Argentina Pavilion at the 15th Gwangju Biennale

In the Order of the Stones, a solo show by artist Florence Levy, challenges the status of ‘progress’ and poetically narrates the impending breakdown of the capitalist system. The artist’s latest work, Cientos de millones de años para estas formas [Hundreds of Millions of Years for These Forms], a 13-channel video  installation, evokes the figure of the Greek tragedy’s chorus to confront us with the drama of the contemporary global scenario. In this version of the chorus, a semi-circle of post-human entities embodying the material and cultural unsustainability of the current world-system, the choir sings to a present order of things: to the polymetallic nodules being harvested from the bottom of the ocean and the microplastics silently entering our human bodies, but also to the colonial history and ecological trauma engrained in the birth of the extractive system that still drives the world today. 

The exhibition subverts the technological complex and turns it onto itself, allowing for the boundaries between the human and the non-human, the real and the digital, the image of ‘progress’ and the reality of the material world to become obscured. Thus, emerges a new and complicated network of interactions and dispositions, of potentials for new solidarities that might, one day, divert us from the course of unstoppable extractive violence. Ultimately, Levy draws the contour of a world that can bridge geologic time and remind us, in the tempest of the present, of the power of the ocean and the memory and agency of our bodies, human and non-human. They remind us, like Glissant, of our power to dream of a different land.