WITH THE TURTLES
an exibition by Arthur Cordier & Valentino Russo
“Oh darling…” shouts an ungraspable entity, where the works instead of trying to fill the void of the exhibition
space, almost amplify it. A series of footprints on the walls, a suspicious backpack and what appears to be an
oddly cropped ad from the Dutch national airline KLM, are remnants of a human presence, now absent, always in transit.
Daaaaamn son!
The exhibition is loosely inspired from the legacy of the
renown The Whole Earth Catalog originally published from
1968 to 1971. The catalog became an instant-classic among
the counterculture. Thanks to its environmental orientation
and embodying a do-it-yourself/self-sufficiency mentality,
under the slogan “access to tools”,
it indexed alternativeand esoteric knowledge. In a speech from 2005, Steve Jobscompared it to the early stages of Google.
Half a century later, in a world dominated by efficiency, where people and goods travel the globe relentlessly, the Whole Earth Catalog assumes the status of an utopian
vision. In a moment in which slowing down seems impossible, running with turtles becomes a strategy of resistance.
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