CITRINITAS for hochstr45, Berlin

CITRINITAS*

As is widely known, a yellow ribbon (not to speak of many) tied around the Ole Oak Tree is a good sign when coming back home to your significant other from just another manly odysseia, filled with fights and other notable experiences. It is a symbol for the state of waiting (in particularly good faith, like in traffic lights), but it is also the scholastic symbol for a new future.

Wait a minute - a new future arrives by waiting. Like Godot?

POZZO: I am blind.

(Silence.)

ESTRAGON: Perhaps he can see into the future.”

-S. Beckett

FROM NEW FUTURE TO NEW MATERIALISM

"In art this analysis [#new materialism] could be the study of matter and meaning" and "Similar to poststructuralism new materialism considers the future as open to countless possibilities that promise no salvation."


-Iris van der Tuin, Rick Dolphijn

But whose war is it?

"Everything flows" said Herakleitos, and continued: "We must know that war (πόλεμος polemos) is common to all and strife is justice, and that all things come into being through strife necessarily." Foucault: "We must conceive discourse as a violence that we do to things, or, at all events, as a practice we impose upon them; it is in this practice that the events of discourse find the principle of their regularity."

So it is the artist, who is the real soldier - the one who creates, not the one who destroys. In Continuation War, Finnish army valued wood works (puhdetyöt) that soldiers produced while waiting for the war to continue (=to get back home sooner) according to their esthetic properties also: the decorative tactics at hand included painting and burning of the material. Soldiers liked carving so much that they didn’t finish their fortressess, and the rest is war history...

Greek, Nostos ‘return home’ + algos ‘pain’

From the choice of materials to the sensitive processings of it, Koitila's sculptures are compassing around infralayers of meanings that material itself surreptiously trafficks into the minds of the unconscious: "Smell and touch are strong evokers of nostalgia due to the processing of these stimuli first passing through the amygdala, the emotional seat of the brain. These recollections of our past are usually important events, people we care about, and places where we have spent time" –Wikipedia:Nostalgia.

Koitila extracts symbols from narratives, turning them into material counterpoints, compulsive structures and processed surfaces. This chain of reversed alchemy results in metaphysical golems (a clay figure brought to life by magic; Hebrew, gōlem ‘shapeless mass.’), that become alive with surreal weight of spectator's own intimacy - the dream-like memories sunk deep into the neural sea of lizard brain, triggered by the color of that rope, the texture of that fabric, the fragility of those seashells, or the consistency of that candle wax.

Koitila's sculptures carry a peculiar, evidential aura, but not of a crime scene. Rather that of an archeological excavation site – at the ruins of a distant civilization that wanted “to love and be loved in return”, as Eben Ahbez put it in Nature Boy’s lyrics.

The Final Line

After the song became popular, the song writer wanted to change the final line into “The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is to love and be loved, just to love, and be loved”, but it was already too late.

 

* Citrinitas is a term given by alchemists to "yellowness." In alchemical philosophy, citrinitas stood for the dawning of the "solar light" inherent in one's being, and that the reflective "lunar or soul light" was no longer necessary.  In the Jungian archetypal schema, citrinitas is the wise old woman.

* Spider webs around pine trees can be seen in the morning sun. Nearly invisible nets symbolized the feminine. The tree symbolized the masculine. Beard lichen can grow only in pure forests.

* Moral is an elementary particle initially theorised in 1964, and tentively confirmed to exist on 14 March 2013. It behaves that a superposition of states is never actually observed, since the system collapses to a single state at the instant that a measurement takes place.

* OURIBOROS PHOSSILE. THE MYTHOLOGICAL ANCIENT HEADLESS SNAKE HAS BEEN DESCRIBED AT LEAST IN CODEX SERAPHINIANUS (1981) ON PAGE 81.

⁄J a r k k o R ä s ä n e n 2 0 1 3⁄

for IDA KOITILA
"A Yellow Ribbon"

Opening 15.10.2013, 7 pm
Exhibition15.10– 29.10.2013 (by appointment only) , Hochstrasse 55, Berlin