The economic crisis faced by the world
today is not only extensive and multifaceted,
but its implications for our future are profound.
To comprehend the current situation it is essential
to create alternate approaches enabling us
to make sense of our tumultuous political and
social reality. This is not a typical exhibition,
but rather a selection of artworks meant to invoke
comment on our current social dilemma.
“Animal Spirits” references a concept
coined by the British economist John Maynard
Keynes, who argued in his 1936 book, The
General Theory of Employment, Interest and
Money, that animal spirits— emotional
factors that cannot be modeled or quantified,
and are thus often played down by economists —
are in fact very important to the understanding
of economic dynamics. Keynes believed that
business cycles are driven by basic instincts.
Operating on the basis of trust, confidence,
desire for fairness, bad faith, and awareness
of corruption, these instincts can generate
spontaneous optimism or corrosive pessimism.
Using the same Keynesian language in 2008,
Italian social researcher Matteo Pasquinelli
drew a provocative conceptual bestiary unleashing a politically incorrect grammar for the
coming generation.
The collection gathered in the Slaughterhouse
on Hydra summons some of those animal
spirits in order to reflect the leaps of faith, politics
of trust, social bestiaries, blind confidence,
spreading fear, and distorted meaning of positivism
emerging in our world today. These drawings
are in dialogue with each other but also with the
architecture that houses them, its atmosphere,
and traces of all past activities, conjuring multiple
narratives. The artwork in this show embodies
a Keynesian dynamic, drawing on animal
spirits to provoke social commentary and urgent
acknowledgment of the looming crisis.
