Louises Will works has been shown at the Fattori Museum (Livorno, Italy, 2023), 59 Rivoli (Paris, France, 2023), f 5.6 Gallery (Lucca, 2023), Chelsea College of Arts (London, UK, 2022), Cantiere SanBernardo (Pisa, Italy, 2021), Platform Southwark (London, UK, 2019), Crypt Gallery (London, UK, 2019), Ugly Duck Gallery (London, UK, 2019). She works with any media, from painting, photography sculpture and performance, to better represent a concept, from ecology to feminism. She focuses on the harmful relationship between human beings and their natural environment. She believes the link with nature is strictly connected to humans' fear of death. With her work she analyses it by reflecting on the passing of time, the angst of the future and of the unknown. She shots photographies of humans' mischiefs, where the artificia materials are hidden in natural environments, or by paintings of artificial landscapes with polish, acrylics and found materials, aiming to make the viewer reflect on their deepest fears, to change their life along with nature.
Louises Will research is deeply influenced by Nicolas Bourriaud, the first who theorizes the turn of tendency of fine art at the end of the 20th century. In “Relational aesthetics” he defines art as "a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space". Bourriaud explains the approach of contemporary art, through examples of what he calls relational art, of gathering people discussing about interactions and social context. As long as ways of living and models of action for the existing real art can be critiquing society. Ai Wawai, for example, attached 14,000 life jackets used by refugees to Berlin’s Konzerthaus concert hall, a tribute to the refugees that died at sea in an attempt to escape war and poverty in the Middle East and North Africa. With this installation Ai Wawai success showing the refugees crisis and highlights the problem of borders. In the world of today, where people can circulate freely, borders are pointless. One solution about social problems could be discussion, which can be facilitated with culture. Another example of the approaches of social engaged art practices are the photographs of Zaida Gonzales which stands as a parody of the mexican cultural issues. This technique of criticism can useful to highlight social problems for an artist.
Either expressing the experience of the human subject can be the starting point of social engaged art practices. In particular one subject’s view of the world is the argument of discussion of existentialists philosophers like Jean-Paul Satre. Indeed he is considered to be one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism. In “Nausea” he narrates the life of Roquentin and his philosophical view of life. He says he feels nothing is real, as he is surrounded by cardboard scenery, the world looks like a theatre where anything can happen. Reality starts to lose its familiar outlines and everything seems an illusion. In this scenery Roquentin says there is no reason of living and what we experience is eventual and not absolute. As long as Sartre, the Czech writer Milan Kundera discusses the viewpoint of his characters. He says “Everyone go wrong when it comes the future” says Milan Kundera in the book “The ignorance”, when he narrates the episode of a men who predicts the duration of the USSR. If we see life as a path, we do not know where we are going, and we have no direction in life.
Existence is temporary and this is the only certain prevision about future. In front of this preoccupation about the future religion reassures. In particular Catholicism, indeed Nietzsche says “The genius of Christianity is to tell man they will never die”. This is the reason why Christianity culture takes over ancient Greece's culture. The illusion of God pervades human existence as a consolation for our worldly and precarious life. Nietzsche, despite he is the son of a pastor he is strictly anti-catholic. He believes catholicism disregards life and pushes human beings believe in paradise, which devalues our mortal life. The christian moral with the promise of ascesis is killing the life of the people and condemning them to nothing. In front of the hardness of life and questions about themselves and nature man invented God. Nietzsche invites man to decide about their destiny and establish their values. Without God life as no reason, and human beings are condemned to wander around without a way, and no place to stop by. Nothing to believe and nothing to hang to. Humans are ontologically lying on nothing.
Nietzsche is according to Feuerbach when he says man project outside their best qualities like love, justice and wisdom in an objectified entity which is God. By attributing these qualities to the outside man pauperize them of this good qualities.
As long as impoverishing the qualities of man, religion promises a better life after death, pushing man to abandon their freedom and will in front of their mortal lives. In these scenery religions, in particular catholicism, deletes the individual by shaping creatures which are unwilling and controllable. Religion does a negative effect on people, it alienates.
Olafur Eliasson believes art has a strong impact outside the museum: he argues art can arouse a strong sensitivity in people. Part of his research concentrates in the relationship between the environment and human beings. He detects a very important function in art and its aim of making people reflect about historical issues. A big issue nowadays is represented by pollution. Plastic pollution, in particular, shows human consumerism and the explotiment of the environment without considering the consequences. One key lecture for pollution might be that one subject pollutes for no sense of community and for individualism. The cult of one-self has become predominates the collectivity and the environment. It means one person can not see the people around.
