contemporary art world trapped in a
silo through the cultural phenomenon
created by BTS. I have come to realize
that there is a common factor between
BTS’ message and the message that
elitist contemporary art ultimately
wishes to convey. It is tremendously
rewarding that this project has led
me to constantly think about how I
can generate more connections with
culture overall as a contemporary
artist.

CONNECT, BTS
Some people even copy down all

the text in the galleries. I heard that
visitor demographics of the Serpentine
Galleries in London also changed after
CONNECT, BTS.
INTERVIEW
The grand take-away from my
conversations with members of ARMY
is that top-down communication is
not valid anymore. People no longer
trust production created and delivered
by the privileged few with their huge
capital. Self-generated energy must be
connected horizontally and organically,
and positively influence one another.
Popular culture that we will create will
not be popular culture as we know it.
The term “popular” itself has become
absurd. Through this project, we ask
ourselves a fundamental question: is
the existing contemporary art system
valid, indeed?

346 347
TYPEFACE CONNECT BTS.otf

BIOGRAPHY
348 349
 CONNECT BTS.OTF London
51°30'25"N
The CONNECT BTS Typeface was created exclusively for the 0°10'17"W

CONNECT, BTS global art project. The basis of the design was
to seek diverse points of connection and versatile materiality in
representing the five cities. That point of connection was found in
the unfamiliar rather than the familiar, and depth and dimensionality
Berlin
was achieved in 2D through a perceived curvature of flat space. 52°30'25"N
13°22'54"E
The typeface works with the negative spaces connecting the
characters rather than the individual characters. The typeface shines
through the diverse combinations in creating words and phrases,
presenting a sense of spatial rhythm.
Buenos Aires
34°36'12"S
CONNECT, BTS

Digital technology is virtually in its entirety flat, insisting on 58°22'10"W

TYPEFACE
presenting even the richest forms of aesthetics in planar 2D form.
The unfamiliar, the outliers that do not adopt the rule of the second
dimension are gradually losing a place to stand. The CONNECT BTS
Typeface creates connections through its bitmap-basedsculptural
characteristics that defy artificial curves in a gesture of solidarity New York
for the nonconforming oddities that connect and enrich us through 40°41'54"N
74°00'01"W
diversity.

Seoul
37°34'00"N
127°00'34"E

350 351
 ABCDEFGHIJ
KLMNOPQRST
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abcdefghij
LONDON BERLIN BUENOS AIRES NEW YORK SEOUL

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0123456789
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BIOGRAPHY Artists
Curators
Contributors

