During the 54th October salon, Red Min(e)d together with participating artists, collectives and the public develops visual and discursive methodologies of researching, re-thinking and presenting the subject of (non)human nature. The concept and the structure of the international contemporary art exhibition No One Belongs Here More Than You stand for a grounded sense towards singular subjectivities that are collectively bound and outward-oriented by the feminist concept of ‘sustainability’. As proposed by the feminist theoretician Rosi Braidotti, this kind of sustainability argues for ‘a re-grounding of the subject in a materially embedded sense of responsibility and ethical accountability’ for society and environment. Rethinking the embodied structure of human subjectivity requires an ethics of lucidity, as well as powers of a new transformative creativity. In this sense, the exhibition takes fully into account the fact that bodies have become techno-cultural constructs immersed in networks of complex, simultaneous and potentially conflicting power-relations in which all kinds of historically transposed ideologies have been internalized by contemporary capitalist conditions of everyday life as a permanent and only possible state of social reality. Through the subject of (non)human nature, the exhibition presents the challenge of finding a new way of (social) imagination towards possible futures and its responsible politics of the commons and communalities.
No One Belongs Here More Than You departs from the continuous project Living Archive, which deals with the (im)possibility of breaking through the ossified structure of institutional and patriarchal knowledge production. Engaged with contemporary art and feminist curatorial practices, it works towards overcoming their appearance as a symptom of today’s political, cultural and educational system.In fact, it shifts between the politics of social movement and the politics of common knowledge as well as between individual practice and collective work towards a feminist kind of everyday life sustainability. By bringing together artists, collectives and the public, the Living Archive creates different ‘(non)working stations’: Exhibition, Perpetuum Mobile, Audio/Video Booth, Reading Room, online Questionnaire, Digital Oven, Forum, Music Spot and Curatorial School.
In this way, No One Belongs Here More Than You (re)produces an interactive space – the space of a loud (feminist) articulation out of which it is possible to reflect, rework, emancipate and sustain one’s own and our own positions. As described by Biljana Kasic, “it is an open space that means and creates both dislocation and new location, visibility and presence of the invisible, possibility and freedom of experimentation, thereby enabling politicization of space and time”. It is not only about being interactive, it is also about being (in)active.
*The title of the exhibition is taken from the eponymous stories by Miranda July.
Curated by: Red Min(e)d – Danijela Dugandžić Živanović (Sarajevo), Katja Kobolt (Munich/Ljubljana), Dunja Kukovec (Ljubljana) and Jelena Petrović (Ljubljana/Belgrade)