Heavens – Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen
Part of Serpentine’s Back to Earth. Curated by Rebecca Lewin, Lucia Pietroiusti and Kostas Stasinopoulos. Composition by Pan Daijing. The Swiss Church, London, 12-17 October 2021
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You look away from Heavens, an immersive installation conceived for planetary-style projection methods, inspired by Walter Benjamin’s mournful comment in his essay “To the Planetarium,” that the development of astronomical technology brought about the death of the cosmic experience of the ancients: the more we see, the less we sense; the more we know, the less we conceive.
Heavens itself is dedicated to that cosmic trance, and to the peculiar and otherworldly behavior and biology of the octopus, that age-old oracle, a being perhaps too alien to turn out to be alien, and yet it might just be, as a scientific paper suggests, hypothesisng that the mass increase in biodiversity that occurred on Earth some 500 million years ago may have been due to extra-terrestrial DNA. Given a potential cosmic origin to the octopus’s secret history, the artists work their way back from the animal’s odd properties to a vast, cosmic state, an obsessive perception of interconnections, an apophenia delirious enough one might lose oneself in it.
On the other hand, if all ecology is interplanetary, then there is no outside, the virus didn’t come from anywhere, there’s nowhere to escape to, and the colonial, survivalist dream of resettlement is nothing but a suicide cult at the end of history – of this history.
Ego death: the dissolution of boundaries between self and non-self in collective dance – an ecstasy; orgasmic vanishing (like the fisherman’s wife: “boundaries and borders gone: I vanish”), those stars, spots, tunnel visions you see as you’re being asphyxiated during sex.
The event is in the future, and it is in the past. The event, the dramaturgical scaffold of a religious ritual that takes you through the tunnel and out the other side – the hole you disappear into: gravity at its most inescapable, swallowing what can be known into nothingness.
We are all children of the event, drifting bits of space junk ejected from original wholeness. Desperate for wholeness: loving, dissociated, euphoric, desperate.
– Lucia Pietroiusti
Looking up to look down. Looking up to look back. Looking down to look forwards.
This new moving image installation, titled Heavens, starts from the theory that the octopus evolved from a virus originating in outer space, expanding our perception of ecology as a network of interplanetary relationships. Emerging from conversations with a philosopher, a writer, a psychiatrist, an astrobiologist, an astronomer and an escape artist, Heavens comprises a constellation of text, sounds and images. The piece looks to the physiology and behaviours of the octopus to reflect on human and non-human attempts to escape through acts of communal ritual, or through leaks and spillovers.
Composition by Pan Daijing features vocals of Anna Davidson and Marie Gailey. Heavens is co-commissioned by Serpentine and Malevich.io as part of Back to Earth, Serpentine’s long-term multidisciplinary project dedicated to the environment and the climate crisis.