Europe is a soil, not a machine

It just so happened that in August 2005, at the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, I had been asked to think up a closing event for “Making Things Public”, an international exhibition I had curated on the necessity to renew politics by allowing it to be, as we said, object-oriented.1 That period corresponded, alas, with the French rejection of the European Constitution in May 2005. Already at the time I had been struck by the strange inability of my friends and colleagues to speak strongly not only on behalf of the European Union as a complex institutional machine, but also of Europe as ground, land, earth, a soil, a history, a material thing, an issue; in brief, a reality as obvious as what attached each of them to their own country. Why were they so timid?