Uncertainties in Gaia

Sandra Rey

Curator of the exhibition

Chair Director and Representative of ICESCO at UFRGS

The exhibition “Uncertainties in Gaia” gathers work from artists who feed on different considerations about life on Earth. At a moment when the contemporary world goes through unprecedented ecological, political, economic and social crises, how do the uncertainties that surround our fate in this planet nurture, shake, provoke and drive the processes and practices in Art? How to design escape routes and define possible horizons? The term Gaia poses the thesis that the Earth is a set of living beings and matter built together, that cannot live separately from each other, and from which mankind cannot be removed. The concept refers to the goddess that embodies Earth in Greek mythology, but does not incorporate the idea of Nature as it has been envisioned from the XVII century on - this Nature that has been the background for our actions and that complements our human subjectivity.

Nothing is further away from this definition: the idea of Gaia is not to add a soul to the globe; the “Gaia hypothesis”, theory developed in the 1960’s by the British scientist James Lovelock presents an interpretation of Gaia as an unstable self-organized system and acknowledges the incredible creativity of living beings to shape their own world. Gaia is this uneven figure, composed by both Science and mythology, that designates our planet – the Earth – our habitat, our home and shelter, in the unimaginable vastness of the Universe.

The awareness that we live in a time that can be identified as the Anthropocene, sounds as an alarm call in our minds. The term explicitly suggests the idea that culture has become a power that interferes with the biological processes working on the planet. The term Anthropocene designates a new geological era starting with the industrial revolution and characterized by the advent of humanity as the main power driving change on the planet, overcoming geophysical forces. The impact of these changes goes beyond natural fluctuations, particularly in regards to the planet’s climate and the balance of the biosphere.

It so happens that the human action that used to have local effects, now have global effects. According to Günther Anders (1960), contemporary time is not characterized by a crisis in time and space, but by a crisis of time and space. Time and space are not the scenario of thpolitical struggle, they are the object; they are no longer the conditions, they are conditioned, thus, to the contingencies of the human story; what we group under the name Nature leaves the background and takes the stage.

Far from the intention of gathering works by formal or conceptual affinity, the proposal is to value differences and dialogs, and to upgrade modes of thinking and designing scenarios and subjects about the uncertainties that surround life on the planet. The national artists, invited to this first exhibition that marks the beginning of the public activities of the “Cátedra Arte e Natureza, Processos Híbridos” (“Chair Arts and Nature, Hybrid Processes”), are deeply engaged with the development of the project that aims to advance and expand art and art thinking, nationally and internationally, highlighting productions related to the relationships and conflicts involving Nature and contemporary culture.

The curatorship is carried out by the artists Nivalda Assunção from Brasília, Hugo Fortes from São Paulo, Irineu Garcia, Tetê Barachini, Elaine Tedesco, and Sandra Rey from Porto Alegre. Hala Al Khalifa, from Bahrein, and Siham Issami, visual artist and writer based in Berlin, Germany, integrate the international network of ICESCO and honor us with their installations. We pay a special homage in memorian to the French artist and arts critic Éliane Chiron, who has collaborated to the development of the research in Visual Poetics at the Institute of Arts

for Years, and left us in 2021. Her work, presented in the exhibition, is part of the MACRS collection.

The exhibition marks the beginning of the public activities of the “Chair Arts and Nature, Hybrid Processes”, in the international cooperation agreement between ICESCO and UFRGS, signed in April of 2022 — and launches the cooperation with MACRS, and the Department for Culture of UFRGS, as partner institutions in this project.

▸ Éliane Chiron’s performance as an art critic is marked by analyses that sought to establish relationships between readings of the finished works based on data on the artists’ creation processes to unravel what she deemed as the hidden meanings of the works. In her studies and production, she invested in renewing the language of pain-ting using modern technologies, producing digital pain-tings and videos from pictures taken in trips.

The works “Pétrole à Ipanema I” and “Pétrole à Ipanema II” were created from photographs of the beach of Ipanema, taken from the hotel window, in Rio de Janeiro, during a trip in 2014. The photographs were subverted to pictorial resolution through an exhaustive work of transforming colors and distorting forms, pixel by pixel, in the computer. The result is impacting due to the contrasts between zones with several shades of gray that create a dim and opaque atmosphere, and the vibrating shades of pink and magenta.

The reality of the scenes is almost undone, requiring a perception effort from the observer to distinguish the shapes in a landscape imagined by the artist at the view of oil platforms on the horizon and the idea of a possible black tide reaching the beach... Coincidentally, when these works were exhibited for the first time in MACRS, in 2019, Brazil was facing an oil

spill at the north-east coast that flooded the Brazilian beaches with the black and viscous liquid provoking an ecological catastrophe with damages to the coast’s fauna and flora beyond estimation.

