LET’S DESTROY THE EARTH BUT KEEP HUMANS by Keith Farquhar @ LAVAPIU

LET’S DESTROY THE EARTH BUT KEEP HUMANS an exhibition by Keith Farquhar

14th July – 14th September 2023

curated by Celeste

The end of the world is a perfect ride

in my heart explodes the desire of a party

The end of the world what a sweet misfortune

I’m feeling sick, my head is exploding

Ciao Ciao by La rappresentante di lista

On the 14th of July Celeste will launch LET’S DESTROY THE EARTH BUT KEEP HUMANS an exhibition by Keith Farquhar (Edinburgh, 1969) and last instalment of the four interventions of LAVAPIU 2022-23. Embracing the post-apocalyptic connotation of the project, Farquhar presents a work originally made in 2003, revisited in the form of a double vinyl sticker, which becomes actual again.

LET’S DESTROY THE EARTH BUT KEEP HUMANS comes from a series of collages assembled on the early 2000s “very quickly, intuitively and irreverently” and in 2011 was included in DYSTOPIA an exhibition curated by Alexis Vaillant based on the short story written by Mark von Schlegell, a sci-fi writer, at the CAPC, Musée d’art Contemporain of Bordeaux. In the collage Keith assembles a black and white picture of a young Joan Bakewell, a popular British journalist since the Sixties, with a hand drawn speech bubble which seems to come out of her lips. Like in a nouvelle vogue movie, the women smokes a cigarette with a seductive and confident attitude. Yet the message in the speech bubble creates a contrast with the image of Joan Bakewell. Farqhuar borrowed the message from a drawing of a friend’s son: during an enormous space war, an evil captain gives order to destroy the earth and take the humans as prisoners, without killing them. Twenty years later this call seems quite paradoxical. With a planet brought to collapse by its more infesting inhabitants – the humans – who would have had the guts to spare us? Nevertheless, characters such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the like, manage to monetise on the extinction, materialising the possibility of a migration into the universe, seeking new planets to colonise.

In order to accompany Keith Farquhar’s exhibition Celeste invited the philosopher Franco “Bifo” Berardi to write a text. The author has kindly accepted. The piece he wrote is titled To desert the desert.

LET’S DESTROY THE EARTH BUT KEEP HUMANS by Keith Farquhar. Exhibition views from LAVAPIU, Teramo 2023 © Celeste.