354 355
Ann Veronica Janssens
b. 1956, UK - Belgium
Ann Veronica Janssens was born in
1956 in Folkestone, England. She
studied at L’École de la Cambre
in Brussels. The artist lives and
works in Brussels.
Janssens’s work foregrounds the
body’s perception of the world
and itself in it. She often uses
light, natural optical phenomena
or glass as a medium. Her
contribution to the 48th Venice
Biennale (1999), where she
represented Belgium with Michel
François filled the space with
thick mist. In 2013, she added
colorful glass monoliths to the
windows of the Chapelle Saint-
Vincent de Grignan in Provence,
transforming the interior space
into a constantly changing color
environment.
Janssens’s work is held in the
collections of Centre Pompidou,
Paris; Nasher Sculpture Center,
Dallas; Louisiana Museum of
Modern Art, Humlebæk; Museum
De Pont, Tilburg; Fundación
Jumex, Mexico City; Mona –
Museum of Old and New Art,
Tasmania; Musées royaux des
Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels;
MUHKA, Antwerp; S.M.A.K., Gent;
Mu.ZEE, Oostende; Musée des
Arts Contemporains – Grand
Hornu; Caldic Collection –
Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar;
Museu Coleçao Berardo, Lisbon;
Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv;
mac, Marseille; Institut d’art
contemporain Villeurbanne/
Rhône-Alpes; FNAC – Fonds
national d’art contemporain, Paris;
Les Abattoirs – Frac Midi Pyrénées,
Toulouse; Frac Nord-Pas-de-Calais,
Dunkerque; 49 Nord 6 Est – Frac
Lorraine, Metz; Frac Aquitaine,
Bordeaux; Frac Bourgogne, Dijon;
Frac Pays de la Loire, Carquefou;
Frac Languedoc-Roussillon,
Montpellier; Frac Corse, Corte;
Frac Franche-Comté, Besançon. In
2020, Ann Veronica Janssens will
have a major survey exhibition
at the Louisiana Museum in
Humlebaek, Denmark.
Antony Gormley
b. 1950, UK
Born in London in 1950, Antony
Gormley has had a number of
solo shows at venues including
The Royal Academy of Arts,
London (2019); Delos, Greece
(2019); Uffizi Gallery, Florence
(2019); Philadelphia Museum of
Art, Philadelphia (2019); Long
Museum, Shanghai (2017); Forte
di Belvedere, Florence (2015);
Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern (2014);
Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil
(2012); Deichtorhallen Hamburg;
State Hermitage Museum, St
Petersburg (2011); Kunsthaus
Bregenz (2010); Hayward Gallery,
London (2007); Kunsthalle zu
Kiel; Malmö Konsthall (1993); and
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art,
Copenhagen (1989). Permanent
public works include the Angel of
the North(Gateshead, England),
Another Place (Crosby Beach,
England), Exposure (Lelystad,
The Netherlands), Chord (MIT
– Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Cambridge, MA,
USA). He has also participated in
major group shows such as the
Venice Biennale and Documenta
8, Kassel, Germany. Gormley
won the Turner Prize in 1994 and
has been a member of the Royal
Academy since 2003. He was made
an Officer of the British Empire
in 1997 and knighted in 2014. His
public installation, Event Horizon,
was exhibited in New York in 2010.
Tosh Basco(a.k.a. boychild)
b. 1987, USA
boychild is a movement-
based performance artist
whose work operates through
improvisation as a mode of
survival and world building
in the liminal, performative
space where becoming meets
representation. Adamant about
the visceral experience of live
visual performance, she makes
a case for how the movement
of form can communicate
what remains impenetrable in
images, and through language.
Her performances have been
presented at the Venice Biennale,
the Sydney Biennial, the Whitney
Museum of American Art, MoMA
PS1, the San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art, the Museum of
Contemporary Art Chicago, MOCA
Los Angeles, the Stedelijk Museum
Amsterdam, ICA London and
Berghain. boychild has toured with
Mykki Blanco, and collaborated
with Korakrit Arunanondchai, Wu
Tsang, as well as the streetwear
label Hood By Air.
356
Jakob Kudsk Steensen
b. 1987, Denmark
Jakob Kudsk Steensen (b.
1987) is a Danish artist based
in New York concerned with
how imagination, technology
and ecology intertwine. He has
exhibited internationally at the 5th
Trondheim Biennale for Art and
Technology; the Carnegie Museum
of Art; Serpentine Augmented
Architecture, Serpentine Galleries;
Jepson Center for the Arts; Time
Square Midnight Moment; MAXXI
Rome; FRIEZE London; Podium,
and Ok Corral. He was shortlisted
for the Future Generation Art Prize
2019, and as part of the awards
program, he was invited to create
and exhibit new installations of
RE-ANIMATED (2017-2018) in Kiev
