After Nature takes as its starting point the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which indicates that if carbon emissions are not drastically cut, by the year 2042 our planet will suffer a global increase in 1.5º C causing an environmental disaster even greater than the one we are experiencing today. The exhibition investigates the origins of climate change: the separation between culture and nature, between human and non-human, and the extractivist paradigm that mediates between both terms. The industrial forms of production and the extractivist policies that organize modern life have caused the appearance of meteorological phenomena such as devastating tornadoes, waves of extreme cold and heat, and the desertification and flooding of large territories. Thus we have devastated all kinds of natural resources and essential ecosystems, deepening social and territorial injustice, the subjugation of countries of the global south and the historical exploitation of entire peoples.
From the porous boundary between dichotomies such as nature versus humanx, humanx versus machine, and the empirical world versus the supernatural or extraterrestrial, After Nature sets out to experience the “ecological” not as a pedagogical category but as a way of re-imagining our relationship with the planet. “After nature” is not the end of nature, but the beginning of what Donna Haraway calls “natureculture”: a form of coexistence that recognizes the inseparability of these terms in their biophysical and socially formed relationships, and that will allow, eventually, to become ecological beings.
The works gathered in the exhibition produce images that move from extractivist philosophy and ecocide towards sensual and fabulous ways of imagining life on Earth. From terrestrial and extraterrestrial imaginaries, the invited artists produce works that intertwine vegetable forms and industrial materials until their differences disappear; they put into images metaphysical ideas about the origin of the world and its supernatural energy; they imagine humanoid figures merging with plants, animals, and insects, engendering new, more-than-human bodies and identities; they create assembled and unrecognizable objects as if they came from another galaxy or from ancient times that go beyond the limits of what is known and what we think is possible. In this way, the works configure scenarios for an imagination that can ignore some of the modern categories that no longer serve us, and enunciate, instead, new models of being, thinking, feeling and living together in the ecosystems of the present.
Ph: Fundación arteba.