Arterritory launches Spiriterritory
The new portal’s patron is Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto
This coming May, the culture and art portal Arterritory will celebrate its tenth anniversary. In the spirit of the times, the portal’s editorial team marks this milestone with a new and transformational beginning: the launch of Arterritory’s first independent branch – Spiriterritory. Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto, who came up with the new entity’s name, is its symbolic godfather.
Spiriterritory is an international and interdisciplinary virtual space where we discuss vital subjects and issues: humans, the planet, our relationship to it, and our future on it. We talk about what it means to be human and to be alive as well as the footprint we make in this world, all the while remaining conscious of the fact that a sustainable future for humans and the solution to the current crisis (be it ecological, social, political or mental) can only be found in interaction, in the meeting of ideas from various different fields and the subsequent synthesis of new ideas. It can only be found in a dialogue rooted in an international network – a dialogue between ancient knowledge and various spiritual practices and modern-day science, between shamans and philosophers, between artists and neuroscientists, between anthropologists and musicians, between politicians and religious leaders, and between teenagers and adults – instead of only within the narcissistic “bubble” of a single discipline and a single way of thinking. Or as one of our featured individuals, Colombian anthropologist Luis Eduardo Luna, says: “The biggest cause of civilisation’s current problems is monoculture. Monoculture in everything – in ideas, in products, in agriculture. In many ways, we have to get rid of straight lines, so to say: in the mind, in agriculture, in philosophical thought.”
The process of transformation is not easy – regardless of whether the one undergoing it is a planet, a country, a village, a household, or an individual – and everyone has to find their own tools for this journey. Spiriterritory is a story of paths, tools and experiences – sometimes unconventional – as therapies and cognitive tools that can bring you closer to yourself and through yourself towards the idea of a sustainable world. Spiriterritory is the Arterritory team’s small contribution to a cosmological vision of global consciousness for a better world. Because we simply believe it to be possible; that despite predictions to the contrary, it is not an unobtainable utopia.
“The idea of territory is very broad, and it can happen in an abstract or material way. But there’s an important detail. In Portuguese, and I believe in any Latin language, ‘territory’ is a political body, but it is also terra, the earth, mother earth, our body. There’s an artwork by Lygia Clark titled A Casa é o Corpo (The House Is the Body, 1968), which she called ‘biological architecture’ and ‘nostalgia of the body’. It was exhibited at MoMA in 2014. One day while dancing at a beach party under a tree, I received a message that was a variation of Clark’s statement from 1968; it said: ‘A Terra é o corpo’ (Earth is the body). When we say it this way, we feel like we’re inside the earth/terra, as a part of it; we bring back the landscape to our body, and we feel that we are a part of it and not that it is apart from us,” says Ernesto Neto. Spiriterritory was set in motion with Neto’s inspirational words – a poem that he composed this past February during Rio Carnival, specially for the launch of the new portal. Spiriterritory’s logo and design have been created by artist Krišs Salmanis.