and the Venice Biennale. He has
received awards from the Danish
Arts Foundation, The Augustinus
Foundation, the Lumen Arts
Prize, The International Academy
of Digital Arts and Sciences,
Games for Change, the Lumiere
Foundation, The Telly Awards, and
Cinequest Festival. His work has
shown at Sundance, TriBeCa and
Cannes among other film festivals.
Steensen is an alumni of NEW INC,
a technology and culture incubator
by The NEW MUSEUM, in NYC.
Jelili Atiku
b. 1968, Nigeria
Born on Friday 27th September
1968 in Ejigbo (Lagos), Nigeria,
Jelili was trained at Ahmadu Bello
University, Zaria, Nigeria and
University of Lagos, Nigeria –
Where he was awarded Bachelor
of Arts (Fine Arts) and Master of
Arts (Visual Arts) respectively. He
is presently the artistic Director
of AFiRIperFOMA – a collective of
performance artists in Africa; and
Chief Coordinator of Advocate for
Human Rights Through Art (AHRA).
Jelili has travelled widely and
participated in numerous
performances /exhibitions/
talks in Africa, Asia, Europe and
America. He is 2015 Prince Claus
Laureates and was wrongly
accused, arrested, detained in
prison and trialed on the instance
of his performance in public
space in 2016. He was artist in
residence/assistant professor
at the Department of Africana
Studies/Brown Arts Initiative in
Brown University, Providence, USA
in 2018.
Marcelo Evelin
b. 1962, Brazil
Marcelo Evelin is a choreographer,
researcher, and performer, living
and working between Amsterdam
and Teresina. He took his first
steps as a choreographer in 1989,
building a body of work that
today consists of over 30 pieces.
In the early years of his career,
he collaborated extensively with
artists from different disciplines in
projects involving dance, physical
theater, performance, music,
video, installation, and site-specific
work, in countries like the United
States, Uruguay, Italy, Hungary,
and Brazil.
While living in New York in 1995,
Evelin choreographed and danced
his full-length autobiographic
solo, Ai, Ai, Ai. Distinguished with
the Silver Dance Prize of the Arts
in The Netherlands, Ai, Ai, Ai has
been performed over one hundred
times since its premiere in
Amsterdam twenty years ago. In
1996, Evelin founded his company
Demolition Inc. in Amsterdam and
created a series of four pieces, God
On All Fours.
Since 1999, Evelin has taught
regularly at the Mime School in
Amsterdam, where he also creates
pieces and guides students in their
own creative processes. He has
taught workshops, lectured about
his work, and coached residencies
around the world, in Europe, the
Americas, Africa, and Asia.
Upon returning to Brazil in 2006,
Evelin began to develop his work
as a curator. He founded Núcleo
do Dirceu, a collective of artists
and a platform for independent
research and development of
contemporary performing arts,
which he coordinated until 2013.
With Núcleo do Dirceu, he directed
1000 houses, a two-year project
that involved performances in
1000 houses in the periphery
of Dirceu, Teresina, and a final
performance presented in
different cities in Brazil.
. Bulc, the European Commissioner
Mette Ingvartsen
b. 1980, Denmark
Mette Ingvartsen is a Danish
choreographer and dancers.
Her work is characterized
by hybridity and engages
in extending choreographic
practices by combining dance and
movement with other domains
such as visual arts, technology,
language and theory. An important
strand of her work was developed
between 2009 and 2012 with The
Artificial Nature Series, in which she
focused on reconfiguring relations
between human and non-human
agency through choreography.
By contrast, her more recent
series, The Red Pieces(2014-2017)
inscribes itself into a history of
human performance with a focus
on nudity, sexuality and how the
body historically has been a site
for political struggles. In 2019,
she premiered Moving in Concert,
an abstract group choreography,
that focuses on the interlacing
between humans, technological
tools and natural materials.
Ingvartsen holds a PhD in
choreography from Stockholm’s
University of the Arts and
graduated prior to that from the
performing arts school P.A.R.T.S
in Brussels. She established her
company in 2003 and her work has
since then been shown throughout
Europe, as well as in the U.S,
Canada, South Korea, Taiwan and
Australia. She has been artist in
residence at the Kaaitheater in
Brussels, Volksbühne in Berlin,
as well as associated to the APAP
network. In Berlin, Hebbel am Ufer
/ HAU has been a constant support
and partner through the years.
357
Tomás Saraceno
b. 1973, Argentina
Born in 1973 in Tucuman,
