It was a family trip to Jamaica that brought into focus the real world implications of philosopher Dieter Roelstraete’s life’s work. “The one thing I was looking forward to most was switching off my phone. I didn’t want screens or computers. I didn’t bring a laptop,” he explains, sitting under the extravagantly frescoed Baroque ceiling of Fondazione Prada’s Ca’ Corner location in Venice, where he’s just opened his latest exhibition, Machines à penser. “But when I arrived there was WiFi,” he continues. “Even in paradise, we were unable to escape the prison of connectivity.”
The desire to disconnect is a longtime academic curiosity of Roelstraete’s, who was trained as a philosopher at the University of Ghent and currently works as a curator. With this exhibition, his curatorial mission was to explore ideas of exile, escape and retreat in relation to creativity, choosing to do so through a somewhat unconventional entry point: the philosopher’s hut, something philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger and Theodor Adorno have been connected to in their respective careers. In the exhibition, Roelstraete explores the hut as both an essential bricks-and-mortar shelter for cultural production and a metaphor for the seclusion required to fulfill intellectual potential. A ‘room of one’s own’ for male continental philosophers, if you will.
“The triangulation of Heidegger,
Wittgenstein and Adorno together with their huts is what really sparked the
curatorial argument to make an exhibition,” explains Roelstraete. “I wanted to
look at these structures as a way of talking about the relationship between
thinking and place, between creativity and isolation, between reflection and
solitude.” Visitors to the exhibition are invited to step inside mock-ups of
both Wittgenstein’s and Heidegger’s huts, while Adorno’s life in Los Angeles as
an exile during the war is recreated through detailed maps and photography by
Patrick Lakey. Together, they provide a doorway into the three philosophers’
isolated physical realities during their most prolific stretches of time.
In addition to the huts,
the exhibition considers a broad range of work by artists and intellectuals who
have dealt with the idea of retreat and escape within their own practices.
Gerhard Richter’s paintings of the remote Engadine landscape sit alongside a
historical study of the hermit Saint Jerome, who spent his life alone in the
Syrian desert translating the Bible into Latin. New work was commissioned for
the exhibition, too: Goshka Macuga created a series of vases that take the form
of the philosophers’ heads, as well as plans she made, unfortunately
unrealised, to turn Fondazione Prada’s palazzo into a mossy, hut-topped fjord
overlooking the grand canal. The Scottish poet Alec Finlay responded to brief
with an epic poem tacked to cherry red lattice work enveloping a richly
decorated Renaissance era studiolo, and Portuguese designer Leonor Atunes
created a series of chandeliers inspired by the house Wittgenstein built for
his sister in Vienna. We spoke to Roelstraete about his inspiration behind the
show, his thoughts on exile, and why escapism should be seen as a virtue.
“The title of the show is Machines à penser,
an allusion to the famous quip by Le Corbusier, who called a house a ‘Machine
à Habiter’ – a machine for living. It looks at philosophers who have been
associated with huts in various degrees. The two most important ones are Ludwig
Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger who both had historical huts built for them.
Heidegger’s hut still exists today in the Black Forest village of Todtnauberg,
while Wittgenstein’s hut used to stand on the edge of a fjord in the Norwegian
village of Skjolden. Thirdly, there’s the figure of Theodor Adorno, who never
lived in a hut or built himself a hut, but strangely enough had this sculpture
named after him by Ian Hamilton Findlay, who is British sculptor and poet who
made this installation in 1987 named Adorno’s Hut. My discovery of the
existence of the Adorno’s hut many years ago is what triggered the thought
process that eventually culminated in the exhibition.”
“One thing that I was
interested in doing was to stage escapism as a virtue, not a vice. If you’re
called an escapist, it’s derogatory, right? Escapism is something that’s bad,
right? Entertainment is escapist. It’s meant as a slur. I was interested in
painting a picture of escapism as a completely legitimate attitude and
productive for a variety of things: thinking, art making, but also perhaps
social interaction.”
“If part of the
exhibition is the relationship between thinking and space in the relative
comfort of the space of one’s own choosing, we also show the connection between
thinking and space if you are forced into that space. If all you have left of
your home is your language. On display is a map that shows where Adorno and
Horkheimer, who were immigrants from Germany, used to frequent when living in
LA in the 1930s and 1940s during the war. It’s where the cream of the crop of
German Weimar intellectual culture in LA used to live in that period. Thomas
Mann, Bertolt Brecht, all of these people. Hanns Eisler, [whose music is played
in the gallery] is somebody who fled to the US, was initially welcomed with
opened arms, and then in 1949 when the Cold War was gathering pace, was forced
to leave again because of his Communist sympathies and return to his native
Germany. He’s somebody who has hounded his whole life, on the run his whole
life, and still managed to create.”
“You
can make the same show about islands, or you could make the same show about the
desert. In both cases, they’re spaces that are the recipients of our desire to
escape. To flee and break free from connectivity, from the attention economy,
from all these things. And so, that’s I think why this exhibition is relevant.
This is something that we all dream of, that we all want. If you live in a big
city, you probably dream about the mountains.”
Another Magazine, June 20, 2018
“Machines à penser”
focuses on three major philosophers of the 20th century: Theodor W. Adorno
(1903-1969), Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951).
