1. art participates, more intensely than ever, in the destruction of the world, in the predation of life.
2. riding on a swelling wave originated in the worship of culture and the disdain for the material conditions that make it possible, western and westernized civilizations have reached an absurd peak on which the most sophisticated cultural artifacts are precisely those that require the greatest amount of destruction.
3. it is tremendously disheartening to see so many artists playing around with shiny new technologies whose production and usage are the cause of serious social and ecological conflicts. seeing the carefree operation of those artists confirms the painfully widespread belief according to which art exists inside a sphere, completely isolated from the world, from life.
4. today, upon that peak of hubris and self-absorption, we find all kinds of artistic practices that use digital technologies, both as tools or as media. while such artistic formats are the object of unprecedented appraisal by global cultural elites, a sinister web of extractive processes that disintegrate human communities and ecosystems is fed and set in motion by digital devices and algorithms. it is not a coincidence that those technologies are some of the most useful allies in the perpetration of genocides.
5. in the very same communities and ecosystems that are being predated on behalf of technology, digital art is conspicuous by its absence, and such absence is a raging sign: it screams in our face that the worst marks of identity of colonialism are being reproduced there, in those sacrifice zones that suffer so that urban artists (both rich and precarized ones) may flood the world with their pixelated creations. but how little life is there on their screens! we need to break them with our hammers, as contemporary followers of king ludd.
6. the separation of nature and culture, a distinguishing feature of the failed enterprise of modernity, has resulted in the massive and accelerated production of a gray and serialized art: an art that is exalted by the hegemonic culture while its devastating social and ecological impacts are conveniently ignored. at the same time, urban societies sink further into panic, anxiety and hopelessness as the material conditions that sustain them rapidly collapse. only an anti-modern art can heal that metabolic fracture, that acute crisis of the senses and the sensible. only an art that opposes the deadly project of modernity can participate in the restoration of the naturecultural continuum.
7. anti-modern art aims to cure that aching rift by placing, on the same plane of value, works and territories, ideas and waters, aesthetic forms and the humans and more-than-humans that make them possible. an art that is as important as the trees, rocks and rivers that allow for its material existence. never again an art without ants: live, proliferating colonies: paint the earth black and red! ants and ferns and mountains as subjects, not mere objects in art.
8. anti-modern art refuses to recognize and reward works whose production requires intensive mining, energy or material waste, pollution of air and water, the annihilation of biodiversity or the oppression of humans, and instead commits to denounce these excesses, which will no longer be accepted or overlooked. never again an art that excuses destruction for art’s sake.
9. anti-modern art actively participates in the mending of the world and considers every artistic work that does not contribute to that goal as an unacceptable aberration.
10. anti-modern art turns its back on the self-destructive drive of western modernity, in order to search for its place among the clear waters and fresh air of the cultures that never forgot how to take care of the ties that bind us to the world, to a territory. the arts of those cultures, for so long dismissed as crafts, hold keys which are deeper and more vital than the hollow formalism of museums, the techno-extractive electronic nausea of digital arts, or the viscous gibberish, the cowardice and condescension of the artistic and intellectual elites and their minions.
11. anti-modern art wants to start all over again: it walks away from screens and technological excess, from the white cubes and the illegible catalogs, and turns towards the animal, plant and mineral origins of culture: towards the infinitely cyclic passage between light and darkness, the eternal weaving and unraveling of winds and tides, the gloriously dirty color of the earth, the song of the desert flower that, for so long, has been silenced by the gray drone of numerization that hides its murderous face behind a mask called art.
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– download the manifesto
– print the pdf file (size: 43 x 28 cm; double sided; actual size)
– fold and cut like this:
