A Conversation with Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk, Artistic Director, POPPOSITIONS Art Fair, Brussels, Belgium, by James Scarborough

April 15, 2018

POPPOSITIONS 2018 focuses on diagnosis, articulation, prescription, and, lest we forget, discovery. It feels more like a World’s Fair than an art fair. Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk provides artistic direction. The show encourages a discussion between people with strongly held convictions about the state of the world and the role of art. It’s idealistic (what should be), pragmatic (what is), cautionary (man has made a mess of things…), and visionary (… but that doesn’t mean there isn’t hope.) It takes a big-picture look at things and wonders if we can reframe the world’s locomotion “outside an anthropocentric feedback loop.” “Outside an anthropocentric feedback loop”? Whoa.

Conceived in 2011 by Liv Vaisberg, Pieter Vermeulen, Bart Verschueren and Edouard Meier, POPPOSITIONS stakes a successful claim as the alterative art fair venue. The show convenes each year in a different venue. Each show, then, amounts to a site-specific installation and not an art emporium.

This is its 7^th iteration. It substitutes a collaborative organization model for a commercial one. Lekkerkerk curates work from 29 international galleries ***, artists’ initiatives, and project spaces around a salient theme. This year’s theme comes from Richard Brautigan’s 1968 novel, In Watermelon Sugar. The story’s characters work together to survive in a post-apocalyptic society. The theme’s relevance to the current state of affairs could not be more clear.

*** Belgium, Canada, Colombia, Estonia, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Morocco, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

The fair runs from April 19 – 22. It is located at Former Atelier Coppens, Place du Nouveau Marché aux Grains 22-23, 1000 Brussels(Metro station: Sainte-Catherine / Sint-Katelijne). For more information, visit here.

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JS: Is this an optimistic show? A pessimistic one? Is it diagnostic, deconstructionist, constructivist? How about nihilistic?

NJL: To my concern it is important for the arts to be propositional in nature, rather than accusatory. Although there are voices claiming that the arts would benefit from a more militant stance. We are the great bridge-builders between disciplines, and I see an important role for the arts to enable us humans to attune ourselves, and to render ourselves perceptible, sensitive and conscious to matters of concern that would otherwise go unnoticed and bypass our sensorium. Just as soil counterbalances the carbon dioxide produced by plants, common sense flattens the constructed artificiality of one’s surroundings. In that sense there is a lot of work to be done through artistic research and positions, to uproot our tendency to assert stable patterns and to subsequently rest too comfortably in our category of being human. The show carries a general sense of optimism –“we are in this together, let us make it work”–whereas quite obviously the “stable” backdrop against which we thought we used to be working has ceased to exist. This carries a certain pessimism. These are troubled times begging more then ever for our shape-changing capacities.

JS: Is this a show about change? What kind of change? If so, is it monumental or incremental?

NJL: In a certain way, yes, the show is about living on a damaged planet. To seek for the possibilities of life in capitalist ruins. A major point of change should consist of trying to overcome our tendency to endow the human figure with the capacity to be the basis of reconstruction; trying to think outside of an anthropocentric feedback-loop begs for an active consideration of non-human forms of agency to become part of the equation. As the sky has not fallen yet I think the process will remain incremental.

JS: Despite the crises it addresses – “the unprecedented and rapid depletion of life forms and the degradation of biodiversity on a global scale” – is it less post-apocalyptic and more pre-apocalyptic, right? Or is as full-on post-apocalyptic as the Brautigan novel?

NJL: Perhaps the apocalypse has already taken place, but all we can think of is “business as usual.” We continue to speak in terms of crisis, which is a great error, as this implies that the environmental problematic that we are facing today would “only” be of a passing nature. We are beyond the golden spike.

JS: In the universe of contingencies that your show broaches, did you ever envision – and/or did the art suggest - a post-human scenario?

NJL: Not necessarily a scenario without humans, as since after the human again comes the human. However, in thinking with philosopher Rosi Braidotti, I consider the idea of the posthuman as a crucial position in bridging sensibility today, as it no longer privileges human ways of encountering and evaluating the world, but instead attempts to explore how other entities encounter and apprehend the world. In other words still, the posthuman position aims to establish a pluralization of perspectives – without necessarily rejecting or eradicating the human figure – that complicates our ability to speak univocally and universally about something called the human.

JS: One school of thought believed that Modernism, in all its iterations, implied progress. You’re suggesting that POPPOSITIONS 2018 creates a physical, mental, and emotional space that “leads us back to being animals…” That’s both a fascinating as well as a frightful thought. What exactly do you mean by “…back to being animals…”?

NJL: The idea that we share a backbone that is quite similar to the entity we call fish. To acknowledge what we are in the first place rather than celebrating ourselves as honorary vertebrates. As the late Ursula K. Le Guin said “Perhaps what I'm trying to do is to subjectify the world, because look at where objectifying it has gotten us.”

JS: What was the inspiration for this show? From where did its theme originate?

NJL: It forms part of a longer research trajectory I am developing within my curatorial practices, concerning the Anthropocene thesis, naturecultures and ecology. Brautigan has been an obvious influence, but also writers like Ballard and Le Guin, and philosophers such as Povinelli, Haraway, Braidotti and Latour.

JS: As you sifted through work for the show, what are some prevailing trends you noticed in the art, whether you selected it for inclusion or not? In other words, how would you characterize global art at this moment?

NJL: That is difficult to answer, as I believe there are no global trends. The image of the globe is hard to maintain anyway. However I do see many artists acting on the idea of “your human doesn’t do much good for me, I’m out”–“your human” being a neoliberal heterogenically-inscribed law-abiding quietist subject. Artists increasingly trying to invent alternative modes of being outside and beyond that dominant order with its normative ethics.

JS: How do you connect the show’s art to these themes? How does art create worlds? Is this a utopian concept? Art had high hopes for a brief shining moment in the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. That didn’t end so well. What kind of world would this art create?

NJL: Artistically speaking I think these so-called world-making projects concern the idea of envisioning new and different imaginary horizons set apart from the situation I described previously. These undertakings surely can be rather private enterprises, more than actualized and situated collective models for “peaceful” co-habitation. However, there a great examples of works of art the engage in making worlds collectively. For instance, I deem of interest if Ursula Biemann’s Forest Law (2014). The project draws from research carried out by Biemann and architect Paulo Tavares in the oil-and-mining frontier in the Ecuadorian Amazon— one of the most biodiverse and mineral-rich regions on Earth, currently under pressure from the dramatic expansion of large-scale extraction activities. At the heart of Forest Law is a series of landmark legal cases that bring the forest to court and plead for the rights of nature. One particularly paradigmatic trial that has recently been won by the indigenous people of Sarayuku based on their cosmology of the living forest.

JS: In general, what sets POPPOSITIONS apart from other art fairs? From, for instance, the recently-finished Art Dubai?

NJL: We induce ideological agenda’s which we aim to mobilize with our participants and through the project they propose, rather than being a sales event.

JS: POPPOPISTIONS changes venue each year. What were the challenges and successes with this particular space?

NJL: The former Atelier Coppens is a great example of a capitalist ruin, a remnant of a past glory. It comes with holes large enough to let in wildlife. An interesting challenge has been the lacking infrastructure; it is a very bare surrounding.

JS: The exhibition’s physical space seems to be conceived as a staging area. What’s the one thing you want viewers to take away from the show?

NJL: To start treading lightly.