FGA#38 What life could be

What life could be / the ambivalence of success is an oral history about place, living as an artist, being contemporaries and sharing a time frame with specific problems and enchantments. Photos, quotes, maps and documents, artists’ contributions and essays, are inserted into the flow of the conversations. Ten white pages are occupied by a scent.

In 2018 we started revisiting people, topics and places that featured in FGA’s 2008 The Swiss Issue, and soon focussed on cooperative forms of thinking, living and working together. Some good people in Zurich, Geneva and St-Imier, Glarus, Aarau, Lausanne, Rolle, Biel and Tschlin, shared their knowledge and experiences about proposals and counter-proposals from ancient times, and from the 1920’s, 50’s, 70’s, 80’s and now.

The cities we live in are changing rapidly. Their proclaimed success excludes many from affordable space to live and work. “To survive as a singular artist, we must organise collectively”, Pascal Gielen said. In this issue SciFi author P.M. asks: “How would you really like to live? What do you really want to do? In what kind of society would you feel comfortable?”

FGA adds: What could life be and what can art contribute to that? What can spur and support the possibility of imagening, building and living such proposals, and keep them outside the market? One co-op law from the 1920’s supports this idea, but Terrence McKenna sees the root of the matter underground, and suggests it is the largest rhizome of psychedelic mushrooms on earth that first sparked the collective imagination of what life could be.