The Habitat of the Infinite
Friday, 28 March 2014 14:12
Written by Text by Marco Aurelio Díaz Güemez Mérida, Yuc., Marzo. 2013
A very happy day
The fog lifted soon,
I worked in the garden
The hummingbirds lingered on the honeysuckle
There was nothing thing on earth I wished to possess.
CZESLAW MILOSZ1
Nature is the Other who is also watching us. If this is so, and we heed what Emmanuel Levinas says, then we are responsible for it because, “His responsibility concerns me.” This is a responsibility that goes beyond what I do.” This nature, composed of flora, fauna and the devices that human beings have built and established, has enabled Gerda Gruber to look at it to assume responsibility for it.
Peninsular nature is the Other in “Habitat-Shelter.” Although Nature does not speak, it has an expression and a face which is in itself is a discourse. Therefore, “Absolute experience is not (an) unveiling, but (a) revelation" 3. This exhibition is therefore a revelation in the terms outlined above, the author was responsible, as if a neighbor were involved, for the landscape inhabiting this land.
Now, thanks to this Other represented here, we know that human artifice can become sunny flora; that transformed woods can hover and take us to a land where sculptures become a human landscape like a mirror for those that look into it, that rubber can become a comfortable nest, and that this earth, whatever it is called, looks at us every day, asking us to bond with it.
Gruber has built a habitat for the link between her, us and nature; a complex relationship between an “I” and an “Other” which Levinas has described as infinite, because it is a “Desire.” We grasp this as we tour the exhibition: there is, “A failure to stop progress.” 4; there is also a strange sense of “being unable to avoid responsibility, of not having an interiority. 5 At that precise moment, the entire exhibition becomes a shelter.
A refuge, an infinite habitat, where we dealt with our responsibilities and are more responsible, because in the end, we finally discover the face of the Other, which gives us fog and birds, fragrant trees and dense forests, but which we barely knew. “Habitat-Refuge” reveals its face, its footprint. It gives us what is absent through a set of relations that have called our awareness into question: otherness, our shelter as a being, dwells beyond the human.
1.Czeslaw Milosz. Poems. 1976.
2. Cited by Gil Giménez, Paula. Levinas’s ethical theory. www.filosofía.net: Cuaderno de Materiales. Filosofía y Ciencias Humanas.
3. Ibídem.
4. Lévinas, Emmanuel. La Huella del Otro. México: Taurus. 2001: 64.
5. Ibídem
A very happy day
The fog lifted soon,
I worked in the garden
The hummingbirds lingered on the honeysuckle
There was nothing thing on earth I wished to possess.
CZESLAW MILOSZ1
Nature is the Other who is also watching us. If this is so, and we heed what Emmanuel Levinas says, then we are responsible for it because, “His responsibility concerns me.” This is a responsibility that goes beyond what I do.” This nature, composed of flora, fauna and the devices that human beings have built and established, has enabled Gerda Gruber to look at it to assume responsibility for it.
Peninsular nature is the Other in “Habitat-Shelter.” Although Nature does not speak, it has an expression and a face which is in itself is a discourse. Therefore, “Absolute experience is not (an) unveiling, but (a) revelation" 3. This exhibition is therefore a revelation in the terms outlined above, the author was responsible, as if a neighbor were involved, for the landscape inhabiting this land.
Now, thanks to this Other represented here, we know that human artifice can become sunny flora; that transformed woods can hover and take us to a land where sculptures become a human landscape like a mirror for those that look into it, that rubber can become a comfortable nest, and that this earth, whatever it is called, looks at us every day, asking us to bond with it.
Gruber has built a habitat for the link between her, us and nature; a complex relationship between an “I” and an “Other” which Levinas has described as infinite, because it is a “Desire.” We grasp this as we tour the exhibition: there is, “A failure to stop progress.” 4; there is also a strange sense of “being unable to avoid responsibility, of not having an interiority. 5 At that precise moment, the entire exhibition becomes a shelter.
A refuge, an infinite habitat, where we dealt with our responsibilities and are more responsible, because in the end, we finally discover the face of the Other, which gives us fog and birds, fragrant trees and dense forests, but which we barely knew. “Habitat-Refuge” reveals its face, its footprint. It gives us what is absent through a set of relations that have called our awareness into question: otherness, our shelter as a being, dwells beyond the human.
1.Czeslaw Milosz. Poems. 1976.
2. Cited by Gil Giménez, Paula. Levinas’s ethical theory. www.filosofía.net: Cuaderno de Materiales. Filosofía y Ciencias Humanas.
3. Ibídem.
4. Lévinas, Emmanuel. La Huella del Otro. México: Taurus. 2001: 64.
5. Ibídem