The only records of our ancestors are in their fossils
"The search for the primitive is, then, as old as civilization. It is the search for the utopia of the past, projected into the future, with civilization being the middle term.”
Stanley Diamond, 1974, In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization
The only records of our ancestors are in their fossils (2012) shows the impermanent and fragile impression of a species incessantly struggling between civilization and the primitive, the logical and the mystical, between living as erect rational individuals and being destined to born and die according to the unknowable and inexplicable flow of primordial forces.
The drive toward advancement on one side, and the contingency of our nature on the other, represents an existential dichotomy and an innate dilemma that seems cannot find plausible responses neither in the present or in the past of the mankind, nor in the future and in its evolution.
The project is conceived like collection of records of humanity in the middle of destruction, preservation and progress, as an anachronistic and paradoxical series of mementos, which does not respond anymore to any form of analytical law and which is reluctant to rational speculations and resistant to predictability. The dialogue between past and future remnants annihilates the linearity on which the pillars of civilization sit.
Through the demolition of what is visible, demonstrable, and objectively quantifiable and the random reassembly and the exposure of the empirical order, traces of the primal and raw condition of human race could be still recovered and the defects of the monolith of human nature could be finally brought to light again in order to be consecrated as essential sides of a humanity aiming in the accomplishment for eternal endurance.
Stanley Diamond, 1974, In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization
The only records of our ancestors are in their fossils (2012) shows the impermanent and fragile impression of a species incessantly struggling between civilization and the primitive, the logical and the mystical, between living as erect rational individuals and being destined to born and die according to the unknowable and inexplicable flow of primordial forces.
The drive toward advancement on one side, and the contingency of our nature on the other, represents an existential dichotomy and an innate dilemma that seems cannot find plausible responses neither in the present or in the past of the mankind, nor in the future and in its evolution.
The project is conceived like collection of records of humanity in the middle of destruction, preservation and progress, as an anachronistic and paradoxical series of mementos, which does not respond anymore to any form of analytical law and which is reluctant to rational speculations and resistant to predictability. The dialogue between past and future remnants annihilates the linearity on which the pillars of civilization sit.
Through the demolition of what is visible, demonstrable, and objectively quantifiable and the random reassembly and the exposure of the empirical order, traces of the primal and raw condition of human race could be still recovered and the defects of the monolith of human nature could be finally brought to light again in order to be consecrated as essential sides of a humanity aiming in the accomplishment for eternal endurance.
Comments 4
Say something