Matter Dialogues

Abstract

This exposition relates Claude-Lévi Strauss' concept of bricolage with two examples of the author's artistic praxis, with the aim that the subjective case studies will contribute to highlight a more general methodological standpoint of contemporary artistic creation, namely: the artistic work as a dialogical, enactive process where the discussion with the artistic material takes a guiding role. The proposal intends to resituate a classic concept from structuralist anthropology, which I find strikingly useful for analysing contemporary intermedia artistic processes and works. The exposition discusses the philosophical implications of a practice that abandons itself to an unforeseen, dialogical relationship with the environment. The oeuvre then becomes an ecological process of using what is offered by the situation, in a constant discussion with the environment. Ideas, forms and materials are engendered, lost and transformed in a dynamic process that resembles a sort of artistic aikido. The ecological strand of the discussion on bricolage leads to Anna Tsing's "Mushroom at the End of the World" and Timothy Morton’s “Dark Ecology”, where the concept of Nature and the value of naturalness are abolished in favour of a flat relationship between human and her environment: an ecological system between different manifestations of being, where human-made phenomena are not regarded as extra-natural. An artistic practice of bricolage finds a favourable breeding-ground in such a conceptual context.