The contemporary art gallery Biju Gallery in Cluj-Napoca hosted the painting exhibition “Menschen-park”, a solo show by Sebastian Big, from May 10 to June 9.
“The WhatsApp group for the parents of class 3B, the Mormons, the backcountry skiers, the group of left-leaning thinkers who used to be monarchist-relativists, the camping buddies, the Slack channel for people_who_get_along, the painters from the Cluj school, the cultural management of Cluj, we are surrounded on all sides by groups and factions where hierarchies are distilled, elders emerge, ways of working are formed, processes, cultures are born. In all this movement, conformity with financial finality gradually eliminates precisely what is most specific to humans, namely humanity, the random nature of existence, and, thereby, freedom.
Fortunately, there is something stronger in humans than this kind of manoeuvring, namely the instinct of adaptation. Everything that is thrown at them, humans grind, process, appropriate, acculturate, subvert, and somehow make use of the enemy’s weapons for their own survival.
Thus, we end up using precisely this disfigurement, forced depersonalization, with origins clearly found in slave management (see Caitlin Rosenthal – Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management). They want us to be no face no name just a number, but it’s hard because when there is no face and there is no name, the number dissolves too, the position in the queue is lost, we become harder to track, harder to be put to/in order, the electric brain sweats hard to hunt quiet quitters; the workforce, the primary resource, the essence of capital gradually dissolves into an original magma, without fixed forms, from which what is to come will be born. What is alive will never be content with its own state. Life will always create new worlds.” (Sebastian Big)
Sebastian Big (b. 1979, Baia Mare, Romania) studied philosophy at Babeș-Bolyai University. He then completed a master’s degree at the University of Strasbourg, where he attended the classes of Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe.
Currently, he is part of the speculative visual research collective Colonia-Colonia with Dan Beudean, Matei Țigăreanu, Cristian Tușinean and Sasha Bandi, among others. At the same time, Big coordinates the Renewable Energies collection from frACTalia. Big co-founded the bio-speculative and advanced research group at the Aloe Vera Cultural Institute (ic-av.ro). He translated into Romanian the book “Simulacre si simulare” by Jean Baudrillard.
