Who owns the Earth?

For the third year since the first time ever promoting of a Global Exhibition, there will be a Global Exhibition at the time of Global Dialogue 2008, and at the same site in Nanaimo. It will also be occurring anywhere else in the world along with Global Dialogue 2008. The Global Exhibition is a replacement to the usual Trade Show we have been promoting during each previous Global Dialogue. The Preliminary Program to the Global Exhibition will be the same as that of Global Dialogue 2008.

Preliminary Program for the Global Exibition

Program for Global Dialogue 2008

The Global Exhibition covers many aspects. It can be about creating high profile, highly targeted business and consumer exhibitions, where buyers and suppliers from around the world can come together to do business. In an increasingly digital age, nothing can replace the power of human contact for establishing and maintaining business relations. And with more market leading exhibitions than any other organiser, no organiser delivers more business contacts. We specialize in exhibitions, trade shows, conferences and event planning.

The Global Exhibition must allow multiplicity, diversity and contradiction to exist inside the structure of an exhibition ... a world where the conflicts of globalization are met by the romantic dreams of a new modernity, a new federation of nations.

We divide the Global Exhibition into "platforms" -- conferences and lecture series engaging figures from a wide range of disciplines -- that take place at different communities around the world over the course of the year leading up to the installation in a large Global Exhibition in one country.

Getting to know one another and ourselves as one humanity.

Unity in diversity

The Global Exhibition must allow multiplicity, diversity and contradiction to exist inside the structure of an exhibition ... a world where the conflicts of globalization are met by the romantic dreams of a new modernity, a federation of nations.

I would certainly plan to promote many aspects such as:

1.     Earth Government and its Global Constitution
2.     Earth flag
3.     Celebration of Life Day
4.     the Global Community
5.     the Global Dialogue
6.     the Portal of the Global Community
7.     the Global Community Citizenship (every participant would become a global citizen)
8.     the Certified Corporate Global Community Citizenship (CCGCC)
9.     the ECO Award and have an Award Ceremonies
10.     actions for the good of all as per the Statement of Rights, Responsibilities, and Accountabilities of the Global Community citizens
11.     a global co-operation between nations
12.     Humanity's new vision of the world
13.     global societal sustainability
14.     global governance and Earth management
15.     the Global Community overall picture (6 world regions approach and hundreds of issues)
16.     the global life-support systems
17.     the Global Community Assessment Centre (GCAC)
18.     all educational, cultural, political, social and religious aspects

Nothing in contemporary art speaks so directly to all of these issues as the large scale exhibition as well as any number of other biennials that cropped up around the world during the past decade. The Global Exhibition, endowed with a transnational circuitry, assumed the unique position of reflecting the idea of a world government. Establishing a new curatorial class able to bring artists together from wide-ranging geographic and cultural points, the large-scale exhibition alterd the kinds of visibility afforded artists and so fundamentally changed the conditions of artistic discussion, ultimately forwarding the position that no show could, or should, presume an all-encompassing thesis--at least not in conventional terms and form. Rather, the exhibition extends through time and across geography to include panels, lectures, publications, performances, and public works that fall welt beyond the parameters of the traditional show, and lies well beyond the grasp of any single viewer. In turn, these exhibitions have come to marshal the forces of any number of disciplines, including art history and theory, which leads one to the question of whether the critical function is in some sense migrating from critic to curator, or indeed whether such nominal distinctions are useful at all. At this level, I think that many people correspond to the economic, social, and cultural figure of the 'artist' as it has been constituted in the modern age."

Earth Government aims at replacing the United Nations. That is truly a Revolution. If true revolution changes the rules on how to change the rules, then we must arrive at terms that transform the very concept of the exhibition. Although a few criteria for inclusion based on identity and geopolitics have developed, the art world is still heavily commodified, and an artist without a sales (and therefore publicity) base in the developed word--or a curatorial support network in the world's "periphery" -- is not going to be included. Further, the new terms of engagement may be geopolitical, but work from the "First World" must have a powerful aesthetic surplus or an antically unrecognizable political dimension in order to gain access. So many artists are doing serious work with directly political themes but do not see themselves included in these shows -- and would not expect themselves to be-since the public visiting such exhibitions is not their audience of interest. Granted, the flattened terrain of modern communications is bringing the interlocking worlds of art production and display into closer proximity, so it would not be correct to claim that work with direct political address will always be left out. But is it still necessary to point out that while "geopolitical" can have the cover of a prefix to cover its political nature, the politics in question bad better be far, far away?

The art world -- a congeries of professional services along the lines of dentists, doctors, and professors on the one hand and high-end showrooms like ear dealerships on the other--consistently offers the modernizing elite a compass for understanding cultural and social "facts" as they impinge on their consciousness. The global exhibitions serve as grand collectors and translators of subjectivities under the latest phase of globalization. But as we move between disparate colonialist eras, what is plain about the present moment is that there is no dearth of images of the colonized Other in public view, despite only a little more insight -- and that quite momentary -- into the interior lives of others than in the previous colonial moment. The elite in question, especially in the North and in developed industrial and postindustrial nations (which includes, perhaps, the antipodean South), may have a taste for edification via these new Crystal Palace expositions. And why not?

Germain

Germain Dufour
Project Officer and Chairman
Global Dialogue 2008