M..E..T..A..S..P..E..C..T

sample
The Radiobiological Human Tissue Repository
(installation with photos, drawings, prints, found and constructed artefacts, dimensions variable)

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ELEGIAC FALLS (Part One) – The Radiobiological Human Tissue Repository

part of Antwerp Art Weekend 2018

The Radiobiological Human Tissue Repository is located in Ozyorsk in Russia. Since 1951, the Repository archives human blood and tissue samples derived from autopsy of workers from the Mayak nuclear weapons production facility. In order to study effects of exposure of these workers to radioactivity, also ‘clean’ samples from residents from Ozyorsk are archived. However, as a consequence of bad safety management, radioactive waste has been leaking in the surrounding rivers and lakes since the beginning, polluting the whole environment and thus rendering the original sampling and archiving project meaningless.

On view is an installation and a fiction film by Gaston Meskens and Juliane Borths for the Arts Institute.

opening reception

Friday 25 May 2018, 18h00 – 23h00

hours

opening Friday 25 May 2018, 12h00 – 23h00
Saturday 26 May 2018, 12h00 – 18h00
Sunday 27 May 2018, 12h00 – 18h00
(part of Antwerp Art Weekend)

extra

Saturday 2 June 2018, 14h00 – 18h00
Sunday 3 June 2018, 14h00 – 18h00

venue

The AnteRoom, Kattenberg 93, 2140 Antwerp

 

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Elegiac Falls (Part One) – film synopsis and info

A woman and a man live in a 19th century house in a city. Both live with a specific distress that determines the whole of their life and coexistence. The man lives with a permanent fear that he will fall through the floor; the woman has a permanent fear that the ceiling will come down on her. Despite of their maladies, they manage to live together relatively well. One day, they conclude their fear is not some personal disorder but caused by the house itself, and they decide to look for a small house in the countryside with a ground floor only. They start to travel and end up far away from
home in a city in a desolated region of the country. They buy an abandoned house and start a new life. The man finds a job as farmer and the woman starts to work at the nuclear facility nearby the city. Together they make long walks in the forests and along the lakes, and they feel completely relieved from the distress they experienced in the old house. One day, the woman tells the man about the sampling programme the nuclear facility has put in place, and suggests he should take part too. After their death, blood and tissue samples of their bodies will be compared, with the aim to find out whether she had lived a higher risk working at the facility as compared to him, not being exposed to radiation. Yes, says the man. Of course I want to do that for you.

Film Elegiac Falls (Part One) (25’)
Actors: Juliane Borths, Gaston Meskens
Music and images by TRAGIC REALIST FICTION (featuring Gaston Meskens & Juliane Borths)

The Radiobiological Human Tissue Repository

The Radiobiological Human Tissue Repository (RHTR) is located in Ozyorsk, a city in the Southern Urals in Russia. It was established in 1951 to study effects of exposure of workers to the radioactivity of plutonium coming with the production of nuclear weapons at the Mayak nuclear facility. Since 1951, the Repository systematically archives human blood and tissue samples derived from autopsy of workers from the Mayak site and from residents from the city of Ozyorsk and its surroundings. Comparing samples from ‘non-exposed’ residents with those of workers would help researchers to study the health effects of working in a radioactive environment. However, as a consequence of both the Kyshtym disaster in 1957 and enduring discharge of radioactive waste into the nearby lakes and Techa River, the whole of the natural and urban environment of Ozyorsk became contaminated with radioactivity. As a consequence, the collected blood and tissue samples of the residents cannot longer serve as reference for those of the nuclear workers, rendering the original sampling and archiving project meaningless. Up to 1989, the Mayak management and the Russian authorities have constantly denied this, and they left the workers and the local population in total ignorance. Since the disclosure of the nuclear archives (including those about the accidents that happened), the RHTR has been reorganised and now offers its archives of blood and tissue samples ‘of workers and contaminated residents’ for consultation to the international research community. The pollution of the environment by the Mayak facility continues.

