ALTOFEST EN 2019

HABITAT*

* the natural environment in which an animal or plant usually lives

In front of us are lying spaces peopled from the human race. Cosmopolis. Anthropocene. Terrestrial leftovers. Simultaneous, immaterial, virtual, hyperconnected habitats. Spaces that are reconstructed, adapted, cleansed, exalted, rarefied, displaced. Life increases its habitats. Humans cannot hold their blind generative power. Constantly changing scenarios is determined by human presence. Inside them, the human being shows itself as a defenceless interruption, as a bare question. Hand has no more grasp.

We feel observed (…) beside every synchrony, before and outside each of our glazes. (…) We feel seen by a glaze, that will be always impossible to catch.
Jacques Derrida

“What sort of agent we are? (…) Life has not an environment. Life is producing his own environment”
Bruno Latour

The one who inhabits doesn’t recognise the correspondence that connects them to the environment.  They act or feel acted on a faded threshold, eternally transitable, eternally opened. They act the landscape interruption. The scene becomes a doubt, the action a question.

How do we name, then, this one?

Will their name remain “human being”? A name that wants them anchored in their terrestrial origin, destined to share the humid fertility of the hummus? Defined by the earth, that has been their first habitat as origin and matter.

In Hebrew Adame is the land that gives Adam name and shape, the matter where the body will be returned, decomposing, in order to melt into the work of nature and to fulfil itself in the eternal return of its law, to feed the genesis, to regenerate the habitat.

In this new scenario what does the body can, still human and already utopian (Michel Foucault), as an inhabitant of habitat, that is no longer just one? An inhabitant of a landscape without place, without matter. A witness of multiple dimensions, which still must be crossed and obtained, by giving them a name.

The question of the presence arises. A presence that acts in multiple spaces. What matter is this body made of? Which kind of matter? Does this matter still exist? How does this body move? How does it inhabit the scene? Which is its scene?

Should it claim back the body’s carnality or exalt its absence in an image, in the sign that transcribes it? We need to question ourselves. Before acting. Even before standing out.

I am (no longer) here, where the body remains. I don’t inhabit my body anymore. I observe this scenario hosting me. I look for the gesture that unveils the cycle which corresponds to them of my body, the law determining the place that embraces me, the logic that defines it habitable, ingestable, warm, that shows me the norm which places me – my “own” place. But there is no nature in which the secret code that defines the place I inhabit could be read. There is no habitat besides this becoming, besides this clayey substance shaped by my hand, besides the multiplication of possible shapes.

What have I become?

A matter shaped by my own body, while I discover myself as an inhabitant of this unlimited, elusive space that is fading out. I’m contemplating the landscape and me. Me in the landscape: me-actor, me by building my habitat. I’m looking for the code that allows me to read, to read into, to intellect the secret of which I’m still part.

We chose then the word habitat to introduce the program of the Altofest’s 9th edition. If we associate this term to its literal meaning of natural environment in which an animal or plant usually lives, then is puzzling to allocate our “species” in its own habitat. This question underlines the measure and the features of the historical, geological and ecological threshold, which is portrayed our condition nowadays.