IN FACT, WE STOPPED COMMUNICATING WITH THE WORLD LONG AGO

At the beginning of 2021, after a long break, I resumed my collaboration with Aleš Čermák and joined, as theoretical support, his project The Transversal Navigation, which runs in collaboration with the AMU Gallery (GAMU). This year I joined the team of The Transversal Navigation (TTN) project, which in Aleš’s words is “a performative-educational entity concerned with a shift into a different global state of reality – that is, it creates other ways of being in the same world. A necessary consequence of transversal navigation is gradual, systematic and conscious alienation.”

It was precisely the emphasis on different ways of being and on systematic alienation that motivated me to write a text for Aleš, in which I used my reading of texts by Graham Harman, Arthur Danto, Marshall McLuhan and the Czech philosopher Alice Koubová to speculate on whether art is not a better medium for approaching the being of other objects (people, things) than the one philosophy offers. It seems to me, as you can read there if you like, that philosophy, with its focus on analytical verbal description, cannot replace the lived experience of interacting with other objects. Lived experience cannot be exhausted by reducing it to words. What we can do is try, with the help of art, to find strategies that draw us into a microworld and into spaces that induce the experience of a relation to other objects that is not direct, not full, yet fuller.

Aleš is interested in the relation to other objects, above all to other people with various bodily and neuro diversities. The main concept of the whole TTN project is “transversality”. Despite the numerous interpretations of the word, I understand transversality as a barrier-free (in every sense of the word) process of crossing existing boundaries, senses and ingrained routine ways of behaving, and this for the purpose of discovering new and better relations of society, technologies and culture towards people with various diversities of body and mind. And not out of a sentimental feeling that people with these diversities “need our help”. As far as I could understand Aleš’s approach, he has no time for thoughtless sentimental relations towards other people. For Aleš, what matters is to use the tools and procedures that performative art offers so that we, as the majority of society, have first of all the possibility of establishing a more open and more authentic relation towards people with bodily and mental diversities. At the same time, Aleš does not try to impose on the people participating in his performance one correct world view or view of the matter; he trusts that a suitably set-up process and the affordances of meeting (this, it seems to me, is the intention of his artistic work) will lead the participants, thanks to this experience, to see things differently, and so their (however temporary) view of the world, of themselves and of other people will change.

While my first text for the TTN project was theoretically oriented, in my second text for TTN, “Alienation and a Space for Radical Love”, I tried to use a concrete and personal experience to express how often we create artificial barriers between ourselves only because we are not willing and/or able to admit that our understanding of the world is not something we have built step by step, but something we largely take over from our sociocultural environment as a hermeneutic pre-understanding. Such pre-understanding is not something a priori bad. None of us can create every day entirely new values and ways of behaving in the world — something Nietzsche asked of us through his figure of Zarathustra. Instead, we take over the modes of behaviour and thinking of previous generations, and this allows us to lead normal lives, for we do not have to think about the fundamental questions of our lives every second (why we live, why we get up in the morning, what forms of relationships with other people are right, etc.). Of course there are people, philosophers or theologians for instance, who devote their lives precisely to asking these questions, but that is not the case for the majority of society.

Because most people, however, have no time to deal with these questions, we take over prejudices and artificial gulfs in our relations to other people; for example, precisely to people with bodily and neuro diversities. One of the ways to overcome these prejudices and gulfs is to get into a state of absolute openness towards the other person, a kind of bracketing of one’s own ego, so that we can, perhaps for the first time, perceive, live through and feel the relation to that other person without inherited filters and prejudices. What role does art have in this? Can such a state be reached? Does it make sense to call such a state radical love towards the other?

The text “Alienation and a Space for Radical Love” can be downloaded in Czech and English versions from the project’s pages hosted on the AMU Gallery domain. Alternatively, you can download the PDFs of the texts here TTN2_A4_Ferenc_CZ and here TTN2_A4_Ferenc_EN_uprava_01.

I would also like to thank, besides Aleš, Petr Krátký, Terezie Štindlová for the visual and Vít Bohal for the English translation of my text.