Continuing the investigation of “things” after the exhibition And Another Thing last fall in the James Gallery, Anselm Franke (curator, Taipei Biennial 2012) will speak on animism in conjunction with his exhibition on view in April at e-flux. The modern understanding of the concept, which was closely associated with the colonial project, holds animism to be a pre-modern social and psychological mechanism by means of which nature and things were erroneously endowed with souls and agency. The modern separation between the animate and inanimate gave rise to other dichotomies characteristic of modernity, such as the opposition between nature and culture, the subjective and objective world, and the relation between fiction and reality so notorious to the arts. What if modernity’s conception of the boundary between life and non-life were to be re-thought?
https://vimeo.com/48819916