Argentina, Tomás Saraceno
currently lives and works in
Berlin. For over a decade, he
has been imagining a world free
from borders and fossil fuels. In
this age of climate emergency,
his work envisions a new era of
our earth that emphasises the
atmosphere, called the Aerocene.
Fly with Aerocene Pacha was
inspired by Saraceno’s life-long
dream of flying and his practice
of developing flying sculptures
as a model for a new form of
sustainable, carbon-free form of
movement attuned to the rhythms
of the planet.
The artist previously
experimented with solar flying
using an aerosolar balloon made
BIOGRAPHY
of recycled plastic bags, and fell
20 m, breaking his back. After two
surgeries and eight screws in his
back in order to be able to walk
again, he undertook scientific
residencies at Nasa, MIT and the
CNES in France. This enabled him
to develop a new generation of
flying sculptures with a special
ultrathin membrane to make
them safe and functional.
He draws on this practice in his
interactive installations that
propose social and sensory
solidarity with the planet, most
recently seen in his exhibition
On Air at the Palais de Tokyo in
Paris (2018) and at the 58thVenice
Biennale (2019). Later this year,
solo exhibitions of his work will
take place at the Palazzo Strozzi
in Florence (22 February – 19 July)
and at The Shed in New York (6
May – 9 August), and a major
exhibition of his work is planned at
the Serpentine Gallery in London
in 2021. In addition, permanent
architectural installations of his
work open in 2020 and 2021.
Saraceno is also an active speaker
on art and the climate crisis. In
2017, he was invited by Violeta
for Transportation invited him to
open its biannual conference. His
2017 TED talk has received over
1 m views. In 2017, the World
Economic Forum at Davos invited
him to show his Aerocene flying
sculptures and give a presentation
introduced by Vice President Al
Gore. He also spoke at Davos in
2015.
Yiyun Kang
b. 1982, Korea
Born in Seoul in 1982, Dr Yiyun
Kang is an artist who generates
immersive experiences with
environmental moving image
installation. After completing her
PhD at the Royal College of Art
in London (RCA), she is currently
working as a Visiting Lecturer
at the RCA. Kang’s works have
been exhibited at the CONNECT,
BTS (2020), Shenzhen New Media
Art Festival (2020), Victoria and
Albert Museum (2017), Venice
Architecture Biennale (2014), and
Taipei MOCA (2014). Kang did
residency programmes including
at the V&A and National Museum
of Modern and Contemporary Art,
Korea (MMCA). Her installation
work at the V&A has been acquired
by the museum, and her large-
scale fulldome projection work
commissioned by Max Mara has
awarded the Red Dot Award (2018).
Kang is featured in Bloomberg and
yundai’s Art+Technology series and
her writings have been published
in the Leonardo Journal (MIT Press,
2018) and Practices of Projections
(Oxford University Press, 2020).
She participated in several
conferences and symposiums
including SIGGRAPH (2018) and
NEXUS Pavilion, organized by La
Biennale di Venezia (2017). Kang
is also a fellow of the RSA (Royal
Society of Arts, London) since
2019.
Ben Vickers
b. 1986, UK
Ben Vickers is a curator, writer,
publisher and technologist. He is
CTO at the Serpentine Galleries
in London, co-founder of Ignota
Books and an initiator of the
open-source monastic order
unMonastery. He serves on the
boards and advisory panels for
Light Art Space, Transmediale,
Auto Italia, Furtherfield, Complex
Earth, SXSW Arts Programme and
the Warburg Institute in London.
His work extends across
a broad set of disciplines,
including curation, technological
development and publishing.
Recent major exhibitions,
programmes and publications
include: Augmented Architecture
with Google Arts & Culture and
Serpentine (2019), Ian Cheng
exhibition BOB (2018), Hito Steyerl
exhibition Power Plants (2019),
CONNECT, BTS, Catharsis by Jakob
Kudsk Steensen (2020). Recent
edited volumes include The White
Paper by Satoshi Nakamoto
(2019), Atlas of Anomalous AI
edited with K Allado-McDowell
(2020). Publications by Ignota
Books with co-founder Sarah
Shin include Ursula K. Le Guin’s
Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (2019),
States of the Body Produced by
Love by Nisha Ramayya (2019),
Unknown Language by Huw
Lemmey and Hildegard of Bingen
(2020), PHARMAKO-AI by K Allado-
McDowell (2020).
Daehyung Lee
b. 1974, Korea
Daehyung Lee delves into the
future habitat of contemporary art
in the 21st century. He values the
social role of art and expands his
curatorial practice to the issues
of environment, community,
