A piece reflecting about tools crafted by monkeys, and how they can be valued.
When I created a piece about the invisible with "If I Return Will You Remember", I experimented with material techniques that attribute presence or visibility to things that are absent and unseen. This was the case of techniques such as pantomime, drawing, descriptions or afterimages, that allowed to perceive invisible things as being present. Departing from this experience, I am now interested in researching how certain materials become objects and, from there, how do objects accumulate value, be it as financial commodities, historic artefacts or personal amulets, or souvenirs.
Sure, these are very broad and ambitious questions but, to start, I want to speculate about the alchemy that transforms a material into a thing. That is why I want to depart from the very concise and apparently simple example of the sticks used by monkeys to collect ants. Showing the difficulty of cataloguing this object within human knowledge allows to tentatively outline the limits of our knowledge-making.
For example: in which kind of museum should this artefact be shown? On a Natural History Museum, focusing on their primatehood, or on an Anthropology Museum, focusing on their personhood? And on an aesthetic level, should the chimpanzee stick be placed on a Contemporary Art Museum, as a kind of ready-made, or on the Archaeology Museum, as an artefact from our distant past?
I’m sure that it, in the hands of humans, it could also become a sort of magic wand, de-objectifying everything it touched (returning it to the natural state of given matter) (something animistic in fact) In each object that is valued there is a transformation of things into something else and, in this performance-lecture, I will try to find which spell is that.
Presented at Theater Frascati, in Amsterdam, in the programme of Come Together #5 - link here
Photos by Bas de Brouwer
