To be completely honest, I do not know. But I do have some intuitions. I think that a good place to start would be, even for a moment or as simple thought experiment, to admit that contemporaneity is generative. And it is so for two main reasons. First, because we, as humans, have wrecked a considerable amount of devastation, that demands to be responsibly acknowledged. Such a state of affairs, I argue, prompts us to imagine what the world would like in the future, taking into account that we have arguably destroyed a good part of it already. Second, because this reconstruction of the world will have to be, largely, artificial. And while it is true that artificiality has always been capable of replacing and enhancing the natural— think, for instance, when we substituted legs for wheels— never before have we been able to not only enhance nature but to overall replace it with a better version336.
‘Better,’ as we know by heart, is no essential category. It is a matter of ethics, of choice and belief337. Perhaps, we are witnessing the construction of a different ‘better,’ a new ethical framework that is partially the consequence of our lack of faith in the old(s) one(s). Perhaps, the prosthetic is a consequence of this new framework, while simultaneously being a tool to draw and define it.
Contemporaneity gives us, then, the opportunity to build a new ethical sustenance, a different framework for our being in the world. Maybe even a better one. Among other things, such a framework is constructed and populated with objects
336 See: Moreno, Gean. “Notes on the Inorganic, Part 1: Accelerations,” in Aranda,
Julieta, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle, eds. 2015. E-Flux Journal: The Internet Does Not Exist. Berlin: Sternberg Press //
337Žižek argues that the ethical sustenance of a community depends on nothing other
than belief to such a point to which, we are even ready to perform countless (and often meaningless) sacrifices. (150)
and beings—some of them, I am convinced, existing prosthetically.338 And objects and beings, when put together, create communities.
They can create, for instance, communities of exchange, such as the one activated by Mario Bellatin in his project The Thousand Books of Mario Bellatin, which I discuss in the first chapter of this dissertation. Or the one spearheaded by Roberto Jacoby and his Proyecto Venus, a virtual community that, among other things, exchanged real-life services339. They can also produce communities of resistance—actually they often are. Or just communities tout court, spaces for dwelling that need, in order to be operative, agreement and shared beliefs. Because while it is true that communities are still mostly imagined, as Benedict Anderson posited, they are now much more easily crafted—a plasticity that becomes all the more relevant today when real communities continue to be disrupted by man or nature. The difference being that, today, physical proximity is not a prerequisite for being close340. And artistic practices are usually at the vanguard of endeavors that envision and materialize new ways of being together that account for such manners of contemporary closeness.
The prosthetic condition, when used to approach artificial communities, may become a tool to understand how artistic practices can advance feelings of belonging
338 It will be interesting to see if prosthetic beings and objects will be affected by the
same animacy hierarchies as those currently in place. Would they too be gendered, classed, racialized, etc?
339See Jacoby, Roberto. 2011. El deseo nace del derrumbe : acciones, conceptos,
escritos. 1. ed. Barcelona: Ediciones de la Central.
340 Zygmunt Bauman, in Postmodern Ethics, states: “The morality which we have
inherited from premodern times—the only morality we have—is a morality of proximity, and as such is woefully inadequate in a society in which all important action is an action on distance (…) Moral responsibility prompts us to care that our children are fed, clad and shod; it cannot offer us much practical advice, however, when faced with numbing images of a depleted, desiccated and overheated planet which our children, and the children of our children will inherit and have to inhabit in the direct or oblique result of our collective unconcern.” (67)
and togetherness—how they can favor the transition between a human gathering, by choice or by accident, and a community. Because creating a community implies opening a new space—of exchange, of belief, of resistance, of dwelling—for the interaction of beings and/with objects. And such opening is also a creation—it implies connecting fragments, weaving a network of meaning that, in this particular case, becomes a space to be inhabited341. The heftier the weaving, the closer the community will be—perhaps, the closer it is— the more it will resemble a real, historic, atavic one.
New explorations can also pay attention to prosthetic events, and study how they increasingly affect public opinion. They could also dig deeper into the hierarchies that are established between prosthetic beings, how they mimic existing social relations, how they engender subjectivities, and how mobile can such subjectivities actually be.
