Opening September 14th
Within the context of San José Ciudad Paisaje, a project for the sustainable transformation of the Costa Rican capital under the direction of Ricardo Ramón Jarne and the curatorial work of Blanca de la Torre, artist Juan Zamora presents his new site-specific project entitled The Possibility of Emergence in the Shade of a Buzzard.
To address the sort of warp that the eco-social crisis entails, and in particular to focus on the loss of biodiversity, Juan Zamora departs from the scientific concept of emergence - in reference to those properties and/or processes of a system that cannot be reduced to the properties and/or processes of the parts that constitute it - and holds that "the whole is more than the sum of its parts". The term emergence has gained popularity with the rise of complexity sciences and plays a fundamental role in the philosophy of biology and the arts, given its implications for the perception of human beings and their place in the ecosystem. In order to analyze some of these emerging phenomena, the artist looks at the importance of the idea of the collective in the natural environment, as is the case of the architectures created by termite colonies, flocks of birds or shoals of fish.
The two works that make up the project are based on the figure of the buzzard, a bird that the artist adopts as an allegory of the "sustainable", given the work of cleaning up the environment that it undertakes, and whose population is drastically declining due to anthropogenic action.
Thinking about the world at a turning point on the brink of collapse involves a vision from and to the collective. This collaborative empathy has to extend beyond the human - in this case, exemplified by the tree and the buzzard - as the only way to inhabit other realities and possibilities of coexistence. Thus, this exhibition calls for the collaboration that every process of social transformation requires. An appeal to cooperation to confront the eco-social crisis entails the discussion of de-carbonization, the circular economy and environmental justice. It involves mitigation, placing life at the centre, and believing in the construction of a new post-fossil collective awareness.
Blanca de la Torre
General Coordination: José Eduardo Montero (CRI)
