DYSOCISION, CHANGE, RECONCILIATION
From the exotic body to the post-exotic body

Post-structuralism, Post-ideology, Post-Fordism, Postcolonialism, Post-Internet are among the definitions we most often find in relation to current artistic practices. It would seem that, for several decades now, the world has been undergoing a phase of rejection of all the theories that animated the cultural debates of the past century, and, moreover, we have the impression that, between the latter part of the second half of the W twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, this demand for redefinition of current cultural, social, economic and communicative phenomena has accelerated somewhat.
However, this urgency for redefinition has not resulted in many new definitions, but rather in a proliferation of 'postisms’, which could be described as attempts to move beyond a concept while noting its subsequent relationship to it. If, on the one hand, this trend seems to resonate with the famous phrase of the American conceptualist Douglas Huebler, who said: „The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I don’t want to add more”, so why add more definitions in a world that is already almost saturated with them? On the other hand, the tendency to create postisms can also be seen as a ploy to ensure a kind of cultural continuity with previous categories.

In the early 1990s, the French writer known by the pseudonym Antoine Volodine described the literary genre he had invented in an interview as 'post-exotic’. Thus, another post-ism that has been quite recurrent in his writings since then.
Volodin has tried several times to clarify the meaning of the term without being able to explain it completely. „Post-exoticism” seems to be a kind of container of words, containing the most diverse definitions, but above all a literary ploy to provide a set of references capable of structuring and legitimising Volodin’s fictional work. Post-exotic literature is literature from another place, in which the distant has not so much a spatial valence but rather an identity valence, and the notion of otherness, which underpins the very idea of exoticism, manifests itself more as a multiplication of individual identities and as a form of alienation in itself
rather than as a form of alienation towards towards the other. This literary genre does not refer to representations of other latitudes, but to representations of fictional places whose fidelity ensures the creation of identities and the multiple overlapping of temporal lines.
Evidently, Volodin’s post-exoticism has little to do with the notion of exoticism as an aesthetic category prevalent in the colonial era, but rather with the ancient meaning of the Greek word exo 'outside’ or exôtikos 'stranger, outside’. However, this strangeness appears in relation to the self.
Indeed, the very notion of exoticism today would seem almost meaningless or, in any case, associated with another century. In this latest phase of globalisation, which some specialists have begun to call „post-global”, an age of migration, cultural hybridisation, constant mobility, connectivity and virtual networks covering the entire surface of the planet, the concept of exoticism still makes sense. ? On closer inspection, there is no longer even an 'externality’ as another space in relation to the hyper-connected global system. When we think of the notion of 'outside’, we increasingly associate it with the idea of being off the grid, and thus with an offline state.
Whereas today, the notion of 'reachability’ is considered in general terms, in terms of virtual accessibility and connection rather than geographical distance. The idea of unknown and mysterious territories is a mirage of the pre-modern past. Today, nothing escapes the virtual network that surrounds the planet, and social networks remind us that there are a growing number of users on all continents who use the same applications and the same virtual tools every day.
Thus, the one who is far away is no longer the one who is at a different longitude, but rather the one who is forward or backward on the timeline. The notion of otherness seems to manifest itself more forcefully when we are in the domain of temporal distances, and what was once an 'exotic fascination’ or predilection for the exotic is now manifested rather in relation to a mythologised past, or simply an idealised one in which we are others. In the present era, one could say that the post-exotic state is one that divides humanity as a whole, since all the peoples of the earth are now in a more or less advanced stage of modernity. In light of these considerations, Volodin’s literary invention goes beyond the boundaries of narrative fiction, taking on a much broader meaning that can encompass the fields of artistic creation and aesthetics. Applied to the field of contemporary visual arts, the definition of post-exoticism proves particularly effective and useful in identifying a set of artistic attitudes or stances, as the curator Harald Szeemann might have defined them, which are united by a fascination with the phenomenon. dimension of alienation from the present and which have grown out of the assimilation and overcoming of postmodern narrative. Post-Exotic artists are united by an approach characterised by a tendency to reclaim pre-modern aesthetic forms in order to rework them according to contemporary taste. Rejecting the critical or parodistic spirit that animated postmodern artists, the past is seen as a mythical time, but above all as a key to understanding contemporary malaise.

