✦ Saturn Devouring a Future Where the Last Cathedral Is a Mouth
A myth reprocessed into ontology. A cathedral that no longer aspires, only swallows.
Saturn no longer rips flesh. He sorts bodies. He calculates risk. He administers grief as excess.
This work theorizes vital austerity: the machinic stripping of ambiguity, refusal, and memory in the name of optimization. Drawing from Rubens’ Saturn, the colonial ledgers of the VOC, and the ontological machinery of Barry Smith’s Basic Formal Ontology, it stages a genealogy of sovereign violence across aesthetics, warfare, and software.
Saturn is re-read here not as mythic father, but as an epistemic regime. His mouth is an interface. His scream is now a spreadsheet.
Structured across recursive zones: from Lot’s Wife to DARPA kill chains, from Sergio De Loof’s opulencia sudaca to the chromatic insurgency of Freddy Mamani, this work refuses linear temporality and archival closure. It proposes a methodology of mourning, not resolution; recursion, not progress.
This is not art history. This is ontological archaeology.
Note for curators, editors, publishers:
Theory as structure. Grief as classification. Saturn as administrator.
This project operates as a speculative framework and commissionable structure for theorizing vital austerity; that is, the next phase of necropolitical governance in which life is not extinguished, but computationally minimized. Saturn no longer devours in myth. He parses, optimizes, discards. His hunger is epistemic.
Staged at the convergence of Rubens’ Saturn, colonial bookkeeping, and the ontological regimes of Barry Smith, this work traces the sovereign logic that punishes grief, criminalizes ambiguity, and renders excess illegible. Through a recursive visual and conceptual methodology, it draws a throughline from Lot’s wife to DARPA kill chains; from Dark Enlightenment ideology to Freddy Mamani’s chromatic insurgency; from De Loof’s opulence to the spreadsheet as mouth.
This is not a static essay. It is a research engine, already structured for:
- → exhibition frameworks
- → lectures
- → speculative seminars
- → interdisciplinary publications
The cathedral is a mouth. But not all mouths devour.
Some refuse. Some archive. Some sing.
→ Commission script, curatorial abstract, and long-form dossier available upon request.
To inquire further or to receive fragmentary dispatches from future iterations, see below.