From Animal to Mineral

Judith Adelmann, Rachel Fäth, Sophia Mainka, Hannah Mitterwallner, Jonathan Penca, Maria VMier

15.12. 2023 – 18.02.2024

Lothringer Halle, Lothringer Str. 13, 81667 München

Filmstill_Mainka_HabitLoss(1)

“Animals” are wolves mainly, rats and the wasp. “Mineral” is everything imperceptible: elements, particles and molecules. To go from animal to mineral is to experience becoming, to step across a threshold and change.

I began my reading of A Thousand Plateaus, specifically the chapter “1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming- Imperceptible …” 1 during the corona pandemic, when environmental concerns were at the forefront of almost every media discussion. Defining humanity’s role in nature seemed like an important task and Deleuze and Guattari’s work was useful in addressing the too easy distinction between nature and culture. I liked how Deleuze and Guattari saw the dominance of our species over others as a philosophical problem of autonomy where Man as a thinking being is subject only to the laws of his own construction. For them, the capacity for conscious thought conferred upon Man a dignity denied to other creatures, making their voices unheard.

Whereas, in A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari present nature as an endless variability, the “whole thousand-voiced multiple” of Difference and Repetition 2. Here, nature is a multi-voiced body, where the voices constituting this body resound in each other in a “clamor of Being.” In this din, my voice is one of many and many voices resonate in mine 3. For Deleuze and Guattari, to change the human collective relation, not just to animals, but to earth itself, would demand that we stop hearing just our own voice and become aware of the noise of others. This is the experience of becoming-animal, becoming-imperceptible. It is to shed Man’s mantle and learn how to listen, becoming the voice of many.

Since 2021 I have realised a series of exhibitions at various locations in responses to different aspects of this chapter of A Thousand Plateaus, whether to its ideas of nature, technology or memory. This exhibition at Lothringer 13 Halle confronts the idea of becoming, specifically in our relation to nature, more directly. In different ways all the artists participating in this exhibition share these concerns, many acutely aware of working in the era of the Anthropocene, where the human impact on the planet can no longer be denied.

To their cluster of voices I add my own, belonging to the writer. The texts I have written over the past few years in response to Deleuze and Guattari’s chapter on becoming are on display throughout the room. The texts resonate with the artwork, and the art inhabits the text. The exhibition is an experiment in the construction of a multi-voiced population, a pack of wolves, a people of rats.

Magdalena Wisniowska, November 2023

1) Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (Minneapolis, London: University of Minesota Press, 2005).
2) Deleuze, Gilles, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 304.
3) Ibid.

The Flamekeepers

Lilian Robl

13.07. – 20.08.2023

Lothringer 13 Studio, Lothringer Str. 13, 81667 München

Lilian Robl, The Flamekeepers, 2023, installation view

Lilian Robl, The Flamekeepers, 2023, installation view with red filter and poster

Lilian Robl, The Flamekeepers, 2023 with red filter and poster

Lilian Robl, The Flamekeepers, 2023 with poster

Lilian Robl, The Flamekeepers, 2023 with red filter, speakers and poster

Lilian Robl, The Flamekeepers, 2023 with customised deckchairs

Lilian Robl, The Flamekeepers, 2023 deckchair embroidery (detail)

At each corner, each fork in the road, we encounter the same: Man. Not some man, a particular man with a friendly, if white European face, but man as a standard on which every opposition is based. This is the man that is the principle term in the opposition of male/female, white/red, rational/mad. A center point from which all other points take measure. The point of origin all other points echo. This kind of man is one “gigantic memory.”

The path we take instead is a straight one, without any crossroads. As soon as we open the door to the Lothringer 13 Studio space there is only the left. Nothing takes place on the right hand side. On the left there are four large windows covered with transparent red filter and once again there is no alternative to the redness that saturates the entire room with colour. Also on the left there are three deck chairs clustered around some speakers. Left is an open window. A poster hangs at the very edge of the distant wall behind.

