Portal of Mysteries

October 8 2022

A video installation conceived by philosopher and writer Emanuele Coccia, Portal of Mysteries welcomes and introduces us to the 23rd International Exhibition, offering us a perspective through which we can address the themes of the unknown unknowns, free ourselves from a geocentric view and overturn our idea of the world.

“An alien child discovers a meteorite fallen from the sky that is capable of transforming all aspects of reality human beings, black holes, plants and all the artefacts designed by man. The unknown we do not know we do not know is the planet itself, the planet that constitutes the material of our bodies and of every object we use. The Earth is the designer and maker of all the forms that inhabit the cosmos.” Emanuele Coccia

It is within or behind everything we do. Buildings, cities, everyday objects. They are all its constructions. They are its forms. We don't see it. We don't even know that we ignore it.

The planet we live on is an immense open-air unconscious.

It is everywhere. It is the flesh and life of everything. Hidden each time behind a different face. It is the one great creator of everything we see. The one and only true designer. The one and only true interior decorator. It is because of it that everything can stand beside everything in our experience. The galaxies and the brain, the clouds and the living. It is the planet and its force of gravity that designs all that we are and all that we see. Black holes and armchairs, roots and celestial observatories. It is not something unknowable and it is not simply a mystery. It is an ignorance that lies within all forms of knowledge. Like an immense desire that we can see only after it is extinguished. Needless to give it a name. Earth, Gaia, Globe, Planet. It has the names of all things to which it gives form and matter. It has the face of all the things it creates and in which it invents a new way of existence. This stranger who inhabits and embodies us is indifferent to the opposition between heaven and earth as well as to that between the human and the nonhuman. It is alive in the past as well as in the present. We ignore it and ignore to ignore it but we do not stop using its strengths. Every time we design, every time we build something, we only prolong its life. Architecture, design, the arts, should start from here. Everything they do is but the life of this mystery that we cannot know except by transforming it. All they do is make our planet even more unknown and mysterious.