Lightness is beautiful. It is the image of grace, agility, luminosity, the essence of buoyant clouds and billowing silks. It is good for the spirit and good for the environment. In theory, the lighter an object is, the less energy it consumes during its existence and the lighter its impact is. Nonetheless, even apparently immaterial things carry a burden, at times a heavy one. The Internet’s illusion of weightlessness—human activities, objects, and interactions dissolving into bits and traveling through the air—crashes when confronted by the heavy ecological footprint necessary to sustain its infrastructure.
In its tantalizing aesthetics, lightness can obfuscate the harm it conceals, blurring judgment and growing into an unhealthy fetish. Even the lightness of being epitomized by the novelist Milan Kundera––a freedom of spirit unencumbered by the ballast of reality and negativity that weigh most humans down––becomes unbearable as perceiving one’s life without the weight of meaning can lead to feelings of debilitating triviality and inconsequence.
Here are some more of the questions that we will ask: Is lightness inherently better than weightiness? What is stronger, a lighter or a heavier material? And what about living things? Are lighter beings more resilient? Can a focus on lightness help us to address the climate crisis? Does lightness imply a lack of thoughtfulness? Are there moments in which a heavy burden is welcome? What drives contemporary culture’s fetishization of lightness, from “heroin chic” to Ozempic? Is the awareness of one’s irrelevance freeing, or a burden unto itself?
The evening will commence with a brief introduction by Paola Antonelli, followed by equally brief presentations by – here in alphabetical order:
Ariel Ekblaw: is the founding CEO of Aurelia Institute and GP for Aurelia Foundry Fund, a hybrid space architecture research institute and venture incubation studio.
Sonam Kachru: is an Assistant Professor in Religious Studies at Yale University specializing in the history of premodern Buddhist and Indian philosophy and literature.
Shannon Mattern: is the Penn Presidential Compact Professor of Media Studies and History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
Sarah Oppenheimer: is an architectural manipulator. Oppenheimer creates circulatory pathways that establish unexpected kinesthetic and visual relays between bodies and buildings.
Glaucio Paulino: is the Margareta Engman Augustine Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and affiliated with the Materials Institute at Princeton University.
Insoo Suh: is the director of minimally invasive endocrine surgery at NYU Langone with a focus on innovative surgical techniques and alternative treatment technologies.
The presentations will be accompanied by the screening of a series of short videos cut specifically for Salon 49 by: Pamela Ayo Yetunda, Ed van Hinte, Daniel Barber, Jonathan Sterne, and Nuria Garcia Masip, among others.
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The comments and opinions expressed in this video are those of the speakers alone, and do not represent the views of The Museum of Modern Art, its personnel, or any artist.
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