Horizon: Against Nature

The intention of “Against Nature” project is to shock the mind into rethinking time, space and the relations between things. What it is proposed is that nature is a horizon that can be approached indefinitely and yet never completely grasped. The idea ‘Against Nature’ takes inspiration from the French fiction novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans A Rebours published in France in 1884. The main protagonist, Des Esseintes, is a highly sensitive, neurotic anti-hero and aesthete who escapes Paris for the countryside and abandons himself to a life of decadence, fine art and literature in order to criticize the vulgarity of society. This was the time before the industrial revolution, when society and the prevalent ideology were seen in terms of nature and the beauty of its forms, structures and geometry. Pre industrial revolution, the same umbrella of Nature, held together a unity of aims and beliefs that served the joint purposes of science, religion and art. Today, and within a now post-industrial and late capitalist global logic, Nature is often narrowly taken as being in opposition to culture. Science, art and religion, have become disconnected: science has favored the purely technical, religion has adopted a confused and transcendent notion of God, and art has tended towards reflecting this present state of confusion with the faint hope that it can somehow contribute to its eradication. The project attempts to pull science, religion, art and nature back together under the reconfigured rubric of nature / horizon and unite them inside of regions between visibility and invisibility. In attempting to visualize and move towards the horizon, a range of motion begins that may potentially connect memories, ideas, feelings and all aspects of life to the infinity of the universe.