Topic 2018

TOPIC: Chaos & Silence

Today, an excess of stimuli, news, positive or negative notions, induce human beings into a state of numbness due to an information overload. This numbness makes us perceive all inputs equal to others: the enormous quantity of stress we are subjected to makes distinguishing the specific qualities of each stimulus difficult. The world around us becomes confusing and indecipherable. In this context the search for silence, clarity and peace, appears to be an essential need for contemporary society in response to this developing chaos. At the same time there is, in this chaotic and dense nebula, a continuous movement and contact with different particles: and this is where the origins of great creative possibilities are concealed and the sign of a body which is extremely alive, responsive, diverse and interlinked, as is today's society. In opposition to this, silence becomes synonymous with isolation, disconnection, and refusal of confrontation.

We are so often deafened by waves of noise from our television, the web, news, and information platforms. This wave expands, comes out from the screen and enters into conversations, at dinner, at lunch, at the most unexpected hour. It becomes extraordinarily common to talk for hours on end about a murder, an attack and also a football match or an Oscar award, uttering, repeating, amplifying concepts, ideas, and images. We can live like this, with a systematic transformation of the brain into a sponge that absorbs anything and yields nothing. However, a nothingness that has volume, mass and takes up space. And so, submerged as we are, swimming in words, clichés, social dogmas, vessels of nothingness, we float towards a drift, overwhelmed by too much of everything. The volume is so high, the mass of information so great that the noise flattens everything and so distinguishing the boundaries and the importance of things seems - even if we wanted to make this effort - superhuman. We should look for the sources, and inform ourselves. But even this would not guarantee certainty. Even the sources may be misleading, false, inadequate.

So the only solution appears to be abstinence. Fed up, tired, discouraged by too much, our oars are thrown into the boat, looking for peace, silence. Sooner or later things will get better, the too much of everything will diminish and a defined horizon will reappear, a prospect - something - to dictate the route. Yet, if we look back, the sea has been murky for quite some time, and if we want to look beyond, all there is, is other information, other storms, an increasingly chaotic future. And yet. And yet progress is always there, pulsating, omnipresent. Chaos creates life, with no rules, anarchic, difficult to classify, categorize, but you can't say that it isn't life. We believe that the artist's task is not to die mentally, trying to photograph our era; In the Too Much of Everything don't pull your oars into the boat giving in to indifference, instead take a risk, be the speck that goes against the wind in the desert, make this effort. Shout. Believe in revolutions, make them happen everywhere, raise your head.

General Manager | Cartasia, Biennale della Carta

Emiliano Galigani