Opening September 30th 12 a.m
Visits: Tuesday to Sunday and holidays from 10am to 7pm, with previous reservation at autoentrada.com - Admission: $250. Wednesdays: free. The current global sanitary emergency installs in different ways our gaze on the environment and on the natural surroundings, namely what conventional artistic tropes call the landscape, which is undergoing a process of re-signification in these days. How did we get here? How did societies operate on the natural environment? How was the landscape re-signified within the cultural processes that gradually occurred? These are some of the questions the visual arts try to respond to: they undertake, revise, expand and offer perspectives that once contributed to the delimitation of a "national landscape" that operated within an imaginary under construction, and that now propose alternative representations to continue reflecting on present and possible futures. We know that for several centuries, human societies have been significantly modifying the natural environment through the extraction of resources, which has had a major impact on the planet. In this sense, and thinking with Donna J. Haraway, the notions of anthropocene and capitalism (capitalocene) appear inextricably linked when considering this "new era" as one marked by the harmful presence of the dictates of capital over other needs. (Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene) In Bruno Latour's words, the " new climatic regime" in which we live reveals the total disconnection between the range, nature, and the scale of the phenomena on the one hand, and on the other the array of emotions, reflection habits and feelings that would be needed to deal with such a crisis, not just acting in response to it, but merely devoting more than passing attention to it" (Waiting for Gaia. Composing the Common World through Arts and Politics). Perhaps in search of a reconnection, the arts are part of the spaces that attempt to echo these issues, to draw attention to them and to propose alternatives. In this respect, since 2016 the BIENALSUR international open call has been featuring projects linked to such concerns, which in 2020 became the trope that marked the majority of the presentations in an attempt to think about, challenge or illuminate aspects of our state of planetary emergency. To speak of landscape within the field of the arts refers nostalgically (and from a Kantian perspective) to a type of encounter with nature in which the subject is ecstatic before its immensity, vis-á-vis what is known as "the sublime". However, in the face of this historical perspective, the artists' gaze reveals - not without certain melancholy - another type of encounter with nature, one that alludes to its control and exploitation, which is bringing about its degradation and its end. In this sense, and because we believe in the capacity of the symbolic to confront us with everyday reality in other manners and to trigger other instances of reflection, this exhibition has been conceived as a compilation of numerous partialities, of "details" of a larger universe, with the idea that together they may be capable of inviting us to rethink the ways in which our lives are linked to those of the nature we are part of. The tension between historical works housed in the collection of the Museo Emilio Caraffa and contemporary works seeks to promote a clash of perspectives that offer the possibility of activating those pasts in a present that demands the construction of ecological awareness from a contemporary humanism. Diana B. Wechsler
Photo: Misterios, Christian-Boltanski.
