Living in times of social change and political upheaval, and beset by terrible and terrifying anxieties, the people of Ancient Rome—both the Patricians and the Plebeians, the aristocrats and the ordinary citizens—would lift their heads to the sky in hope of clarity and reassurance. Watching the birds, observing how they turned and swooped in the sky, the small group of “Augurs” would read into their movements and song the will of the Gods, and their feelings towards recent political decisions, votes, or military actions. Contrary to popular belief, the Augurate were not prophetic; through the divination of signs that indicated the will of the Gods, the population would be soothed in their worries.
Their presence suggests a universal human response to anxiety and change; what is important is not knowing the future, but interpreting the signs of the present. The same urge motivates many today, not least as economic and political upheaval shifts much of the west into novel forms of instability, and we fill our culture with attempts to read the birds.
— Huw Lemmey
Paris Internationale
with Damien & The Love Guru
October 17 – October 21, 2018
Her ears were greater than the ones that from a donkey sprout;
Her neck was black a, thick-set, and short, and hairy all about;
Her nose was beaked and longer than the great flamingo’s snout;
Her mouth was fashioned like a hound’s with muzzle thick and short;
With long and narrow horse’s teeth of every crooked sort;
And like a yearling heifer’s great big ankles you would see.
(from The Book of Good Love, Juan Ruiz; 1330)
Houses are defense mechanisms, that give physical expression to the sheltering
of psyche. It is now clear that the instinct ability of humans in general to build
and to wear clothing has a dual root: a physiological and a psychological one:
Physiologically arbitrary reflex motions of the body are in time, mechanized and
standardized through our nervous system. Psychologically all animals, especially
man, living collectively, invariably learn by imitating.
(from Magic Architecture, Friedrich Kiesler; 1947)