At each step of the exhibition “The Flamekeepers” Lilian Robl invites us to think of lines. In this sound sketch that is part of the preparation work for a larger video piece, the protagonists – Emma Hauck, Ingeborg Bachmann, Rabe Perplexum – are not points but lines. For points would be women who as minorities are defined in opposition to the major term, man. Whereas lines flicker with flames of becoming. The lines of becoming are not the mathematical lines of history connecting two or more distant events in the point system of memory. Rather these lines pass between points, constituting a distinct no-man’s land. On this land no man can stand, because here is a place where the discernibility of points disappears. Deleuze and Guattari write that these murky zones form a “line-system of becoming.”

Robl is very good at identifying these indiscernible points, these lines of becoming, in order to constitute a kind of anti-archive, a non-collection of anti-memories. There is Emma Hauck, who in her schizophrenia feels she can control her world and make a nurse jump or a housefly drown. She sits down to repeatedly write to her husband: komm! Her writing is her body as she mechanically writes and rewrites the same word. Her writing is also a landscape she sees out of her window, a grey forest of lines you can walk into. Recalling Heathcliff’s wish to embrace Catherine’s corpse, Ingeborg Bachmann writes of wanting to embrace the skeleton of her lover, filling her decayed mouth and choking on the with the dust he has become, at one with his nothingness. Rabe Perplexum changes their name by deed poll to become-raven, flying about and causing havoc from Gärtnerplatz to Stachus.

Their’s is a terrible suffering. Emma Hauck dies in the Wiesloch asylum, without ever seeing her husband or daughters again. While high on drugs, Ingeborg Bachmann accidentally sets herself alight and dies from her injuries. Rabe’s tongue is a knife and they commit suicide after alienating their friends. To walk in straight lines and not remember – not to make memories by not connecting the distant points of historical events – is painful. But pain and suffering is also what brings about proximity. We are close to them in their suffering because we no longer separate entities but participants in becoming. When there are no binary distinction at play, they can affect us still and something of theirs passes to us. The wound for Robl must continually be licked open.

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 293.
Ibid., 294.

Magdalena Wisniowska 2023

Animals on my mind

Julia Klemm, Zuza Piekoszewska

21.10 – 6.11.2022

Lothringer 13 Studio, Lothringer Str. 13, 81667 München

Animals on my mind, 2022, installation view

Zuza Piekoszewska, Old body, 2020, bioplastic, copper spray paint

Zuza Piekoszewska, The nest, 2022, jute, bioplastic

Zuza Piekoszewska, I’d rather not open my eyes, 2022, mixed
media, fabric, fibre, jute

Zuza Piekoszewska, Ganglions, 2021, bioplastic

Zuza Piekoszewska, Home for troubled eggs, 2022, mixed media

Julia Klemm, pack (series), 2022, ceramic, pigments, dimensions
variable

Zuza Piekoszewska, Superrock, 2022, mixed media

Zuza Piekoszewska, Serene morning on the cornfied, 2022, mixed
media

Zuza Piekoszewska, The angular dog, 2022, mixed media

Zuza Piekoszewska, Complex problems, 2022, fibre on canvas

Last night I tried to think of the first animal I can remember. My grandmother’s black, shaggy dog perhaps? Or earlier, as my mother would say, the jellyfish that stung me on my wrist. I was only two then. Or earlier still I remember the fish on the beach I would make out of the warm sand. But maybe I am thinking about this wrong, maybe it is not about the actual animals I might or might not remember, but rather that all memories belong to the animal kingdom. Maybe memories are like animals.

First of all, there are the individual memories of different things that happened to us, personal memories like family pets, domesticated. Zuza Piekoszewska shows a small landscape of fields in the early morning mist as described to her by her parents. Elsewhere she remakes a kind of very specific dish cloth her mother used in mid-90s Poland, pastel, striped, homely. Julia Klemm’s lions do not prowl but play around the rubble like kittens. The lions though are a different type of memory. They belong not just to us, but to our culture, much like in the taxonomist’s biological classification, a species belongs to a genus. These animals are ordered along evolutionary lines, significant events of our shared past marking out a historical trajectory. These lions that Julia Klemm gathers, derives from 3D scans of bronze and stone lions dotted around European capitals, traditional symbols of strength, courage and nobility in our Judeo-Christian tradition.