technology, and future humanity.
The ecological sound art project
Fermata with SBS in 2020 is a good
example of his current interest.
He recently curated CONNECT,
BTS, a global public art projects
developed in collaboration with
22 global contemporary artists
and curators from five major cities
- London(Serpentine Galleries),
Berlin(Gropius Bau), Buenos
Aires(CCK), Seoul(DDP) and New
York (Brooklyn Bridge Park).
He has also served as artistic
director of the Korea Research
Fellow since 2018 and weaved
curatorial voices from Serpentine
Galleries, Muzeum Sztuki, Taipei
Museum of Contemporary Art,
Frans Hals Museum, MIT List
Visual Arts Center, ZKM, Green
Art Lab Alliance, CCA-Tbilisi,
meter, Rupert, Central Academy
of Fine Arts, and Molior. He also
explored global art market with
Carsten Recksik(ArtReview),
Jane Morris(The Art Newspaper),
Sherry Dobbin(Futurecity), Louise
Hamlin(Art Market Minds),
James Green(David Zwirner),
Jagdip Jagpal(India Art Fair),
David Field(Sutton), and Jesse
Ringham(Serpentine Galleries).
He currently serves on the board
of directors of Nam June Paik
Cultural Foundation. He worked
as the founding art director
of Hyundai Motor Company
for six years connecting Tate,
LACMA, MMCA, Bloomberg, Ars
Electronica and Blue Prize. He
curated Counterbalance: The Stone
and the Mountain at the Korean
Pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia
2017. He was on the jury for the
Ars Electronica’s STARTS Prize in
2018 and 2019. He curated Korean
Eye: Moon Generation in 2009 and
contributed its nomadic show until
2012 at Saatchi Gallery in London.
He majored in Kunstwissenschaft
(BA) at Hongik University, Seoul
and holds a MA in Curatorial
Studies from Columbia University
in New York.
358
Kay Watson
b. 1983, UK
Kay Watson is a researcher,
producer and curator working with
art and advanced technologies
and photography. She is currently
interim Head of Arts Technologies
at the Serpentine and a PhD
researcher at Birkbeck, University
of London. Recent projects include
Sophia Al-Maria, Tosh Basco and
Kelsey Lu: tarax’sup? (2020), Jakob
Kudsk Steensen: The Deep Listener
(2019), Catharsis (2020), Hito
Steyerl: Actual RealityOS (2019),
Suzanne Treister: From SURVIVOR
(F) to The Escapist BHST (Black Hole
Spacetime) (2019), Jenna Sutela:
I Magma (2019), Ian Cheng: BOB
and Emissaries (2018), and The
Serpentine Podcast (2018-2020).
Noémie Solomon
Canada
Noémie Solomon works as a
writer, teacher, curator, and
dramaturge in the field of
contemporary choreography.
She edited the collections DANSE
(an anthology and a catalogue
published by Presses du réel in
2014 and 2015) and her writing
and translations have been
published widely in journals,
anthologies, and art catalogues
internationally. She holds a PhD
in Performance Studies from New
York University and is Director of
the Institute for Curatorial Practice
in Performance currently hosted
at Wesleyan University.
Stephanie Rosenthal Thomas Arnold Hans Ulrich Obrist
b. 1971, Germany b. 1971, USA b. 1968, Swiss - UK
Born in 1971 in Munich, Thomas Arnold is the founder and Born in 1968 in Zurich, Hans Ulrich
Stephanie Rosenthal began principal of Alta Art Production, Obrist is Artistic Director of the
her tenure as the Director of a bespoke art advisory and Serpentine Galleries in London.
Gropius Bau, Berlin in 2018. She exhibition production company He works with many different
started her programme with the specializing in the development professionals from other fields of
exhibition Lee Bul: Crash, which of private art collections, curating knowledge such as architecture,
was organised together with the and exhibition production, and the science, design, movie, and
Hayward Gallery, London. Her integration of art with architecture fashion. In 2009, Obrist was ranked
subsequent shows have included and public spaces. number one in the publication's
Garden of Earthly Delights (2019), annual list of the art world's one
Wu Tsang: There is no nonviolent Thomas Arnold was formerly hundred most powerful people
way to look at somebody (2019), Lee the Director of Mary Boone and that same year in ArtReview,
Mingwei: 禮 Li, Gifts and Rituals and, Gallery, one of New York's most an international contemporary art
most recently, Otobong Nkanga: prominent and history-making magazine. His works include do it
There Is No Such Thing as Solid contemporary art galleries. During (1993), Manifesta 1 (1996), Il tempo
Ground (2020). his tenure, he was instrumental del Positano (2007), and recently a
in the production of over 150 global art project CONNECT, BTS
