Emanuele Coccia – författare

This book documents Lerin/Hystad s meetings with more than a hundred different plants through sketches, text, and music. The otherness of the non-human is by nature inexpugnable. The baseline of our sharing the planet with them, at this point in its evolutional history, entails making kin while negotiating distance. In line with the mounting environmental concerns, artists began to nurture the desire to present less mediated encounters with nature. Central to Lerin/Hystad s modus operandi is a principle of ecological interconnectedness that manifests the undeniable presence of more than human worlds. The main objective has been that of dismantling the anthropocentric view that humans are the most perfect and intelligent species on this planet while inviting us to reconsider non-human intelligences and complexities as valuable diversity. Lerin connects sensors to the plants that Hystad has carefully drawn in their environment. The sensors register electrical currents that plants produce through their biological rhythms and that form a communicational network with animals, bacteria, and fungi.

Genom teckning, text och musik, samlar den här boken Lerin/Hystads möten med över hundra olika växter. Det icke-mänskliga är, till sin natur, ofrånkomligen annorlunda oss. För att vi ska kunna samexistera på jorden krävs det därför, vid denna punkt i evolutionshistorien, att vi knyter an till det främmande samtidigt som vi också aktivt förhåller oss till dess ofrånkomliga annanhet. I takt med att miljöhoten har ökat har också konstnärerna uttryckt en ökad vilja att genom konsten möta naturen direkt. Lerin/Hystads modus operandi vilar på den ekologiska sammankopplingens princip och förutsätter att det existerar fler världar än människans. Viktigast av allt har varit att nedmontera den antropocentriska bilden av människan som planetens intelligentaste och mest fulländade varelse för att i stället lyfta fram det icke-mänskligas många komplexa intelligenser som delar av en rik mångfald. Lerin kopplar sensorer till de växter som Hystad så noggrant har tecknat i det vilda. Dessa sensorer känner sedan av alla de elektriska impulser som orsakas av växternas egen biologiska rytm och som bildar kommunikationsnätverk tillsammans med djuren, bakterierna och svamparna.

We barely talk about them and seldom know their names. Philosophy has always overlooked them; even biology considers them as mere decoration on the tree of life. And yet plants give life to the Earth: they produce the atmosphere that surrounds us, they are the origin of the oxygen that animates us. Plants embody the most direct, elementary connection that life can establish with the world. 

In this highly original book, Emanuele Coccia argues that, as the very creator of atmosphere, plants occupy the fundamental position from which we should analyze all elements of life. From this standpoint, we can no longer perceive the world as a simple collection of objects or as a universal space containing all things, but as the site of a veritable metaphysical mixture. Since our atmosphere is rendered possible through plants alone, life only perpetuates itself through the very circle of consumption undertaken by plants. In other words, life exists only insofar as it consumes other life, removing any moral or ethical considerations from the equation. In contrast to trends of thought that discuss nature and the cosmos in general terms, Coccia’s account brings the infinitely small together with the infinitely big, offering a radical redefinition of the place of humanity within the realm of life.

Throughout modernity there has been a clear divide between art and commerce. Objects could either be consumed as commerce or contemplated as art. Today, as museums are facing increasing financial pressure and as stores have become inventive locations for new modes of display, this clear divide has begun to dissolve.

There is one place that represents a key stage in this evolution: 10 Corso Como. It was founded in Milan, at that very address, by fashion editor Carla Sozzani and has since expanded to Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai, and New York. The name “concept store”, which has now spread across our globalized world, was originally coined to describe this new form.

This book is the first philosophical inquiry into this new form of store and it sheds new light on how categories that have governed our modern lives, such as commerce, art, fashion, and museum, are being redefined today.

We are all fascinated by the mystery of metamorphosis – of the caterpillar that transforms itself into a butterfly. Their bodies have almost nothing in common. They don’t share the same world: one crawls on the ground and the other flutters its wings in the air. And yet they are one and the same life.

Emanuele Coccia argues that metamorphosis – the phenomenon that allows the same life to subsist in disparate bodies – is the relationship that binds all species together and unites the living with the non-living. Bacteria, viruses, fungi, plants, animals: they are all one and the same life. Each species, including the human species, is the metamorphosis of all those that preceded it – the same life, cobbling together a new body and a new form in order to exist differently. And there is no opposition between the living and the non-living: life is always the reincarnation of the non-living, a carnival of the telluric substance of a planet – the Earth – that continually draws new faces and new ways of being out of even the smallest particle of its disparate body.

By highlighting what joins humans together with other forms of life, Coccia’s brilliant reflection on metamorphosis encourages us to abandon our view of the human species as static and independent and to recognize instead that we are part of a much larger and interconnected form of life.