Finally there are the memories of the pack, memories like the swarm of cicadas that emerge all together and so suddenly, after 17 years of underground sleep. History has no place for such memories; this kind of animal is missing from the taxonomist’s classification systems. It is less about individuals, identification and contextualisation and more about how to think the animal as already a population. Memories are never single – there is never the one lion. An animal before it is this or that animal, my animal, yours and ours, is an animal like another, but also different. I mean lions as the same but also as mutants, the repetition of genetic material always harbouring mutation. These memories of the pack are always unknowingly carried with us. I am a product of memories I do not even remember; we are a multiplicity of memories that history cannot contain. The most interesting things happen in between the lines, in shared proximities where the discernibility of points disappears. As Deleuze and Guattari write,

The line-system … of becoming is opposed to the point-system of memory. Becoming is the movement by which the line frees itself from the point, and renders points indiscernible…(Thousand Plateaus, 294)

Here becoming is an anti-memory. To really learn how to remember animals, we must first forget.

Magdalena Wisniowska, 2022

GiG air – more

This year is the year GiG Munich becomes nomadic as GiG air.

When I say ‘circumstances force GiG to become nomadic’, I mean it in a very specific way. The last series of exhibitions at GiG Munich in its former location, ‘Thinking Nature’ were in large part a response to Deleuze and Guattari’s chapter ‘1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming- Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible’ in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, which I was reading at the time. I was interested in how, in this chapter, they introduced the idea of becoming through the discussion of the naturalist and his approach to classifying nature, either through the establishment of series when comparing outward resemblances, or when comparing interior workings of living organisms, the establishment of inner structures. Deleuze and Guattari oppose to this naturalist approach not only to the kind of symbiotic relation, such as between the wasp and the orchid, that is without offspring and therefore also outside the filial relations of evolution, but also to the becoming-animal of creatures like vampires or werewolves, seemingly fictional yet having nothing to do with an imaginary required of comparing and assessing visual similarities between species. There is a suggestion here that becoming-animal constitutes an alternative relation to nature, or rather a bond that isn’t a relation, a relation without relation, because without a recognisable subject and a distinct object. Instead of a molar organisation, Deleuze and Guattari offer the intensities and speeds of the molecular. The exhibition series ‘Thinking Nature’ aimed to explore the impact of man’s relation to nature has on thought. What kind of thought would there be, if this relation between man and nature would be different?

The project however neglected one crucial aspect of this approach to nature, and that is politics. About two months ago a video work by Franz Wanner alerted me to the politics involved in discussions of the molecular. His work was about Germany’s Erinnerungskultur and the problems associated with it. The way in which specifically businesses acknowledge their Nazi past, results in a production of memory that could be understood in Deleuze and Guattari’s molar terms. For Deleuze and Guattari memory, and not just because of its relation to the imaginary, is inherently molar, because of it follows a point-based arborescent system. We think of memory like history generally: as a string of points, going from past to present, each point some event that we can connect to another. Indeed, we organise history in a way not dissimilar to how the naturalist does his charts, in timelines, with branches breaking off in different directions at significant points. But to truly make history involves anti-memory, a break from arborescence in the production of a molecular lineal system. It involves creation, the making of a new reality that then history can only re-contain. This is GiG’s new project: our cultural organisation of memory and how this relates to our organisation of nature.

From the filial relationships of evolution timelines and the punctual system of memory it is but a step to the establishment of the state. The state of things, the status quo, is based on man. It is molar – molecular is the nomadic. Deleuze and Guattaru frame their chapter on becoming on either end with the discussion of the war machine of nomadic origin and of different assemblage to the state apparatus. The war machine is what institutes change and this is why the state cannot appropriate it except as war. The war machine is the mutation the naturalist cannot contain.

Every creation is brought about by the war machine. GiG air is GiG molecular, a mutant, a war machine. Watch this space.