Tremulations x Terra Cosmica: Daniel Birnbaum, Jacqui Davies & Giovanbattista Tusa

Join the authors for the launches of

Daniel Birnbaum & Jacqui Davies, Tremulations (Swedenborg Society & Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, 2023)

and

Giovanbattista Tusa, Terra Cosmica / Traces of Georealism (Tenement Press, 2024)

Wednesday 9 October 2024 | Swedenborg House, London WC1A 2TH

Presentations from 6.00 p.m.

Drinks and casual discussion until 9.30 p.m.

Daniel Birnbaum & Jacqui Davies, Tremulations (Swedenborg Society & Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, 2023)

“Tremulations presents objects from the archives of Swedenborg House as well as writings and works of art by, among others, Marcel Duchamp, Meret Oppenheim and Yayoi Kusama. It combines elements from the Swedenborg House archive, including lead printing plates and manuscript notebooks, with works of modern and contemporary art, film and literature. Structured according to Swedenborg’s unique and ground-breaking model of categorization as developed in his early essay On Tremulation (1719), the exhibition was presented in chapters manifested in physical, temporal and virtual space at Swedenborg House. Swedenborg’s ‘Nine Rules of Tremulation’ is a schema to explore forms of dissemination and transmission, both historical and contemporary: mirror images, dreams, reflections, divinatory visions, phantasies, recollections, prophesies and hallucinations, plus cinematic forms of projection that employ technologies of mediation older than television and video, as well as forms both post-cinematic and virtual. Each chapter of the exhibition included a virtual reality work produced by Acute Art: The Bridge by Mark Leckey; Hilma af Klint: The Temple; and It will End in Stars by Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg. The full list of artists involved in the exhibition is: Tony Cokes, Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, Marcel Duchamp, Hilma af Klint, Yayoi Kusama, Mark Leckey, Grace Ndiritu, Meret Oppenheim, Peter Saville, Emanuel Swedenborg and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.”

The Tremulations publication has been beautifully designed to replicate the iconic Transactions series issued by the Swedenborg Society in the 1930s. It features 48 colour illustrations of the original exhibition and art works, including installation views, and stills from the cinematic and virtual reality artworks that featured. An introduction by Daniel Birnbaum & Jacqui Davies shed lights on the contexts and motivating ideas behind the exhibition, further elucidated throughout the book by carefully chosen quotations from Swedenborg’s ‘Nine Rules of Tremulations’ and extracts from writers including Samuel Beckett, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Marcel Duchamp, Briony Fer, Clarice Lispector, Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Roussel.

Daniel Birnbaum is the artistic director of Acute Art, a laboratory for art and digital media in London. From 2010-18 he was the director of Moderna Museet in Stockholm. He is a contributing editor of Artforum. In 2009 he curated the Venice Biennale.

Jacqui Davies, London-based producer and curator, is Director of production company Primitive Film. She has produced and curated over 80 films for cinema, gallery and broadcast, including Cannes Film Festival, Channel 4 and multiple international galleries. She is Bafta-nominated for Ray & Liz (2018) by Richard Billingham.

Giovanbattista Tusa, Terra Cosmica / Traces of Georealism (Tenement Press, 2024)

“Our age is characterised by the increasing humanisation of a planet that is more and more subject to metaphoric representation and visualisation. The memorialisation, anthropomorphism, and narratological charge of time has birthed an intellectual industry in which the summation of history plays out like a hand of cards. A game in which retrospect and hindsight informs our present and sits us ever at the mercy of prediction and chance in a time increasingly defined by catastrophe, and as emergent crises affect every stratum of life and lived experience. Giovanbattista Tusa’s Terra Cosmica / Traces of Georealism is the result of a series of lectures and essays—a quintet of pieces published over the course of a four-year period—that, woven together into a new collation of interlinked fragments, calls time on time to consider the new form of planetary realism resultant of this restructuring of the imagination. Tusa presents a cosmic remapping of our modes of thinking that assumes that our contemporary moment is absented from its representability, its history of representations, thus remaining open to a sense of its own infinity. Tusa’s work is a scrutiny of our exosystemic condition; a suite of exploratory antagonisms on the need for a new philosophical perspectivism of time, of earth, and a new charter for the foundations of thought and thinking. Tusa’s is a mineral anarchy; a study of our vertigo; a reorientation of an effort to explore human duration via allegory, legend, and symbol; a consideration of a necessary metamorphosis of perspective in our contemporary moment.”

Giovanbattista Tusa is a philosopher based in Lisbon at the Nova Institute of Philosophy (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal). His publications include Cosa resta del futuro / What Remains of the Future? (Mimesis 2024), Quasi Niente: Il tempo cosmico di Claude Debussy / Almost Nothing: Claude Debussy’s Cosmic Time (Il Palindromo 2024), and he is the author, with Alain Badiou of The End (Polity, 2019), translated in French, Portuguese and Spanish. Tusa co-edited the volumes Contemporanea: A Glossary for the 21st Century (MIT Press, 2024), Dispositif: A Cartography (MIT Press, 2023), Fernando Pessoa and Philosophy: Countless Lives Inhabit Us (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), and PPPP: Pier Paolo Pasolini Philosopher (Mimesis International, 2022). He is editor (with Michael Marder) of the Political Theory and Contemporary Philosophy series published by Bloomsbury.