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28.02.2025 — 01.08.2025Mount Analogue Observatory
28.02.2025 — 01.08.2025
Drawing by René Daumal, depicting the curvature of space around Mount Analogue.
“Because of it, everything takes place as if Mount Analogue did not exist.”
Mount Analogue Observatory
Curated by zero sharp
Maximilian Gillessen & Anton Stuckardt
In René Daumal’s novel Mount Analogue, a group of mountaineers sets off in search for an invisible yet geographically locatable mountain – one that is as real as it is metaphysical. This mountain represents the absolute link between heaven and earth, gods and men, serving as an analogy for the ascent toward higher levels of consciousness. However, the expedition reaches only the foot of the mountain. The manuscript ends abruptly, in the middle of a sentence, with a comma that invites endless interpretations. Since its posthumous publication by Daumal’s wife, Vera, in 1952, this ‘novel of symbolically authentic non-Euclidean adventures in mountain climbing’ has continued to captivate musicians, artists, writers, architects, explorers, literary scholars, and spiritual seekers.
Often interpreted as a journey towards oneself, Mount Analogue is also an encyclopedic pastiche, a collage of diverse genres and forms: myth, philosophical speculation, travel journal, scientific treatise, poetic confession. The exhibition will explore this other dimension of the novel. By examining its numerous reflections, references, and subtexts, a singular history of ideas takes shape within the kaleidoscope of Daumal’s seemingly naive writing style. It unveils an investigation into the metaphors, models, and mechanisms of thought, the realm of symbols and values, mathematical theorems and geographical problems, the threshold between the visible and invisible, mythologies and facts: an investigation that permeates the text, from its central themes to even its most minor clauses.
Or in the words of the narrator: ‘All of us keep a fairly extensive collection of diagrams and inscriptions in our heads; and we have the illusion we are 'thinking' the loftiest scientific and philosophical thoughts when, by chance, a few of them fall into a pattern which seems neither too conventional nor too novel. It happens as if by the effect of draughts or cross currents, or simply by the result of their own constant shiftings, like the Brownian movement which displaces particles suspended in a liquid.’
Mount Analogue Observatory is curated by zero sharp (Maximilian Gillessen & Anton Stuckardt). Zero sharp is a Berlin-based publishing imprint that focuses on translatig literature that goes beyond conventional narrtive forms. Amongst others they have published René Daumal’s Mount Analogue, La Grande Beuverie and Mugle, several works by Raymond Roussel, the first German-language anthology of Jean-Pierre Brisset and a German edition of Michel Carrouges’s Les Machines célibataires. For the Alphabetum they have previously curated the exhibition Roussel/Brisset/Duchamp – Engineers of the Infra-thin.
Curated by zero sharp
Maximilian Gillessen & Anton Stuckardt
Exhibition
28.02.2025 — 01.08.2025
Opening
28.02.2025, 19:00
Location
West Den Haag in the former American Embassy, Lange Voorhout 102, The Hague
In René Daumal’s novel Mount Analogue, a group of mountaineers sets off in search for an invisible yet geographically locatable mountain – one that is as real as it is metaphysical. This mountain represents the absolute link between heaven and earth, gods and men, serving as an analogy for the ascent toward higher levels of consciousness. However, the expedition reaches only the foot of the mountain. The manuscript ends abruptly, in the middle of a sentence, with a comma that invites endless interpretations. Since its posthumous publication by Daumal’s wife, Vera, in 1952, this ‘novel of symbolically authentic non-Euclidean adventures in mountain climbing’ has continued to captivate musicians, artists, writers, architects, explorers, literary scholars, and spiritual seekers.
Often interpreted as a journey towards oneself, Mount Analogue is also an encyclopedic pastiche, a collage of diverse genres and forms: myth, philosophical speculation, travel journal, scientific treatise, poetic confession. The exhibition will explore this other dimension of the novel. By examining its numerous reflections, references, and subtexts, a singular history of ideas takes shape within the kaleidoscope of Daumal’s seemingly naive writing style. It unveils an investigation into the metaphors, models, and mechanisms of thought, the realm of symbols and values, mathematical theorems and geographical problems, the threshold between the visible and invisible, mythologies and facts: an investigation that permeates the text, from its central themes to even its most minor clauses.
Or in the words of the narrator: ‘All of us keep a fairly extensive collection of diagrams and inscriptions in our heads; and we have the illusion we are 'thinking' the loftiest scientific and philosophical thoughts when, by chance, a few of them fall into a pattern which seems neither too conventional nor too novel. It happens as if by the effect of draughts or cross currents, or simply by the result of their own constant shiftings, like the Brownian movement which displaces particles suspended in a liquid.’
Mount Analogue Observatory is curated by zero sharp (Maximilian Gillessen & Anton Stuckardt). Zero sharp is a Berlin-based publishing imprint that focuses on translatig literature that goes beyond conventional narrtive forms. Amongst others they have published René Daumal’s Mount Analogue, La Grande Beuverie and Mugle, several works by Raymond Roussel, the first German-language anthology of Jean-Pierre Brisset and a German edition of Michel Carrouges’s Les Machines célibataires. For the Alphabetum they have previously curated the exhibition Roussel/Brisset/Duchamp – Engineers of the Infra-thin.