Welcome to The Next Art-Of-Peace Biennale 2015-17

Dear Art-of-Peacemaker,

Welcome to the weblog of The Next Art-Of-Peace Biennale 2015-17. Here you can find out more about the curatorial ideas behind the Biennale and the broader research project ‘Curating the Eternal Network After Globalisation’.

You may be aware of Robert Filliou (1926 – 1987) already and that ‘The Art-of-Peace Biennale’ was originally his concept and research project. His appetite for research as ‘the domain of those who do not know’, rather than the privilege of those who know led to concepts such as ‘The Art-of-Peace Biennale’ but countless others including ‘The Eternal Network’, ‘Art’s Birthday’, and ‘The Territory of the Genial Republic’.

image: Robert Filliou, ‘La Territoire de la République Géniale’, 1971

 image: ‘La Territoire de la République Géniale’ remediated during ‘Art’s Birthday 2015: What is Peace?’, London, 2015

Filliou was an optimist, a utopian even. He dreamed of ‘La Fête Permanente’ (translated to non-equivalent English as ‘The Eternal Network’), a permanent celebration of the artist as mindfully interconnected with all fellow travellers, human or otherwise, throughout the present world and beyond. How Filliou thought about this network can be understood through long-running series of events such as ‘Musique Télépathique’ in which a mandala of music stands suggests a physical site for telepathic communication with remote participants.

image: Robert Filliou, ‘Musique Télépathique’, Hamburg, 1985

image: Robert Filliou,  ‘Musique Télépathique’, Leeds, 2013

Contemporaries of Filliou such as Robert Adrian X, Roy Ascott, Nam June Paik amongst others were fully engaged in exploring new technologies directly to broaden possibilities for ‘telematic exchange’, producing networks of increasingly remote participation. Filliou, possibly a utopian ludic-luddite, seemed to lack capacity or desire to engage with wired technology as directly.

The question arises how to consider Filiou’s ‘La Fête Permanente’ /  ‘The Eternal Network’ today since the holistic ‘globalism’ sought by Filliou to overcome geographical, political, psychological and social frontiers of mind and territory and of mental and physical space has it turn been supplanted by neoliberal ‘globalisation’ for which network technologies have provided the medium.

This project takes Filliou’s plans for an Art-of-Peace Biennale, realised only once previously with the assistance of René Block in Hamburg in 1985, in particular to experiment with different models and practices online and offline to curate The Next Art-of-Peace Biennale 2015-17. You can follow the project over its two years of existence here through www.peacebiennale.info and can even get involved.

Roddy Hunter

25.05.2015