Heaven’s Gate
IMT Gallery
Some time ago in a passionate conversation about religion and deliberate choices, while dinning at a restaurant lost in the midst of the countryside, someone (non-European) expressed that the previous Pope, Benedict XVI, was a Nazi, because he was conscripted into the Hitler Youth. However, this idea clearly aroused the indignation of almost all of the people at the table not for religion’ or political’ reasons, but, instead, for a lack of cultural knowledge and understanding and it was also obnoxious how people from a particular region in the world perceive the history of the world and cultural difference. Most of the people at the table, under 50-years-old, were from European countries that until the 1970s had been under a fascist regime, and perceived that commentary as a rude vision on how other people might perceive world history and bring their local different perceptions of the world.
Life is made of curves, not of straights lines, and when Ratzinger joined the Hitler Youth, in 1941, membership was require by law for all 14-years-old German boys after March 1939. Being part of a nationalist youth organization, until the 1970s, is like, presently, all of us having to have an email account and a mobile phone, even if not required by law, or we like it or wanted it or not! It is demanded by society at large.
The dissemination of totalitarian ideologies, believes and modes of behavior led by the propagation machine in the XX century, is, today, communicated by those informational channels being demanded by society. Non-places where the political corrects breeds! For the matter, it would be useful to think about which images circulate by and in the social sphere! So, my point here is that if what he had seen is that straight line (and imperialist view imposed over the world multitude), what curves given us by is what goes beyond over those fatalistic imagery conditions defining Democracy, State, Freedom, Islam, Terrorism, etc.
It is on those moments that sound start to emerge. I’m thinking about Gordon Shrigley work (presently at IMT Gallery in London) Heaven’s Gate comprising 14 slabs of straight small lines of chalk on painted board as musical compositions. An endless vocabulary of things describing that that was and is around us, with each slab resonating different soundscapes and compositions. It sprouts from the most inconvenient places and moments.
