Patricio Pron
Madrid
Host: Bieke Willem
Juniorprofessorin für Romanische Literaturwissenschaft
Research Project
"The Darkness Illuminated Everything"
Underground cities, bunkers, caves, cemeteries, geoglyphs, land art, crop circles, psychogeography, the cult of ruins, the "foxholes" of the Falklands or Malvinas War—which fired the imagination of those who were children in Argentina at the time,—the never-cleared Belgian trenches of the First World War, the alarm regularly triggered by the bombs "sleeping" under German cities, situationist movements, micronations, the gated communities of preppers, forest baths, whose popularity acceptance have continued to increase in the last years, performance art as well as territorial occupations and 'liberations': they all revolve, in different ways and to varying degrees, around the question of how we inhabit the physical world and why we seem unable to stop its destruction before it destroys us in turn. "The Darkness Illuminated Everything" is a work-in-progress. On it, practices and concepts that relate to our enormously conflicted relationship with the physical world are part of a quest-like narrative that explores the possibility of finding ways to heal our connection to the Earth and to ourselves.