The narrative of risk is a narrative of irony. This narrative deals with the involuntary satire, the optimistic futility, with which the highly developed institutions of modern society - science, state, business and military - attempt to anticipate what can not be anticipated. Socrates has left us to make sense of puzzling sentence: I know that I know nothing. The fatal irony, into which scientific-technical society plunges us is, as consequence of its perfection, much more radical: we don’t know what it is we don’t know – but from this dangers arise, which threaten mankind!
Ulrich Beck, «Living in the world risk society» in Economy and Society, Volume 35, Number 3, August 2006, London, pp. 329-345. (t.a.)
Catagreena & Raquel Pedro
The contemplation of risk
(detail), 20s. loop, 2015
From Contemplation Rock, Glacier Point (1385) by Eadweard Muybridge, 1872, albumen stereograph, Collection of California Historical Society.
Video, part of the installation Contemplação do Risco (The Contemplation of Risk), (table 2) in Risco e Incerteza (Risk and Uncertainty) an exhibition by Catagreena and Raquel Pedro which took place at Galeria Municipal Palácio Ribamar, in Algés, from 7 to 24 May 2015.
