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.