“Memento Mori”, remember you will die, it’s a proverb from ancient Rome, and existence of mortals can be compared to decomposition and mold. Death is decay, and this condition of getting older, ugly and disappearing scares human beings. But existence in this world is temporary, and our destiny is to follow the natural rules of decay as every other being. We will die in any case, and our aim to dominate nature I believe is because human beings would like to be superior, so immortal.
Another interpretation of pollution can be placed in the domain of human beings on nature. Animals take part of the ecosystem peacefully, but human beings are not animals because they lack instincts, for the simple reason that they can predict them. Plato in the “Protagora” dialogue describes Prometeo, the men who Zeus gives the ability of seeing in advance. According to Plato, prevision is the core structure in man, as they are able to predict what they will need. For the ancient Greeks nature is the immutable structure which is created by no man. On the contrary in the book of “Genesis” God gives man the order to dominate nature, which is created by God for the human beings. I think the catholic culture gives the basis for our presumption to dominate the world, and to gain a superior position in the ecosystem. Human beings tend to domain nature, there it comes the presumption to be immortal. Natural and man materials represent a fatal interaction, where human beings exploit nature. One example of the relationship with human beings and nature is The expression “mother nature”. As a personification of nature, it shows that man associates the power of nature, and its creation and devastation, to a human being.
Gino De Dominicis explains that the culture of progress denies the discontinuity of the origin of the world and it supposes gradual advances of time. This continuous adjustment of nature and technique, as long as being harmful for nature, subdue the minds of human beings, forcing them to follow the only goal of progress.
Rather than accepting an existence without meaning religion represent the need to hold on God, who is the response to our questions “why am I here?” “why and for what do I exist?”. One subject believes in God, or in a bigger entity, to give reality a complete dimension.
To solve the problem of mortality time should be stopped, because time passes and there is death, is what Gino De Dominicis says in his manuscript “Lettera sull’immortalità del corpo”, Letter about the immortality of the body. Gino De Dominicis, artist and philosopher, establishes ways of being immortal with his artistic research, changing our modern perception of time. He pushes the viewer to see another dimension of reality, where the law of physics are not valid and where the connections between perception, movement and duration are banned. As long as revealing the intrinsic desire of immortality of human beings he explains the mistake of trying to evolve within time and space, represented by the artwork “Il tempo, lo spazio, lo sbaglio”, in english: Time, space and the mistake. Beside the rollerblades, which distinguish the person from the animal and represent the aim to shorten time, death arrives anyway. This work synthesizes the sentence of De Dominicis about the relationship between time and space: “Man invented ways to be faster because they can't stop the inexorable flow of time”.
Gino De Dominicis is the theorician of the still universe, where time is considered as a range of disseminated now. In this dimension artworks are forms of eternity which are intelligible.
Time is a characteristic of reality, indeed without time we would not see what’s around. Being is understandable only if we relate it to time and history, as Heidegger says is “Time and Being”.
But If time can not be considered a flow but a dimension of constant changing now, it is impossible to establish a still dimension, a still reality. With no flow of time the contact with reality is lost.
Schopenhauer explains in “The world as will and representation” that thanks to time one subject experiences reality, as human beings don’t see the the objects in the world immediately, but they only see the mental representations of external reality. This book of Schopenhauer changes the idea of reality as everything that is perceived is just a reflection of the mind, which allows conclusions that reality is a secret dimension. Martin Creed, with Work n.81, represents a cube made by many layers, which conceptually represent a stratified reality.
Reality is not absolute, it depends on the subject, and it exist thanks to the subject, as with no experience reality would not exist. Indeed idealist philosophers denies the existence of reality, which is considered as a reflection of the experience inside the subject.
Reality, in any case, depends on each subject convictions, on the experiences: it is not absolute, it changes. Reality depends either on perception, which is different for everyone, indeed our eyes manipulate colors and the appearance of objects. If reality is not absolute and varies then the border between reality and fiction, truth and not is vacuus. According to this statement the world has no sheer informations, indeed how can I tell that what I know is true?
But if existence has no meaning so the informations we get. I do not have univocal and indisputable informations because they are from our world of appearance. Being human we are pushed to know the truth, to a motivation, but our surrounding does not allow us to know absolute questions. It seems I lost informations, as I am not able to decipher them.