▸ Hala Al Khalifa is an artist engaged with working under the aegis of culture and diplomacy, promoting exhibitions, conferences, and public arts projects that highlight the particuler aspects of her nation. The inspiration for the video performance presented by the artist reflects her strong connection with her homeland, the small island country in the Persian Gulf, famous since ancient times for the pearl fishing, which was considered the best in the world in the XIX century. The installation “SEA” pays a homage to the thousands of pearl fishermen, who who throughout the country’s history have set sail forever, out to sea, diving deeper and deeper in search of the most precious pearl. Using metaphors, the video stages symbolically the women’s wait for their sons, companions, lovers and husbands who would leave for the deep sea and never come back; the music sounds like a mourning while the artist draws circles in the sand around the basket intended for the pearls harvest and sits patiently tying black ribbons in the basket’s mesh, representing lost lives.

▸ Siham Issami is a Berliner visual artist and a writer, her work emphasises the connections between science, art, music and literature.

The installation “Das Lied von der Erde; probe1” (Earth’s song, Attempt #1) consists of a fragile closed space created through layers of Chinese paper falling from the ceiling like veils. Inside this space in one side, the wall is covered by the entire print of the score of Gustav Mahler’s symphony, which is covered in its turn with a layer of Chinese paper; this layer is fixed by long Bambu sticks from each side right and left, in order to form a screen for the video projection to come.

The video projection taking place in it has two component: sound and images. The sound part consists on five transcriptions for flute by the artist herself of five specifics musical themes from Mahler’s Symphony “Das Lied von der Erde”, starting with the five notes of the pentatonic scale in five different tonalities. These five transcriptions where played on Flute by a very young music pupil, Arthur Marchand (14 years old) and were recorded in the Church Herz Jesu (Alt-Lietzow) in Berlin. The images part consist of a selection of visual references to the four elements: Earth, Water, Air, Fire from the Chinese painters of the eccentric way starting with the primordial Chaos of Zun Derun from 1362 and continuing with, Zuh Da (1626-1705) , Li Shan (1686-1762), Hua Yan (1682-1756), Gao Fangahn (1683-1748), Huang Shen (1687-v. 1772) and Shitao (1642-1707), a long with representations by Siham

Issami of those same Elements. The sound is played alternatively with the images, so that the playing is heard without projection and the images are seen without sound, but in very precisely timed sequel.

▸ Nivalda Assunção is a visual artist, architect and teacher at the Institute of Arts of UnB. Her work places body and landscape in perspective from studies she develops about the Cerrado biome. The artist explores several techniques and languages in her installations to value handiwork knowledge, the direct contact with the land and the traditional culture of the Brazilian indigenous peoples.

▸ Hugo Fortes is a visual artist, curator, designer and teacher at ECA-USP. He has been developing studies aimed at the relationship between art and nature, highlighting issues related to the forests, animals and water. As an eclectic artist, he explores several means of expressing himself in installations, videos and bidimensional works. During the reclusive period of the pandemic, he has been devoted to resume drawing and painting using visual clues collected in artistic residences he took in the Amazon forest.

▸ Irineu Garcia is an sculptor and architect focused on preserving the environment and the inter-relations with nature. His work explores different materials such as stones, metal, ice, fire and waste and discarded objects in artistic processes that denounce the wearing out of nature in works installed in open places in several countries. He is the founder and president of the Yvy Maraey Institute – Art and Nature, in Porto Alegre, a partner institution of the “Chair Arts and Nature, Hybrid Processes”.

▸ Tetê Barachini is an artist, researcher and teacher at the Institute of Arts of UFRGS. She travels guided by urban and peripherical cartographies articulated with investigations that result in tridimensional objects whose installation maximize the poetic expression through the contact with malleable and rigid, organic and technological materials. In one of her incursions, she finds and appropriates a burnt wood trunk and transforms it into a model to make several replicas — plaster, aluminum, bronze, paraffin with graphite —, and presents them recontextualized and re-signified inside large transparent plastic bags, filled in part of coal, folded on themselves and suspended in the gallery She is also the coordinator of the project at the Chair along with UFRGS.

▸ Elaine Tedesco is a plastic artist, teacher at the Institute of Arts at UFRGS, and works in photography. Her photos, videos and installations stage subjective relationships between characters and objects, creating scenes and situations to evoke deep perceptions of the phenomena and operate surprising modes of meeting the world. The photographs she presents, “Between Rest and Isolation” and “Areias Brancas”, go beyond the contexts of the artist’s experience, reverberating ambiguous spaces and situations, implied in time, inciting the observer to evoke other plots and meanings, from their own memories and experiences.

In my work, photography – this technology for the reproduction of what is visible – allows capturing things in an act of pure immanence and keeping reference of things and places and recreating them in the studio using digital technology. I place my arts project in a debate about the deep transformations of our time, seeking to extract aesthetical experiences from issues related to nature and the environment, tightened by asymmetries to which we are subjected in our contemporary life.

The video display presented at the Culture Center of UFRGS integrates the exhibition.

The heterogeneity of the approaches, materials and tech- niques explored by the works presented, as well as the diversity of origins and pathways of each artist reflects the purposes of the Chair of Art and Nature, Hybrid Processes to stimulate unexplored connections and collaborations beyond borders. Among its goals, while fostering several narratives that stage subjective experiences marked by social and existential issues, is the wish to expand contemporary art, establishing a relationship between the Brazilian culture and manifestations of other cultures.

Map of the exhibition "Uncertainties in Gaia"