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16/9/2009

Mauro Folci

Neues Kunstforum, Koln

curated by Katja Lambert

BOREDOM / Video installation
The video Boredom is projected inside a room with no access whose walls are made up of speakers. The video has a purely formal connection with a painting by Antonio Colantonio, Saint Jeronimus in his study (1455), showing the saint extracting a thorn from a lion’s paw. What is kept of this scene is the strange interaction between the animal’s paws and the saint’s hand, transposed in a live representation shot for the video with the help of a lion-tamer and his lion. The lack of any props in the scene is meant to highlight the interaction between the hands and the paws of the two characters. The video can be watched outside this structure through the cracks between the speakers.

It is the intention of this project to draw a connection between the gestures born of the interaction between the saint’s hands and the lion’s paws and the concept of profound boredom as described by Heidegger, who posited an analogy between the stupor of the animal and boredom, an emotional state which the philosopher considered essential for any philosophising to take place. Heidegger analyses boredom to understand what the world means to human beings, distinguishing for that purpose the natural environment from the human environment. Animals live in an environment in the sense that they do not have a relationship with entities as such, but only as disinhibitors activating their specific instincts; the essence of things escapes them.

Animals are befuddled and absorbed by their environment, continuously urged as they are by multiple instincts. Human beings live in a world, or rather they construct their world because, unlike animals, they do not possess specialized instincts and are not enveloped in an environment that acts like a prosthesis. However, the emotional state of boredom reveals how the relationship of human beings with the world can be closer to that of animals with the natural environment.

The German philosopher claims that when this state of mind occurs, ‘being’ as such disappears, that is, it retreats in profound boredom, having nothing more to say to us, and leaves us empty. Being retreats leaving us empty, and we are suspended in time, which fails to be articulated in past, present and future, the modalities that punctuate the rhythm of our actions. Time befuddles and imprisons us in its disarticulated essence, and while we are in this condition of inactivity it throws back at us all of our unrealised possibilities. In this sense boredom can be considered as the best expression of the concept of potentiality, so much so that Heidegger refers to “super-power”.

The video projected inside this space, showing the unusual proximity of a man and an animal, indicates the closeness between the stupor of animals and the enchantment/enchainment of human beings when in an emotional state of profound boredom. In the eyes of other observers watching them from a distance, the spectators spying the video and eavesdropping from the cracks between the speakers become an integral part of the work, bringing to mind the image of a disoriented bee buzzing outside her beehive.

If, as we have said, animals are dazed in their immediate relationship with the disinhibiting entity - and in the example of the bee it is the beehive that does not reveals itself as such - thus the spectators’ interaction with this sound structure that reveals itself to them but cannot be fully accessible, reminds us of the condition of profound boredom in which being is absent, leaving us empty and therefore extremely open.

Press contact: Dr. Katja Lambert
ka.lambert@web.de
0151-56751749

Opening 17 September 2009, h 19

Neues Kunstforum
Alteburger wall 1 - Koln
Hours: wed - sun 18-21
free admission

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