Luca Francesconi at Jupiter Woods

Artist: Luca Francesconi

Exhibition title: Snake, Rice, Food Outlets

Venue: Jupiter Woods, London, UK

Date: March 12 – April 2, 2016

Photography: Michael Heilgemeir, all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Jupiter Woods

There is a food shop on Rue de x, which opens at 7 pm in my or your neighbourhood, this is not important.

Below, nestled between detergents, natural water packs of two litres, there is a sack of rice or potatoes. It’s big, made of plastic bleached filaments, simulating jute or rope, a container that we have forgotten.
Foodstuff buried at the corner of the building, hidden from our attention by ready-to-use products. Far below, under the plethora of different flavoured drinks, produced by the same manufacturer, under that last wooden level that holds everything up, in black dust, big sacks are lying.

Asshole, I don’t care at all that you don’t want to eat this rice. You’re too stupid; you cannot know that actually you eat it often, in an “all-you-can-eat”, run by fake Japanese.

Behind those sacks, hidden in the darkness, there is a snake. It is waiting to be manifested in your stomach, at the time when a cell will mutate. It spends his entire life behind the shelves of a supermarket, those adamant columns over which all kinds of food are piled. This dog with no legs, invisible, has arrived in the city from the Far East, US, Colombia, Australia, along with this rice, now waiting for a fast food restaurant to buy it. There are mountains of cereals, potatoes and flour, thrown limply to the ground, awaiting someone to buy them. They will end up in set meals, or wait forever in an “all-you-can-eat”.

The basis of scientific thought is Coherence. Despite everything, many parts of Reality are not coherent.

Scientific thought and Positivism are derivatives of Darwinism: a structural thinking based on the concept of competition between species. Now the species are over. There are only monocultures. Endless agricultural monocultures, embracing the entire planet as a long, uninterrupted snake; a belt of carbohydrates that suffocate our world and our organs. Here is the result of Positivism.

However, at the end of the food chain, there is still a piece of land and a man: two interconnected biological systems. The health of one is related (systematically) to the other. Even though that now at the centre there is a Supermarket.

In the darkness of a food shop snakes are hiding.

The city imposes itself on our biological rhythm.

Many cooking practices and the processing of foods, such as fermentation, are almost prohibited by the law. Septic value is strongly discouraged. Like it or not, this means that our microbiota, the richness of our intestinal flora on which life depends, is regulated by state laws.

Scientific thought is another Hidden Dragon, counteracted by a systems view of life (*) or a network of interdependent situations. Ecosystems.

I am an ecosystem. Our liver is an ecosystem.
A human being is not the centre of the Universe. A human being is the Universe.
Arne Naess was wrong; there is no superficial or deep ecology.

San Francis defeated Darwin before the latter was born, placing the human being not above Nature, but as a part of it.

Assisi boy, you are an enemy of the Rice Snake.

Crush the head of the scientistic reptile, like Mary will do with Satan.

Text by Luca Francesconi

*The System View of the Life © Pier Luigi Luisi and Fritjof Capra. Published in English by Cambridge University Press, 2014

Luca Francesconi has been invited to Jupiter Woods in conjunction with a programme exploring ideas around care, cultivation and sustainability. The exhibition was accompanied by an event Attune/ Harmonic Receptivity by Standard Thinking in collaboration with sound therapist Marco Florio, on Sunday 13th March.