Becoming obsolescent

A society that has been promised enjoyment without limits has immortality as its main aspiration. The cyborg, protheses, the body without organs, pharmacological doping, alongside other posthumanist daydreams came to challenge death while acknowledging the obsolescence of the biological body and the limits of what is human. But, as Nuria Gómez Gabriel in this same magazine argued, a politics of mourning is necessary before a “hyperpositive society which glorifies youth and postpones the reality of death”. Beyond the necropolitical turn and the all-too-present speculation in casualties by media during the last year, the tragic experience of death in the current circumstances should lead us to re-think – as it happened during the AIDS crisis – the possibilities of the body as a vulnerable space, the power of limits and the inevitable fate of existence that Hannah Arendt found in The human condition (Arendt, 1958).

In this knot of contradictions, between mortality and immortality, obsolescent and eternal, worldly and museable, the exhibition Becoming Immortal and then Die, curated by  Caterina Almirall for BCN Production in La Capella (October 13, 2020 – January 31, 2021), was considered from its title as a riddle or an open question. Reprising Nikolai Federov’s ideas to reflect on the museum as a space of negotiation between life and death, the question became explicit in “The Barry’s Van Tour”, (2007) a video by Jorge Satorre in which he resurrects an object to eliminate it once and for all in the end.. From the funeral urn of the Archeological Museum of Barcelona (900-700 BC) to “Goodbye, My Sunny Child (Tamagotchi Memorial)” (2020) by Daniel Moreno Roldán, the exhibition charted a path from the Neolithic into the present times about the ancestral notion of death. The work “Úra” (2020) by Lara Fluxá, a number of glass pieces full of liquid and fitted in one of the walls in the hall seems to talk about the vulnerability of everything alive in an ecosystem. Next to it, Samuel Beckett’s video “Not I” (1972) meant to deny identity as a will to remain.

Samuel Beckett worked intently on the ironic, which is why maybe the idea that it’s the only place where one may lean out over the abyss, rendering visible the harshness of reality from its own contradictions. Precisely, Theodor Adorno reached that conclusion in his Aesthetic Theory that only with the unspeakable it would be possible to create a “tragic art” (Adorno, 1970).  MACBA is promising an exhibition about Felix González-Torres at a threshold-time in which our mourning deserves to be remembered in order to provide meaning for images. The etymological origin of obsolescere refers to “being in the process of finding an obstacle”, a threshold. Recovering death as a threshold for life, as a tragic fate of existence, places us not just before sorrow but, embracing looking at the tragic in the eye, we will be also capable to celebrate life with carnival joy.