9islands

At the risk of overkill, I’m in the middle of reading Radicant so it is where my head is at this moment… here is a video of Bourriaud reading from it last week in Lisbon. More of the talk to the right >

This is a clip shot in São Miguel (2004) of one of my niece’s toys. I thought of it when I read something yesterday about shifting meridians.

“If contemporary art is the bearer of a coherent political project, it is surely this: to introduce precariousness into the very heart of the system of representations by means of which the powers that be manage behaviours, to weaken all systems, to endow the most well-established habits with the appearance of exotic rituals.” (Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant p99)
Still in the middle of my first read of The Radicant – in some early stage of digestion. But it is a joy.*****

From Art in America interview with Nicolas Bourriaud
BR: What is the ‘Altermodern?’
NB: First, it is an attempt to reexamine our present, by replacing one periodizing tool with another. After 30 years into the ‘aftershock’ of modernism and its mourning, then into the necessary post-colonial reexamination of our cultural frames, ‘Altermodern’ is a word that intends to define the specific modernity according to the specific context we live in – globalization, and its economic, political and cultural conditions. The use of the prefix “alter” means that the historical period defined by postmodernism is coming to an end, and alludes to the local struggles against standardization. The core of this new modernity is, according to me, the experience of wandering — in time, space and mediums. But the definition is far from being complete.
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