Research

Research for the installation and the film is done on the basis of literature, travels and personal communications with Sergey Romanov (the current director of the Radiobiological Human Tissue Repository), Tatyana Rakitskaya (staff member of ROSATOM, the Russian state-owned nuclear company that also owns Mayak and the RHTR), Pavel Malinovskii (professor at the University of Moscow), Andrey Ozharovsky (a Russian activist) and Sergej Letov (artist and member of the Russian conceptualist Collective Actions group).

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Selection of images

film still
Elegiac Falls (Part One)
(film)

film still
Elegiac Falls (Part One)
(film)

document
The Radiobiological Human Tissue Repository
(installation with photos, drawings, prints, found and constructed artefacts, dimensions variable)

photo (museum of the former bomb factory Mashinostroitelny Zavod, photo Gaston Meskens, November 2017)
The Radiobiological Human Tissue Repository
(installation with photos, drawings, prints, found and constructed artefacts, dimensions variable)

photo (Mayak Booth, ROSATOM International Conference, Moscow, photo Gaston Meskens, November 2017)
The Radiobiological Human Tissue Repository
(installation with photos, drawings, prints, found and constructed artefacts, dimensions variable)

glove
The Radiobiological Human Tissue Repository
(installation with photos, drawings, prints, found and constructed artefacts, dimensions variable)

sample
The Radiobiological Human Tissue Repository
(installation with photos, drawings, prints, found and constructed artefacts, dimensions variable)

What is a society? Is it the set of sophisticated social, economic and political methods and structures we set up to organise ourselves today? Or is it the assemblage of temporary human ethic and aesthetic encounters in forests, bars, streets and meeting rooms, continuously dissolving with the promise to coagulate again? And what if those modern methods and structures, created through emancipatory resistance against feudal and religious powers, make up the civilised problem in itself, being nothing better than the powers they conquered?

See the event here.

See the slides of the presentation here.

 

The Institute of Idle Curiosity for Elements of Seduction is a research institute established in 2006. It is built on the (fragmented) legacy of the historical Institut Weich-Fehler für kritische Philosophie der Psychologie that existed from 1924 until 1952.

The research programme of the Institute of Idle Curiosity for Elements of Seduction is concerned with the way human beings deal with the uncertain, the ambiguous, the complex and the unknown in social and political interaction. The basis of the research programme is a critical theory that targets strategies of pseudo-tolerance, conformism, positivism, profitism and populism in social, cultural, scientific, economic or political contexts, but the programme essentially wants to go beyond critical analysis as such. The aim is to research alternative ‘ideological’ human interaction modes that go beyond those traditionally leaning on the proclaimed values of social, cultural and ethnic collective identity, scientific truth, free competition in the market and competition over ideologies in politics. These traditional interaction modes shape our society today, and while the dominant perception is that they are essential in the way they provide certainty and safety and the means for social recognition and self-expression as proclaimed conditions for societal and individual well-being, the argument is that they are actually stimulating pseudo-tolerance, conformism, positivism, profitism and populism themselves. As a consequence, these traditional interaction modes remain to serve the various social, cultural, scientific, economic and political non-overlapping comfort zones of power and profit that steer society today which makes them to hinder rather than facilitate dealing with our unavoidable human individual angst on the one hand and with the various social, ecological and economic malaises on the other hand.

Alternative interaction modes, the institute argues, embrace the uncertain, the ambiguous, the complex and the unknown as inherent characteristics of our co-existence and life. They stimulate and enable the individual to nurture an idle curiosity ‘at the peripheries of social cohesion’ in both private and public interactions and provide at the same time aesthetical consolation that comes with the melancholic awareness of the impossibility of pure beauty, unity and harmony, and of the inevitability of imperfection, decadence and uncertainty.

The LifeWorldTheories Labs of the Institute of Idle Curiosity for Elements of Seduction develop the theory behind these alternative human interaction modes and make it to gradually materialise in a series of texts aimed to serve internal and external reflection. Based on these insights, the other departments of the Institute explore these interaction modes through various media, ranging from soundscapes, music and film (the TRAGIC REALIST FICTION collective) over installations of physical artefacts, models and schemes (the idle-city-else labs) up to text and discursive interventions (the Academia and the PhɅAct Collective). The Arts Institute with its three satellite departments (the Happening Hotel, the Art Archives and the Mono Theatre) serve as the liaison of the Institute with the outside world and are open to the public on specific moments.

