Abstract

According to Zygmunt Bauman, the “natural” waste generation brought about by progress is now extending to human beings in global cartography. Human waste is in otherness territories, outside the borders, and it is above all the distressing result of a perverse combination between uncontrolled profit and cultural hypocrisy. We can see a similar phenomenon in contemporary art: the expansion of mega-corporations matches the expansion of mega-exhibitions a bit everywhere around the world, and particularly in the “outside” territories, within an import-export logic that has not much to do with its initial assumptions. The reaction to this kind of situation is possible albeit disenchanted. The analysis carried out by Claire Bishop, from the theoretical and political premises of such antagonism, allows for the existence of a different way, the one that is shared by the experimental condition of desanaesthesia, that is, unveiling fractures with no relief restrictions. While it strengthens the ever desired approach to the real, it naturally moves away from the pragmatic normalization and standardization of liberal expansibility; it openly chooses a diverse condition instead: the one that favours desire.