LEAP: Your latest book, Inclusions (PUEF, 2021; Sternberg Press, 2022, for the English version), is subtitled Aesthetics of the Capitalocene. Why do you prefer this term over “Anthropocene”?

Nicolas Bourriaud: For a very simple reason: because the changes that led to what we now call the Anthropocene stem from a system of production, not from the human species as such. I use both terms, but in reality, it is specific characteristics of capitalism that have brought about climate change — for example, viewing the living world as nothing more than raw material, or the standardization of the notion of value through its monetary equivalent.
Art is an exchange of human experiences. It is the opposite of that abstract general equivalent that is money.

LEAP: You work in a constant back-and-forth between exhibitions and writing, with your books directly linked to your curatorial practice, and your thinking nourished as much by artists as by theorists. Inclusions followed a trilogy of exhibitions that began in 2014 with The Great Acceleration at the 9th Taipei Biennial, continued with Crash Test at Mo.Co. Panacée in Montpellier (2018), and then The Seventh Continent at the 16th Istanbul Biennial (2019). Can you place this book within the arc of your work, both as a theorist and a curator?

Nicolas Bourriaud: The grammar of an exhibition is not that of a book, and moving from one to the other requires a whole process of translation. One does not illustrate ideas with artworks—that would be to misunderstand visual thought entirely. What I do instead is allow the dialogue between artworks to teach me something, and I translate that into my next book. And vice versa. Inclusions sits at the center of this cycle of exhibitions that began in Taipei—it’s a way of drawing lessons from the new relationships forming between artists and climate change. The central question posed by this cycle—which continues with the Gwangju Biennale, where I’m serving as artistic director this year—is: what is the impact of the Anthropocene on contemporary modes of representation? Or rather: has this shift had a direct effect on the way artists conceive space and time? I’m trying to extract recurring figures from this: the crisis of the human scale, the loop, or even the Larsen effect—a sonic figure that signifies a lack of space.

LEAP: You’re right, I always try to engage in a specific dialogue with a thinker I consider central to the topic at hand. In this case, Lévi-Strauss—who was also the mentor of Philippe Descola—is the thinker who profoundly renewed the nature/culture debate. But the entire book is structured as an anthropological essay. I’m drawn to anthropology above all because, as the British anthropologist Tim Ingold put it, it is “philosophy with people in it.” Moreover, it’s a discipline that avoids hierarchizing sources of knowledge—much like Anglo-American cultural studies. In other words, a fragment of a harpoon can be considered just as important as a statue, a ritual, or a myth. It’s a participatory science that doesn’t choose objects in advance, but rather conversation partners. Lévi-Strauss also paved the way by rejecting the binary structures that underpin Western societies—especially the division between nature and culture, civilized and savage. He deconstructed the myth of “progress,” which positions one type of human as the future of another, imposing its temporal model to organize the space of others. Lévi-Strauss is an anti-colonial thinker, but more than that, he is a thinker of nature.

In the West, art has become a symbol of the nature/culture divide. But in reality, we share the idea of society with ants and bees, and the notion of tools with a hundred other animal species. Art is often considered a uniquely human expression, but Charles Darwin identified three regimes of natural beauty. The first is formal beauty, linked to the intuition of an underlying aesthetic order—especially in the perfect adaptation of a natural function to its organic structure. The second is beauty born of an ecological relationship—developed by Deleuze and Guattari in their famous essay on “the orchid and the wasp.” Finally, there is beauty arising from sexual selection: for Darwin, the feeling of beauty itself is a true driving force of evolution. Inclusive thinking, then, could be defined as a living articulation of elements from different regimes or spheres, brought into relation by the artist. Essentially, it’s the definition of an ecosystem. We need to learn to look at artworks as ecosystems.

LEAP: How does the anthropological concept of mana (spiritual power carried by certain objects or people) allow you to move beyond the Western binary between matter and form, object and subject?

Nicolas Bourriaud: Following Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss defined mana as “a fluid that the shaman manipulates, which settles on objects in a visible form, causes movements and levitations, and whose action is generally considered harmful.” It is, all at once, a mode of action, a property of objects, and a specific state. In other words, it’s a kind of additional regime of meaning—a conceptual zone where all of a society’s “excess meaning” is gathered. Today, we call that zone “art”—an irrational, somewhat wild space we don’t always fully understand. In earlier times, those same phenomena were associated with the realm of magic. When Marcel Duchamp transformed a bottle rack into a work of art, he functioned in our society in the same way a magician did in traditional societies.

LEAP: As a curator, you’ve worked in France but also in the UK, Turkey, Russia… In Race and History (1952), Claude Lévi-Strauss sounded an alarm about the growing uniformity of the world. At a time when the “differential gaps” between cultures are shrinking and we’re seeing a reassertion of once-marginalized traditions, what resources do artists have to resist standardization? And why, in your view, are recent debates around “cultural appropriation” a dead end?

Nicolas Bourriaud: There is no culture without exchange. Without reference to other systems of thought beyond the one you’re born into, art, literature, and global thought in general would be extremely impoverished. If I knew nothing beyond the French culture of my parents, my writing would be of very little interest. The notion of appropriation comes from bourgeois property rights—it has nothing to do with culture or art. Are we really supposed to believe that a people or a human group should hold a kind of copyright on ideas? Personally, I don’t think French culture belongs to me any more than it does to an Ecuadorian student. That would be absurd. I oppose what I call GPS aesthetics, a kind of geolocated aesthetic that suggests the value of an artwork depends on the identity parameters of its author. I encourage artists to appropriate everything—especially what belongs to no one. Picasso’s Guernica doesn’t belong to Spain; it belongs to humanity.

LEAP: China is one of the countries where the acceleration of society has been most striking—leaping in just forty years from a feudal era to one of the world’s most advanced market economies. Ten years after the Taipei Biennial you curated under the theme The Great Acceleration, how do you view the contemporary Chinese art scene and its place in the global artistic conversation?

Nicolas Bourriaud: The most interesting periods of Chinese art, in my view, are those in which it breaks away from Confucianism. Song dynasty painting, for example, is far more compelling because it was created by scholars, poets, and metaphysicians. The 1990s were also a fascinating time because they gave rise to artists who broke with tradition. Today, for example, I’ve invited artists like Cheng Xinhao and Wang Yuyan to the Gwangju Biennale—both of whom are bringing radical and innovative ideas to their work, particularly through video. At the Taipei Biennial, I also worked with Hu Xiaoyuan, who I consider an important artist—though there are certainly others I could name. What seems to be holding back the Chinese art scene today is the lack of distinctive identity in many of its museums and art centers. Too often, they recycle the same ideas and aesthetics, or give in to art that is spectacular and easy.