From 2007 to 2017 Stephanie influential exhibitions in two (2020). He served as a curator for
Rosenthal was the Chief Curator gallery locations, and expanded a contemporary art in Museum of
at the Hayward Gallery, London. roster of internationally celebrated Modern Art of the City of Paris,
Here she curated numerous artists. as well as curator of museum
exhibitions with celebrated in progress, Vienna, from 1993-
BIOGRAPHY
international artists including 2000. He has published a number
MOVE: Choreographing You (2010), of books including the ongoing
Art of Change: New Directions from The Conversation Series in which
China (2012), Pipilotti Rist: Eyeball 28 of them have been already
Massage (2012), Ana Mendieta: published.
Traces (2013) and Dayanita Singh:
Go Away Closer (2013). She was
Artistic Director of the 20th
Biennial of Sydney in 2016, titled
The future is already here – it's
just not evenly distributed, which
brought together more than 80
artists from around the world such
as Lee Bul, Boris Charmatz, Lee
Mingwei, Helen Marten, Otobong
Nkanga and Johanna Calle. Prior
to that, she worked as a curator at
the Haus der Kunst in Munich.
She studied Art History at the
Ludwig-Maximilian-University
in Munich and received her
doctorate from the University
of Cologne. Since then she has
published influential articles
and catalogues and lectured
widely on contemporary art with
a focus on performative methods.
She is a member of numerous
international juries, chairing the
International Jury of the Venice
Biennale in 2019, and currently
serving in the Hyundai Blue Prize
and the Gwangju Biennale juries.
359
Maristella Svampa
b. 1961, Argentina
Maristella Svampa is an Argentine
sociologist and writer.
She is Researcher at the CONICET
(National Center for Scientific and
Technical Research), Argentina
and Professor at the Universidad
Nacional de la Plata (province of
Buenos Aires).
She works on the civilizational and
socio-environmental crisis. She
leads a Working Group on Energy
problems. She has published
numerous books, including essays
and novels, both in Argentina,
United States, Canada, France
and Germany. Among others
Development in Latin America,
Challenges, Resistances, Future
Direction (Fernwood Publishing,
2019) and Neo-Extractivism
Dynamics in Latin America,
Socioenvironmental Conflicts,
Territorial Turn, and New Political
Narratives (Cambridge University
Press, 2019)
W. J. T. Mitchell
b. 1942, USA
W. J. T. Mitchell is an author
and editor who has published
numerous books on art, politics,
and culture. He is especially
known for his work in the ancient
field of iconology, the theory and
practice of images across verbal
and visual media. His major
books include Image Science
(2015), Seeing through Race (2012),
Cloning Terror: The War of Images,
9-11 to the Present (2011), What
Do Pictures Want? (2005), The Last
Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times
of a Cultural Icon (1998); Picture
Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual
Representation, Iconology: Image,
Text, Ideology (1986) and Blake’s
Composite Art (1976). He served
as editor of the journal Critical
Inquiry from 1978 to 2020, and
continues as Senior Editor of that
publication. Several books have
been published about his work,
including The Pictorial Turn, ed.
Neal Curtis, and W. J. T. Mitchell’s
Image Theory ed. Kresimir Purgar.
His most recent publications
include a memoir, Mental Traveler:
A Father, a Son, and a Journey
through Schizophrenia (2020), and
Metapictures (forthcoming 2021).
He is currently working on a new
book entitled Seeing through
Madness, and continues to teach in
literature, art history, and cinema
at the University of Chicago.
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CREDIT COLOPHONE
Art Director Publisher
Daehyung Lee Si-hyuk Bang

Curator Arrangement
LONDON Yeunju Kim
Ben Vickers
Kay Watson Editor-in-chief
Daehyung Lee
BERLIN
Stephanie Rosenthal
Editor
Noémie Solomon
Iona Whittaker
BUENOS AIRES Jisoo Park
Daehyung Lee Sumin Park
Taehyun Kwon
NEW YORK
Thomas Arnold
Translation
SEOUL Susie Cho
Daehyung Lee Soohyun Jang
Jiyeon Kim
Communication
Sungmin Abe Chung Design Director
Jiwon Choi Dohyung Kim
Saetbyul Kim
Design
Graphic Design Jihyeon Kwak
Dohyung Kim Rockhyun Kim
Haerim Yang
Design Assistant Yumin Lee
Hwajeong Shin
Sueah Lee Photo
Taewhan Kim (pp. 394-400)
Exhibition Management
Somi Hong
Boreum Oh © 2021 Big Hit Entertainment.
All Rights Reserved.
Jisoo Park
Published by Big Hit Entertainment Co., Ltd.
Ryoung-jo Alice Han Printed in Korea.
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CONNECT, BTS