Amor Mundi, but…, 2024
Fire hose, perforated tape, wood, 1.186 x 107 x 1.7 cm, 2.240 x 113 x 1.7 cm, 3.177 x 169 x 1.7 cm/ FORÊT [SCEPTIQUE]
At the site-specific work titled 'Amor Mundi, but...' you'll encounter Hannah Arendt's hands, smoking, in the forest. To see the world as it is, we must stand on the sidelines, find perspective, and a place of solitude for thinking. At quiet places like the forest, we are able to think about what it means to be committed to the world, to care for the world, despite its horrors. It can be a challenge. A provocation to go back and to embrace one another in our difference and to meet one another as fellow human beings and the common forms of love can be destructive of difference and plurality. In other words, there has to be a turning in before we can turn out. Loving the world requires reckoning with the world, which means we must find some critical distance from what is happening around us. It is a relational form of love. When we witness injustices, sometimes there is an impulse to act, but Arendt cautions us to slow down and think what we are doing—to be thinkers not just joiners.
Arendt’s conception of Amor Mundi is not comforting, it is challenging. It refuses the idea that we can ‘find meaning in’ or ‘make sense of’ and instead pushes us to work hard to understand and accept that there are no answers to these questions in the way we might wish.
And also, there is so much more to say, but... not here ofc )) Thank you Hannah Arend, you are an icon in this world!
“Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.”
Photos: Jan Hoeft, Selma Gültoprak
Installation view: Bavarian Forest, Group Show – FORÊT [SCEPTIQUE]
Curator: Alfons Knogl