with Paulina Owczarek on baritone saxophone
and Lena Czerniawska Drawing
photo Christina Marx
Human. Error.1
Error
has turned animals into men; might truth be capable of turning man
into an animal again?” Friedrich Nietzche, Human
all too Human
In the online poll on debate.org over
the question “Are humans the greatest mistake made by nature?”
53% of respondents said ‘Yes’, 47% voted ‘No’.
Popular science
media report that “‘500-Million-Year-Old
'Mistake' Led to Humans”.
In many myths of
creation, trickster – an undefinable cultural figure or force -
creates by mistake. “Trickster creates through destruction and
succeeds through failure .“ He “dabbles in the creation of the
world that will be and provides food, tools and clothing for the
people that will inhabit the world”. Trickster is also a powerful
transformer, but seems not to be aware of it. (Larry Ellis,Trickster:
Shaman of the Liminal)
In the moves of creating and
recreating and perfecting ourselves, our bodies, and the world we
are inevitably prone to lapses, unforeseeable consequences, gaps,
omissions, chance moves – that might all be categorized as
mistakes.
In
our piece we want to ask about the nature of mistake. Can we say for
certain that something is or was a mistake? Is a mistake a valid
category at all if we cannot see the wider picture and the far off
consequences? We want to play with the idea that if human race is a
result of a tiny genetic misstep, then who or what would human be if
500 million years ago something went differently ? Would we have
tails and claws? And amphibians would have their underwater cities
and croak programming language?
We
are conditioned to experience mistakes as something wrong, something
to be ashamed of, something that we expect punishment for, yet we are
utterly unable to foresee the consequences of our failures, and we
forget about the fact that they are crucial for learning. When
we make mistakes, we shrug and say that we are human. As bats are
batty
and slugs are sluggish, our own species is synonymous with screwing
up.
Kathryn
Schulz, Being
Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
All erroneous ideas, all poisonous
weeds, all ghosts and monsters, must be subjected to criticism; in no
circumstance should they be allowed to spread unchecked.
Mao
Zedong, Speech at the Chinese Communist Party’s National Conference
on Propaganda Work (March 12, 1957), in The
Little Red Book,
1st pocket edition, pp. 26-27
Drawing:
Lena Czerniawska, Playing baritone saxophone: Paulina Owczarek,
Moving: Anna Bogdanowicz