The latter two shared a life-long need for intellectual isolation: Heidegger
spent long periods of his life in a secluded hut in the village of Todtnauberg
in the Black Forest in Germany, whilst Wittgenstein retreated on several
occasions to a small mountain cabin situated in a fjord in Skjolden, Norway.
Adorno, on the other hand, was forced into exile from his native Germany during
by the Nazi regime, first to Oxford and then to Los Angeles, where he wrote
Minima Moralia, a collection of aphorisms that also reflects on the fate of
forced emigration. These reflections inspired the installation conceived by the
Scottish artist and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay in 1987 titled Adorno’s Hut, a
centerpiece of the exhibition alongside architectural reconstructions of the
actual huts of Heidegger and Wittgenstein.
As Dieter Roelstraete
explains: “these were the places where our protagonists hatched out their
deepest thoughts. Isolation, whether chosen or imposed, appears to have
inspired them decisively—and over the years their huts have proven to be an
inexhaustible source of inspiration in turn for generations of artists,
attracted to the fantasy of withdrawal as articulated in its most elemental
architectural form.”
The exhibition takes
place on the ground floor and on the first floor of the 18th century palazzo,
creating an immersive journey that deepens our understanding of these three
philosophers and the relationship between philosophy, art and architecture.
Adorno is the
protagonist of the first part of the exhibit, in which his American exile is
recalled through a large-scale reproduction of a photograph by Patrick Lakey
showcasing the interior of Villa Aurora in Los Angeles. The fate of forced retreat
is explored through the work of artists such as Susan Philipsz; Ewan Telford;
Patrick Lakey; Anselm Kiefer; and Alexander Kluge, who conceived a new video
for the exhibition.
On the first floor of
Ca’ Corner della Regina Martin Heidegger’s Black Forest cabin is evoked through
a remake that contains, among other works, a series of personal photographs by
the photo-journalist Digne Meller-Marcovicz and a set of ceramic pieces by Jan
Bontjes van Beek. Contemporary work by artists such as Giulio Paolini, Sophie
Nys, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle and Paolo Chiasera chart the long shadow cast by
Heidegger’s thought across philosophies of building, dwelling and belonging.
Inside the
reconstruction of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s small house in Skjolden, Norway, the
viewer encounters Head of a Girl (1925-1928), the only artwork known to have
been made by the Austro-British philosopher, shown here alongside his personal
belongings. Wittgenstein’s self-imposed exile and lifelong quest for
philosophical peace of mind form the subject of artworks created by a Norwegian
artist collective comprised of Sebastian Makonnen Kjølaas, Marianne Bredesen
and Siri Hjorth; Jeremy Millar; and Guy Moreton. A newly commissioned work by
Leonor Antunes and a sculpture by Mark Manders are also featured in the
exhibition.
Goshka Macuga designed
three sculptures for the exhibition depicting the heads of the three
philosophers, Mark Riley presents three dioramas and Gerhard Richter exhibits
overpainted photographs of Engadin mountainscapes and sculpture Kugel III,
evoking Friedrich Nietzsche’s thinking quarters in Sils-Maria where Thus Spoke
Zarathustra was conceived.
The exhibition also includes a
historical section focusing on Church father Saint Jerome (347-419), famous for
leading the life of an anchorite in the Syrian desert while translating the
Bible into Latin. Renaissance paintings and prints dedicated to the iconography
of the saint are exhibited alongside a Renaissance studiolo containing, among
other items, first editions of Heidegger and Wittgenstein’s writings, its outer
walls clad in a site-specific installation by the Scottish artist-poet Alec
Finlay titled Hutopia (2018).
Fondazione Prada
A review of the exhibition. Domus
More photos of the show here : TL Magazine , Designboom
Additional :
Much has been written about the writer’s cabin. Among the most notable recent books on the topic are “Heidegger’s Hut” by Adam Sharr and “A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams,” Michael Pollan’s account of imagining and then actually constructing his own writing space. A standard Internet search can quickly yield images of the writing rooms (cabins, huts, sheds) of legendary scriveners: Dylan Thomas, Virginia Woolf, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Roald Dahl, Carl Jung, Henry Thoreau and — a writer of a markedly different sort —Ted Kaczynski, to name a few. And Jill Krementz’s 1999 collection of photographs “The Writer’s Desk” gives us tantalizing glimpses of writers sitting at their desks. But why the interest? Have these places somehow become secular sites of the sacred?
The Lure
of the Writer’s Cabin by David Wood, December 9, 2012, New York Times
On Heidegger’s hut and
Wittgenstein House by Edwin Heathcote, Financial Times, September 2013,
‘I can’t
imagine that I could have worked anywhere as I do here. It’s the quiet and,
perhaps, the wonderful scenery; I mean its quiet seriousness.’ Ludwig
Wittgenstein, 1936.
Ludwig
Wittgenstein’s exile in Skjolden, Einarlunga Wordpress
This short film takes through the beautiful countryside of
Norway, in search of the hut where Ludwig
Wittgenstein exiled himself from society from time to time, first
starting in 1913. Open Culture
A review
of the book by Adam Sharr, Heidegger's
Hut. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.
Our visit
to the Heidegger cabin (Heidegger's hut). After x nature
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