Home 2023 (EN)

RADICAL NATURE:
The Roots of Land + Water

Dario Invernizzi CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Director of the Invernizzi Laboratory and Studio in Montevideo, Dario is also co-founder of  Análoga, specializing in the research of historical photographic processes. He is a master printer and artistic producer with a degree from the National School of Fine Arts (UDELAR / R.O.U). He has headed the production team for CAMPO Artfest since its launch in 2017, and, this year, as Creative Director, has expanded the festival’s vision working alongside each participating artist.

Patricia Bentancur CURATOR-AT-LARGE

Patricia Bentancur is an independent curator. She lives between Uruguay and France. She has developed research projects such as Art Dishonor and Violence, together with Luis Camnitzer; Archive/Clemente Padin; Gender Issues in Latin America, together with Ana Tiscornia. Curator of the Venice Biennale, she is currently Curator at-large for institutions in Uruguay and abroad. For this edition of CAMPO Artfest, she curated the CAMPO AIR December artist-in-residence cohort.

BANG BANG! SAPIENS by Patricia Bentancur

This edition of CAMPO Artfest focuses on the interconnection between practices of visual culture and the emergence of environmental issues. Nature, water, and land; the origins and restitution of subaltern knowledge. Ancestral wisdom, present excesses, and ignorances are part of the spectrum that will be exposed through visual practices this time.

All the artists participating in this CAMPO Artfest form a horizontal and interdisciplinary work team in an experience of exchanges and mutual learning. It’s a process where ideas, methodologies, and complementary knowledge are shared.

The five artists who are in residence during the month of December contribute to the diversity of their cultures, origins, and knowledge based on their practice processes. Collectively, they build a panorama that includes the recording of these issues and the consequences of a nature radicalized by extractivism and the speculative arrogance of a radical Capitalocene. It’s a crisis of hyper-consumption that disproportionately affects communities in the so-called Global South.

From a situationist practice, Marco Noris helps us to complexify our perception of the environment we inhabit and the value of the time we spend in nature and within an integrated community. He formalizes his extensive walks, which form the basis of his work, using various tools such as cartography, maps, drawings, paintings, and memory.

Rafiki Sánchez works from ancestral knowledge and wisdom, practicing regenerative ecology through intergenerational learning. The materiality of weaving, clothing, and their convergence with the body, the connection with the land, and its potentialities form the basis for proposing reflections through performances, drawings, and other formalizations. Their work seems to echo Quijano’s maxim: “freeing the production of knowledge, reflection, and communication from the pitfalls of European modernity (rationality), as Quijano argues.”

Christian Salablanca‘s “encyclopedic canoes” are adorned with drawings depicting various forms of fish and marine species. This technique serves to recognize and learn from water, understanding it as the life support for many communities and generations. It’s a mnemonic archive that retrieves knowledge from water-related practices, allowing us to aspire to that relearning of wisdom Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui speaks of. Surely, doing so, as the Aymara term “chuyma” reminds us, involves relearning and thinking from the heart and memory.

Jessica Segall works within multidisciplinary teams comprised of scientists, activists, and other species. Through a practice linked to queer ecology, her project serves as an example of the symbiotic work between human and non-human animals. It’s an opportunity to reflect on our connection with nature, how we utilize those resources, the meaning behind our diets, and the overexploitation we subject other species to. Through a video that is equally poetic and thought-provoking, Segall, from her practices, emphasizes the risks and fragility of the environment.

Daniela Medina Poch investigates the ways in which unofficial histories and inter-species entanglements contribute to the conception of eco-centric narratives. She works with the political potential of language, and her practice includes installation performances, talks, and listening sessions. Medina Poch invites us to examine the asymmetries in power relationships.

Like many editions of CAMPO Artfest, all the artists in this exhibition propose, to some extent, a critique of the Anthropocene, that supremacy we humans believe we have over all other existences and pre-existences. Doing so through art can help us reframe and reconsider the various actions we’ve been uncritically developing and their consequential dimensions.

From an interdisciplinary approach, ecology, anthropology, and critical studies have been addressing the interdependence and co-evolution of cultural and ecological processes, often referred to as “Culturaleza.” Authors like Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, or Ray Brassier opened the 21st century with philosophical concepts that help us contemplate a world without us. Decades earlier, Donna Haraway proposed rethinking ourselves through what she called situated learning theory.

In addition to these undeniable contributions, we shouldn’t forget to include philosophical propositions that challenge certain aspects of analyses representing a Western philosophy. Including artists from all regions allows us to reflect from our frames of reference, contexts, experiences, issues, and knowledge. Studies by authors like Deborah Danowski and Viveiros de Castro aid us in decolonizing our ways of thinking, drawing from subaltern knowledge, such as that from Amerindian cultures, which are founded on the concept of multinaturalism.

Whatever perspective we adopt in approaching our connection with our environments and the species that inhabit them—be it a link of unchecked extra consumption or one rooted in sustainability and respect—we belong to a system of interdependent interspecies relationships. This compels us to consider what Mignolo calls “border thinking” and “border gnosis.”

While the concept defining the Anthropocene continues to dominate contemporary thought almost globally, sectors related to eco-feminist thought in Latin America continue to bring to the forefront the existence of class, gender, race, sex, and nation inequalities established within human relationships. This dominion, human-to-human, perpetuates and manifests itself in a supremacy link, human-animal, human-nature, where the human stands above all else. Perhaps we should consider that the Earth was there long before us; between sapiens and the Big Bang, millions and millions of years passed.

To conclude, and recalling one of the slogans emerging from a new generation of environmental activists:

NO ART WITHOUT PLANET / NO HAY ARTE SIN PLANETA