'You Can’t Stand in the Way of Progress'

A significant aspect of the Holobiont Project concerns expanding our already existing networks. We are currently looking for new partners in Iceland and Norway specifically, though our interests are not limited to these two countries.

Back in 2012 the art project Angeli Novi produced the film 'You Can't Stand in the Way of Progress' as a part of a larger solo exhibition in the Museum of Living Art, Reykjavik, September 29 - December 2, 2012. Much of the footage in the film was shot in and around Athens and the topics are just as relevant today as in 2012. The project brought together local, international and Icelandic individuals and artists and is representative of the kind of collaboration and networking which the Holobiont Project wishes to accommodate. Nik Karlsson worked on several logistical aspects of the film.

More info about the project from the artists can be found below.

-- My wing is ready to fly
I would rather turn back
For had I stayed mortal time
I would have had little luck.
-- Gerhard Scholem, "Angelic Greetings"

There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.

XV

The consciousness of exploding the continuum of history is peculiar to the revolutionary classes in the moment of their action. The Great Revolution introduced a new calendar. The day on which the calendar started functioned as a historical time-lapse camera. And it is fundamentally the same day which, in the shape of holidays and memorials, always returns. The calendar does not therefore count time like clocks. They are monuments of a historical awareness, of which there has not seemed to be the slightest trace for a hundred years. Yet in the July Revolution an incident took place which did justice to this consciousness. During the evening of the first skirmishes, it turned out that the clock-towers were shot at independently and simultaneously in several places in Paris. An eyewitness who may have owed his inspiration to the rhyme wrote at that moment:

Qui le croirait! on dit,
qu'irrités contre l'heure
De nouveaux Josués
au pied de chaque tour,
Tiraient sur les cadrans
pour arrêter le jour.

[Who would've thought! As though
Angered by time's way
The new Joshuas
Beneath each tower, they say
Fired at the dials
To stop the day.]

-- Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History"

https://youtu.be/zzQNgL8x59I
http://www.angelinovi.com