ISADORA CANELA
| contemporary art | storytelling | community building
GERMINATIVE UTOPIAS
living installation | 2022
diverse materials
For a colonizing, capitalist and extractivist world that exalts destruction and commodifies existence in its plurality through egocentric and anthropocentrist thinking, the obvious may be precisely what we are missing: humanity is not detached from nature, there is no them and us, we live in a network of interdependencies called Planet Earth.
This reflection, at first so simple and clear, is able to make sense of the logic that sustains the predatory patterns of contemporary society that are so well represented by the mining industry and its serious human and environmental consequences. This is because this logic is anchored in the distancing between man and nature to justify its own existence.
As the indigenous philosopher Ailton Krenak well describes "when we depersonalize the river, the mountain, when we take away from them their senses, considering that this is an exclusive attribute of humans, we release these places to become waste products of industrial and extractive activity."
Inspired by the gardener and naturalist Gilles Clement this work brings plants invading and redesigning the house. To enter the spaces the human beings are imposed the condition of adaptation. In this ludic and at the same time imperative universe the paths are guided by the kingdom Plantae.
It is not by chance that the installation that breaks through the walls predefined to house the "garden" takes place in a house that houses a French colonial garden, impeccably controlled and with the architectural purpose of being seen from above. No, you don't even need to enter, these lives are laid out there for the delight of a Eurocentric aesthetic that desperately yearns for control of the land, of life.
Placed on the altar of intimacy, inside the house, the most private and protected space one can inhabit in the urban conception, the plants invade the space, also provoking to reflect on the right to life and the freedom to exist in the environment that is home. These are rights that the human being seems to have taken exclusively for himself, reducing the rest of the world to an exploitative shelf in a transformation of life into merchandise. In this context the work brings the reddish so present in the killer mining, to be reinvented together with the green, in a living universe.
Gilles Clement says that in the quest to preserve diversity "the first thing I had to do was forget everything I have ever been taught. I have been taught to kill. You had to kill to eliminate anything wrong. Disease, plants, animals insects."
This installation is about a place where utopias sprout and the diversity of life is harvested.
In this context, the works propose to reflect on the network that makes up life and the reallocation of protagonism. At the same time it provokes the audience to reflect and act in the germination of other possible lives.
PROCESS
desire - death - life - anguish - rebirth - planting - colours - smells - desire - memory - cycle - sweat - time - life - doodles - wishes - emails - life - cycle - smell - food - doodles - sweat - water - soil - desire - delight
