Herbarium III
The notion of experience in the act of walking in nature guides my procedures in the studio. The creative process involves constant exchanges between the drifts in the walking experiences and the experimentations guided by issues inherent to art, in the work of the studio. Those exchanges are woven into a storyline ever open to new developments triggered by meetings and reciprocal inter- actions between subject and nature. Photograph unfolds into two different regimes in my work: as documents of walks in nature and as material from which I create art and develop projects in the studio. Moving between experiences and experimentations, unfolding experiences in nature into experimentations in the studio – that is how I organized my art practice, inventing rules, procedures and researching technologies in a project based on three pillars: nature walks, the displacements files consisting of photographs that register the territories crossed, and the experimentation researches at the studio based on edition and assemblies through digital processes....
It so happens that during the pandemic I stopped traveling and started cultivating carefully my garden plants, on the balcony of the apartment where I live. I started paying attention to the weeds that insisted to grow in my flower vases even though I was constantly removing them. When I pulled them out, they would come in one piece, with leaves, stem, and roots. I wanted to register these frail and delicate shapes and started to photograph them.
Concurrently, during this involuntary seclusion period, I was scavenging through my files to revisit the stored photos. Collecting photos taken in the walks refers to the tradition of work files and artists’ notebooks, with notes, schematics, and sketches that make up the reference for the projects. These virtual files, where photographs are stored, - displacement files – hold the memories of the experiences in nature and consist of the raw material for the development of my projects. Organizing these photographs, grouping, and classifying them is a complex process that triggers visual representations of the pathway, perceptions, feelings and thoughts. In the comings and goings between memories and stresses caused by the pandemic, I chose some photos and cut them, taking them out of the context where they were taken to make new images through a assembly processes to get larges photos and edit videos.
“Herbarium” is a series of images and animations created from clippings of weeds and dried bushes fitted to a weathering steel rack designed by me. When I remove the plants from their background, I obtain elements that I will apply in multi-layer assemblies, merging different periods and spaces on the same image, creating identities and strangeness. Proceeding with repetitions and accumulation of several images, interspersed with abstract shapes and plans, I want to subtly evoke nature’s proliferation as a highly sophisticated and extremely unstable self-organized system, and the human persistence to “tame” the environment into our needs and on a whim. The installation presented in “Uncertainties in Gaia” is composed of 3 images inside acrylic boxes presented with the objects that compose that compose the images’ motifs – the little trees dehydrated hanging by the steel device. The video, produced with the valuable collaboration of the artist Manuel Siabato, is a ludic animation of one of the presented images. This series of works, of which I present a small sample in this exhibition, intends to think of an ecosystem built by several natures that determine what nature can become; culture becoming a strength that interferes in the planet’s biological, geological and climate processes, acknowledging the extraordinary creativity of living beings in shaping their own world for the good or for the worse.