There are many such artists whose work could be described as post-exotic. In this aesthetic category, we could include the Shinto-futurist works of the Japanese artist Mariko Mori, the sculpture-mansions dressed in nineteenth-century costumes of waxed fabric by the Anglo-Nigerian Yinka Shonibare, the installations of liquidised carpets by Faig Ahmed, the work of the Egyptian Moataz Nasr, who constantly mixes traditional aesthetic references with current socio-political issues, the fetish sculptures of Pascale Marthine Tayou, but also among artists who could be described as 'Western’, Jan Fabre and his constant aesthetic and formal references to the Flemish Renaissance, Berlinde De Bruyckere and his installations that refer to the tradition of Vanitas, the paintings of Nicola Samori, which bear witness to his obsession with realism and the dark tones of Italian Baroque painting. So it is no longer a question of rejecting the avant-garde or the principle of innovation at all costs, but a conscious and well-determined desire to reactivate certain artistic values and aesthetic concepts of the pre-modern era. To contribute to the establishment of a kind of reconnection of multiple human identities out of place in the chaos of the post-global world. During the 4th edition of the Land Art Biennial in Mongolia, one of the founders of the female collective Nomadic Wave, the young artist Eya Gambat, reflected on her identity and that of the Mongolian nation, which has been put to the test for a long time. The Soviet period. After the attempted cultural substitution by the communist government, which for decades tried to impose socialist values on the country, Mongolia today faces the urgent need to 'rebuild’ its own cultural identity. Eya Gambat, who for several years has been trying to metaphorically repair the tear created during the Soviet period through her artwork, said that she often felt like a 'tourist’ in her own culture. The sense of detachment from one’s origins, one’s culture and the past of one’s people creates a state of otherness of the individual, which seems to be shared by many artists across the five continents. This powerlessness also seems to be the source of the demand to re-appropriate lost time, which also manifests itself in this demand for attachment to pre-modern identity values. The question of the body and artistic performance is part of a post-exotic aesthetic in connection with the theme of individual and collective identity. Above all, it is important to return to the notion of the 'exotic body’, which by definition is the body of the other, in which we find qualities that fascinate us because they differ from our own, because they are perceived as distant, atypical. And which remind us of other places, other
latitudes or lost paradises. The exotic body is a passive body. It is on it that the gaze of the Western traveller, the anthropologist, the coloniser rests. Often in the colonial imagination we find the motif of the exotic body treated as an erotic object [1]. But as we noted at the beginning of this text, 'looking at the other’, as a form of aesthetic escape from the banality of everyday life, has almost no relevance today. This 'other’ is not only among us, but within our multiracial societies, the other is often us. Moreover, in the post-global world, the non-Western citizen also looks to the West, creating forms of cultural resilience such as the concept of Westernism, often mentioned by Indonesian artist Eddy Susanto. The proliferation of perspectives and 'looks’ also ruptures the idea of the exotic contributing to its definitive exhaustion.

On the other hand, the concept of the post-exotic body is still unexplored. How then could we define it? The post-exotic body is also the body of another, but the other is itself the subject, i.e. the possessor of this body. So it is again a field of projection and fantasy, but it concerns other identities of the subject itself. In the concrete case, it is the performer’s body that projects itself into another time and dimension in search of an aesthetic and formal reconnection with its multiple identities. The post-exotic body is an active body that imposes itself as an exotic object. In terms of the corpus-memory theorised by Jerzy Grotowski, the post-exotic body stores individual and collective memories of the past, as well as plastic and aesthetic values, often attached to a particular community or locality. It is the body of this kind of artist that becomes simultaneously anthropologist and shaman, artistic object and generator of social bonds, such as the Nigerian Jelili Atiku, whose participatory performances resemble complex Yoruba rituals, Romina de Novellis, whose performance processions are inspired by the popular traditions of southern Italy, Nikhila Chopra, whose performances often explore the trauma of the individual’s uprooting in postcolonial India. The post-exotic body is thus not only a visual tool capable of depicting the artist’s invisible journey, but also a territory for the artist’s journey through time, a space for catharsis and reconciliation of the traumas of modernity.

Valentina Gioia Levy