See more information on the Institute and on its departments on the About page, the website of its back office www.idle-city-else.org or check the page with contact information and instructions for visits.

 

Revisiting Melancholy

Robert Burton published the first edition of his magnum opus ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’ in 1621. His aim was to write a definite and comprehensive study of the meaning of melancholy. His book promised to explain ‘.. What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up…’. What looks at first sight as an exhaustive analysis of melancholy as a disease to be cured is in fact much more. Burton uses melancholy as a perspective to inquire into all human emotions and thought. In that sense, the Anatomy can also be seen as a total encyclopaedia of the human condition of that time.

Our modern times may now inspire us to re-read that meaning for the contemporary human condition, although not through a systematic re-interpretation of the encyclopaedic classes and categories, but on the basis of one simple idea….

Melancholy is not depression neither pessimism. Drawing on interpretations from the pre-modern Romantic and Decadent Era, it can be described as the aesthetical consolation that comes with the awareness of the impossibility of pure beauty, unity and harmony, and of the inevitability of imperfection, decadence and uncertainty. The idea however is that melancholy is not a detached but an ethical experience, and that this became apparent with modernity: melancholy is the human condition resulting from a deliberate awareness of the limits to rational instrumental reason in a context of social appeal. That social appeal may either be love, friendship or lust, or social or political engagement. The implications of modernity rendered melancholy with a social meaning: the impossibility of pure beauty, unity and harmony, and of the inevitability of imperfection, decadence and uncertainty, is not experienced by way of detached observation, but in a reflexive way in social interaction.

In this vision, the ‘end state’ of melancholy is still aesthetical consolation. But that state is not passive, as it arises from an ethical demand. In its recognition of the intrinsic ambiguity of human interaction and of the inherent complexity of social organisation and cohabitation, it is an intellectual withdrawal from the delusion of grandeur of a society obsessed with rationality, security, efficiency, predictability and competition. In its disdain for complacency, it is a consolatory practice of leaving the comfort zones constructed around strategies of conformism, positivism, populism and profitism. But as an active state of resignation, melancholy is not evasive. Its decadence is in the eyes of the conformists. Layered on reflexivity as an ethical experience, it feels the anger towards the detached. And as a meta-state of concern, it is aware of the fragile potential of intellectual solidarity among the capable, and of the melancholy of the capable as vulnerable.

Melancholy is practicing the aesthetics of imperfection, decadence and uncertainty, although with a constant awareness of – and care for – the possible of human possibilities.

Text: Gaston Meskens

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Workshop at the Rijksakademie, Wednesday 19 October 2016, 11am – 1pm

Introductory lecture:

Melancholies of Modernity: on hope and despair in the social activism of Gaston de Pawlowski and Paul Otlet
Gaston Meskens

Confronted today with its adverse consequences, modernity is traditionally characterised as the era of a growing obsession with rationality, security, efficiency, predictability and competition. That picture is incomplete, as it overlooks the early signs of ‘reflexivity as an ethical experience’ of socially-critical individuals and groups, and of the state of melancholy in which they operated. Understanding modernity is understanding the melancholy of resistance against modernity in modernity.

See the slides of the lecture here: workshop-on-melancholy

Discussion on the value of melancholy in art and science today.

Today, contemporary science, although still locked into its modernist ‘mandate’ to unveil and deliver the truth, often faces total uncertainty while under pressure by politics and the market to deliver advice. As an introduction to the discussion, a case study will illustrate how science, in these situations, cannot but work in a state of ‘enlightened resignation’, despite of the quest for clear advice. The fact of uncertainty becomes a truth in itself.

Lectures

The Politics of Hypothesis
Gaston Meskens

See the slides of the lecture here: the-politics-of-hypothesis

Bringing it all together
Gaston Meskens

See the slides of the lecture here: bringing-it-all-together