On the run

..is conceived as a study of attention through the spectrum of proximity and care. The departure point was the book “For an Ecology of Attention” where the thinker, Yves Citton, uses the theory of the economists George Franck and Maurice Goldhaber considering attention as a currency. Citton proposes a change of direction from the “One” to the “Other” and from the “We” to our environment.

We are interested in this theory as an apparatus applied to the contemporary artistic sphere. Indeed, attention taken in the sense of care for somebody or for something includes, among other things, an impact on creation and it actively implicates the role of the artist, the curator and the audience.

We attempt to analyze the notion of attention as care from the side of the producer and at the same time of a visual consumer. The visual consumer is a “restless spectator”, part of a permanent spectacle, where the difference between presence and absence of apparatus is no longer distinguishable. The systematic automation of our relations and exchanges at all levels facilitates the disappearance of boundaries between a conscious and unconscious act.

Is attention a conscious act? What place is left for conscious attention in a world governed by automatism? How can one return to a conscious attention which implies engagement and concern for oneself with the gaze for the other?

On the occasion of the launch on February 17, 2018 at Hot Wheels Projects, the presentation by the curator Eleni Riga was followed by Paky Vlassopoulou’s work: Hello Mrs Ramsay (Things Don’t Change That Fast), on hosting as an attention practice.

Eleni Riga & Florent Frizet

hd.kepler.