Everyone’s destiny is a journey between topoi, sites where things, places, and time come together.
Preconditions and the personality’s objectives determine individual topoi. The space where personalities unite to form socii is like the ocean. Its form is unstable and changeable. People make their wretched ships of bamboo; to survive they prepare themselves for sailing the world and choose their captains.
The bound-together stems and ropes are like conceptual networks for settling down in a socius, for finding one’s own place and observation of sorts, to quote the sailors.
To find one’s bearings in the world, one needs external reference points, a system of coordinates that is external as regards man and that determines his place in space.
The star-lit sky, faith, or ideas will allow people not to lose the right direction. Since 1996 I have been evolving the idea of “wreck art,&rdq
uo; the art of perished ships, because I have the persistent feeling that our situation is hopeless: we are wandering in the wilderness, our captain Moses is having fun with his mistress in the cabin, we are lost in boundless space, our ship careened but the rule “ladies and children first” is no longer, and the captain is the first to flee the capsized ship with his suitcase between his legs.
From the desert of Morocco I am calling on every captain of the world to get back on board and every person not to lose hope and to build ships even in deserts. I am calling on artists to rise above the surface to see the horizon. To choose unshakeable reference points.
Artist: Alexander Ponomarev