But for now, I hope that the prosthetic condition can serve as a tool to read contemporaneity as it is produced and intervened by art. And as such, it should account for ways of existing that have been so far ignored, despised, or labeled as fictional. It should remind us of the power of our agency, while underscoring the impossibility of controlling it fully. Perhaps more importantly, the prosthetic condition, because it is the result of an artificial crafting, must compel us to assess our ethical positioning. It should arouse our desire to better explain—and communicate— what better means, for each of us. And build upon it.
341 The work of artist Tomás Saraceno illustrates this transition: “(the work) reveals
that multiplying the connections and assembling them closely enough will shift slowly from a network (which you can see through) to a sphere (difficult to see through).” See Latour Bruno, “Some experiments in Art and Politics” in Aranda, Julieta, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle, eds. 2015. E-Flux Journal: The Internet Does Not Exist. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
ADDENDUM 1
PEDRO MANRIQUE FIGUEROA Timeline
1934
* Pedro Manrique Figueroa is born in Choachí, Cundinamarca, Colombia.
1995
* Lucas Ospina and Bernardo Ortiz are undergraduate students at Universidad de los Andes
They are registered in the course “La palabra figurada”
One of the course’s requirements was a presentation about an artist whose work combined words and images
Ospina and Ortiz presented the life and work of Pedro Manrique Figueroa, precursor of collage in Colombia
Ospina and Ortiz receive a satisfactory grade. The professor in charge of the course mentions that there are certain similarities between Manrique and a number of fictional texts by Julio Cortázar
* Lucas Ospina and Bernardo Ortiz are in charge of curating and editing “El martes de las artes,” the section devoted to arts and culture published by El Espectador, one of the two most important national newspapers.
Ospina and Ortiz devoted the section to Pedro Manrique Figueroa and his time at Universidad de los Andes.
* The peer-reviewed journal Historia Crítica publish 16 of Manrique’s collages in its Issue n. 11 (July-December 1995)
* Lucas Ospina, Bernardo Ortiz and François Bucher receive a grant from the Instituto Distrital de Cultura y Turismo, the local government agency in charge of cultural policy and management in Bogotá.
* Ospina, Ortiz, and Bucher use the grant to produce an arts magazine, Valdez.
April 1996
* Opening of the exhibition “Homenaje a Pedro Manrique Figueroa” at Galería Santafe, Bogotá. Organized by Lucas Ospina, it included 10 collages by Manrique, dated between 1953 and 1980.
The exhibition also featured works by other Colombian artists (Maria Paz Jaramillo, German Martínz, and Jaime Cerón, among others), who claimed that Manrique’s practice had influenced their own.
Sometime between 1996 and 1999
* The first two issues of Valdez were published, both included texts and images about Manrique and his work
* Valdez 1 featured: Texts:
“Mi obra soy yo” by Lucas Ospina and François Bucher Images:
Triple Agente, collage, 1975. *Valdez 2 featured:
Texts:
“Introducción a los Evangelios de Manrique según Francisco, según Lucas y según Eduardo—Homenaje al precursor de la memoria” by Victor Manuel Rodríguez
Five blurry headshots accompanying the text. Unclear as of whether of not they belong to Manrique.
October 1999
*Valdez 3 was published featuring: Texts:
“Los años cero” by Carolina Sanín “Los años rosa” by Carolina Sanín “Los años rojos” by Lucas Ospina “Manrique literario” by Carolina Sanín Images:
Al Diablo con Mao, collage, 1976.
February 2000
Valdez 4 was published featuring: Texts:
“Antropólogo” by Carolina Sanín “El Educado” by Carolina Sanín “El público” by Carolina Sanín “Usaquén” by Carolina Sanín
“Apología a la droga” by Lucas Ospina “Teresa Otalora Manrique”
Images:
La coca de los Santos, collage, 1975.
2000
* Manrique exhibits at multiple venues, including the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, and the gallery Escobar Rosas