Ex Tempore | Riccardo Arena Emre Hüner

For the second chapter or Living Together, we focused on practices of togetherness based on loose time spent with others and collective thinking as a methodology which leads to produce (or better co-produce) thoughts, which become imaginaries, which become inventive ways to observe life and improvise other possible lives, together.
Speculating is a practice which in the last decade became popular among students and scholars of humanities and arts, and spread thorough the cultural world, globally, thanks to the efforts of science philosopher and scholar Donna Haraway, who elaborated and connected a cloud of cultural practices, theoretical approaches and material ways of coexisting in her book Staying with the trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016).

With Donna Haraway we have learned that ecological and geopolitical emergencies of our present are the consequence of how humans conceive themselves as separated entities from nature, coexisting according to a functional and extractivist approach: humans in the highest position, non-humans as depletable resources. Within this system, cultures are goods to be produced and consumed as amusement. Through her words we started to foresee the possibility of de-naturalizing the way we are called to live, learning from a network of writers, scientists, animals, ethnographers, philosophers, artists, activists.

“Becoming with”, “SF” (as science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, science fact), “Trouble”, “Response-ability” are few of Haraway's words which depict possible ways out from the constraints of our present condition. They are based on practices of being together, imagining together, inventing together, speculating together. They are not mental diversions from reality: rather they are mental processes which lead to ways of reinvent ourselves in relation with many others and space we inhabit. It is a narration of possibilities which emerge from spending time together, connecting on an intuitive level, sharing words, inventing new words, explaining how they could become realities: wordling.

 

Speculation is therefore a practice of togetherness which leads and demands us to be present, be together, observe elements which surround us and imagine - through them - outer worlds. It is not a passive practice: on the contrary it is an activation, where cultural forms are engaged not as good to be consumed, but rather as elements that we can actively bridge and learn from, because they can lead us to unexpected spaces and states of mind.

 

The second part of the second chapter Living Together is the exhibition Speculating - Ex-Tempore: Riccardo Arena, Emre Hüner, with the two artists invited to cooperate in the spaces of ICA-Sofia to the conception of two dialogating installations which combine theoretical and visual research highlighting methods and forms of collective imaginative knowledge. The formal elements of the installations are part of a long-term iconographic research and construction of archival materials where the artists propose an open method of production, a process of thinking rather than reaching a conclusive outcome. The two installations become components of a complex rhizome, when contemplated, they activate spectators’ perceptions, enable their connection and create new narratives, individual-fictional, and create cultural devices of imaginary knowledge.

Riccardo Arena conceived an intervention which originates from his research methodology on images and iconographies developed with the exhibition Hyphae - Where Things Fall and Never Return to Themselves, a complex installation designed for the spaces of Galleria Milano (and curated by Katia Anguelova in 2021) and with the project Geranos (2021-2024). Hyphae (from the Greek huphḗ, web) are the filaments by which the vegetative apparatus of fungi enters into symbiosis with other organisms and creates an underground network of invisible, interdependent and inextricable relationships. This metaphor speaks of a dense network of correspondences between biographies, scientific theories, and mythologies which merge and transcend into a poetic and evocative dimension. Geranos is on the other side part of a broad interdisciplinary investigation that involved several iconographic archives at the Warburg Institute in London, as well as two institutions in the Locarno area, Monte Verità and the Eranos Foundation, whose histories played a central role in the cultural development of twentieth-century Europe. Both projects and their research methodologies are at the origin of the installation visible at ICA-Sofia from August 5th.

Arena's projects are often focused on the imaginative power of visual elements, and he developed his practice as a multilayered methodology which he meaningfully declined as educational tools for imagineries construction: Semantics of Imagination & Spatialization Thinking. Images, icons, objects emerge in the space and foster a deeper comprehension of the cognitive pathways involved in the formation of an one's mental landscapes as well as the essential role of creative activity as a process of knowledge.

Emre Hüner’s practice focuses on constructed narratives and eclectic assemblages or structures, exploring the subjects of archaeology, failed utopias, technology and questioning the notions of progress and futurities through the re-imagination of architectural entities, speculations on the language and the materiality of organic and artificial forms. 

For Speculating - Ex-Tempore, Hüner proposes part of a new ongoing project, The Archive of Capillary Ruins: A Speculative Index, composed by accumulative, fragmentary and research-based elements such as writing pieces, drawings and sculptural elements. Hüner writes modified encyclopedic texts and invents new images, placed in speculative and fictional relation to each other. The project, “as a literary and visual device, aims to generate inter-connected parts between diverse sculptural forms such as 3D prototype renderings and prints or moulded replicas of existing objects, various drawing parts for animated film sequences, activating an open method of experimental production, leaning on the structure of programming charts, storyboards and scriptwriting, in this case released from their original functions, towards an evolving protocol for a speculative and fictional outcome”, the artist explains. The elements of the Archive of Capillary Ruins are produced specifically for the exhibition Speculating - Ex-Tempore, to speculate at the intersection of fact and fiction, drawing and sculpture, the digital and the artisanal.