LAX Collective | Exhibitions | Biennale di Venezia 2023

BIENNALE DI VENEZIA '23

NOAH | LABORATORY OF THE FUTURE

by LAX Collective

Team : Deniz Sak, Deniz Esen, Tarık Emir Kartal, Enes Vermez

Turkey Pavillion Proposal

Biennale di Venezia, Italia | 2023

What is the solution?

To the problem of being a community, to the problem of crowdedness, to the problem of social action, to the problem of inequality? All one can say is that the solution was never yesterday, will never be tomorrow, but is now. Whenever a crowd comes to its senses and starts to recuperate the organic relations that were long forgotten. NOW.

When indulging in social actions there is this chance of recognizing with what assumption or myths one works, so that one can be free of the grasp of past in forms of traditions and traumas, and can be free of the grasp of future in forms of fantasies and limited goals. Our present for you is the present, not the future, not the past.

Future’s Laboratory is NOW.

Conceptual Team: Deniz Sak (Team Leader), Deniz Esen, Tarık Emir Kartal, Enes Vermez

Author: Deniz Esen

NOAH : Laboratory of The Future

Biennale di Venezia '23

Turkey Pavillion Proposal

Year : 2022

The distinction between the notions crowd and community is our point of departure. What we propose here, first of all, is to consider language itself. Let us first deal with these terms in general:

A crowd can be defined as a group of people who have only one common aspect. Being in the same street or being subjects of the same king or maybe even being the children of the same mother. If somehow it feels like it is the only relationship that you have with your siblings, and if you think that this relationship can be reduced into this one thing, then when you are together with your siblings it is most likely that you will feel more like in a crowd than in a family. But then we can see that this is physically impossible, that organic relationships go on between every organism through the cycles of Earth, and of Sun and the Moon, …, no matter what we think and feel about them. And in this organic way of seeing no interaction can be reduced into one and only one dimension. The way we feel and think ignores the organic relations which are present. And the way we feel and think, to the extent that it is spoken in a language, inwardly or outwardly, would carry and already is shaped by the presuppositions of that language. And this becomes clear when we force our opinions to their logical extremes.

A similar analysis can be made for the word community. A community can be defined as a group of people with a web of common aspects and relations. Not linearly but in a network manner, the nodes are connected. On the other hand, the word common has other connotations which are vulgar, banal, mediocre or featureless. So the same word can indicate a society oriented towards a shared understanding, but it also can mean non-rare, non-peculiar qualities so that a society not with its commonalities but with commonness of its individuals easily produces crowds, especially in the modern era with the individualistic myths that we all been taught. We all want to have equal rights, at least this is how our ordinary political discourses start. But do we really want everybody to be absolutely equal, i.e. identical? We somehow resist this idea. So the
polar-opposite of inequality does not work also.

Then accordingly, what is a term? A term terminates. It is like a mathematical limit, we never encounter a term in an absolute manner; we converge but never get there. Terms, ends of a stick, terminals between cities, need their counterparts for their own existences. So there are no absolute crowds or communities, since we don’t understand what a crowd is without a community and vice versa. This holds generally when we are speaking in terms of terms. We don’t understand what in is without out. We don’t have a notion of us without a notion of them, and vice versa. So this is a labor of producing balance between extremes.

EXPERIENCE: What is NOAH?

We take groups of people inside NOAH. NOAH’s interior can be observed from outside but the converse is not true. She is first in balanced state and the Tree of Life (Baobab) is lit. As people split off from the center to explore the inside of NOAH and the balance is lost, the light dims. Inside people find stairs ascending to future and descending to past, dead ends. As people walk around, NOAH rocks left and right slightly, balancing and letting go. Just as in the chemical and the biological history of humanity, the myth of Noah represents the irrevocable relationship of human with its environment. And NOAH is a celebration of this myth. Just like in this history, in NOAH also, many times balance has been lost and found. Both states are organic and both are life. But still the Tree of Life shines and fades.

ALL IN ALL

So is our audience a crowd or a community? If it is merely a crowd, is it somehow possible to remind them of some essential quality of nature that they transform themselves into a community? Is it possible to find or unconsciously concoct a myth that is healing? What we are trying to do is precisely this, to attempt to give people an artificial myth in which they engage a domain of life and find out that:

Crowds can become communities.
Now that they are a community, they have a common goal, an organized labor in balancing the platform. First they have to find out for themselves that there is a game where the balance of the room has to be established.
But this common goal itself is artificial, a process of myth-making. When the audience understands the mechanism that we installed, they have to choose whether to participate in this artificial task or not. So anyone can play this game as a solemn member of the community, or as if this is the way to a promised present. Or they can leave or even sabotage the game.
But the subtle point is this: When indulging in social actions there is this chance of recognizing with what assumption or myths one works, so that one can be free of the grasp of past in forms of traditions and traumas, and can be free of the grasp of future in forms of fantasies and limited goals. Our present for you is the present, not the future, not the past. Future’s Laboratory is .

Then, the individual/social healing which is presupposed in our work as a possibility is bound up with the notion of getting free from the imposed world-views by our societies, families, friends and foes. Psychoanalysis, Gestalt psychology or Zen Koans have many parallels in this manner, they aim to bring about a thorough examination of the presuppositions that we use actively or passively, that would remain tacit otherwise.