“The symptoms of the present society allow us to understand that we are in a moment of global crisis, we live in a sick society. Modernity left us with legacy rooted verbs like: conquer, progress, change, build, replace, transgress, destroy, exterminate, lie, consume, lack, need among many other actions that are rooted in the collective unconscious and relate to an economy Which is still in force. The environmental forecasts and that overflowing capitalism that was compared by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Felix Guattari with one of the strongest mental illnesses as schizophrenia, which is characterized by personality alterations, hallucinations and loss of contact with reality. A world where our deepest desires are transformed into artificial desires that make consumption from a sugary black drink to experiences and new advertising strategies.
Edgardo one of the characters of King Lear expresses The prince of darkness is a noble knight, this phrase is as valid as other William Shakespeare, because the contemporary world is dominated by corporations that appear before the “poor” but rich countries. In natural resources such as the “noble gentlemen” whose speeches are full of possibilities of diverse orders like the offer of work to many people who need it and under the arm they bring contracts where the profits are for them, the mistreatment to the nature is devastating And they pay fines for various reasons that they contemplate in their budgets. We just need to take a look at the mining or oil companies that use fracking contaminated land and water. Some of these companies disseminate transgenic seeds in order to end the hunger of the countries most in need. Glyphosate is used to eradicate illicit crops which damages the soil, and produce diseases that do not yet have statistics, these chemicals are produced by Monsanto, the same company that uses hormones and antibiotics in cows to produce more milk faster and Less expensive in the United States, and the same one that created Agent Orange to spray the forests and the inhabitants in Vietnam and is one of the companies that patents and monopolizes genes, processes of genetic modification, seeds and even complete plants that belong to the whole humanity.
There are also speeches to build plants and create nuclear weapons in cities, proclaim energy for all, argue the security and stability of the country in the face of a global conflict. Akira Kurosawa in the unforgettable Dream movie presents an image of Mount Fuji where the sky is stained red from the outbreak of a nuclear power plant, this film warns us of nuclear bomb tests and reminds us of Hiroshima and Nagazaki. It also confronts us with present history: France did a test at Mururoa atoll in Polynesia (Lost Paradise), North Korea has just completed another test in September this year. And we can not forget the reactor that exploded in Chernobyl and the escape of the nuclear power plant of Fukushima, nor the deaths, the radiation, the tremors, the movement of the plates and the epidemics of cancer that produced.
This reinforces the idea that the earth became a paradise that was lost by the hand of the human being, the individual today enjoys the mirrors, because these mirrors only him and make him forget everything else, already Many philosophers tell us that the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are the most individualistic in history.
In Genesis one of mankind’s metaphors: “Let us make man in our image and likeness: to command in the fish of the sea and in the birds of the sky, in the beasts and in all the terrestrial vermin and in All the reptiles that creep on the earth. “And the human being took these words seriously and dominated the land, the animals and reached brutal and systematic extremes such as the exterminations of Native Americans, Indians, Jews, Syrians, among others So many who die day by day
It is paradoxical that only after XXI centuries Pope Francis spoke about the environmental problems: “The land seems to become more and more an immense deposit of filth”, it is only necessary to take a look at the “plastic soup” that forms Today a kingdom in the Pacific Ocean and that poisons a million birds, marine mammals and turtles after eating plastic or tangled in it. The statistics provide us with figures such as: between 12,000 and 24,000 tons of garbage eaten each year by fish in the Pacific.
But what does this data mean? Is it simply an alarming number, or one of the visible warnings that the planet is asking for help not to die? Or it tells us that it will regenerate and the question then would be: what will happen to the human being ?
Mother earth mutinous born of observing human actions against the earth, but also a project that wants to connect all forms of creation in favor of nature. The 21st century has a challenge to find a balance, every year Earth Day is celebrated on April 26, agreements are made, but these are only fulfilled with the commitment not only of governments, mutinational and ourselves. The Global Network of the Ecological Footprint published this August 8 that we use all the resources of what the earth can regenerate. More and more alarming, we are at a point where we can not be indifferent to the disasters left by the dynamics of modern society.
Since the end of the 80’s, some artists have linked their artistic practice with the environment they have done in the form of resistance, where practice is linked with activism, where art is linked to life and its processes are a response of one Way of thinking, denouncing and acting. Art is what is not accommodated, it is what dissolves the mimesis of the narcissistic society, interferes and subverts it, manifests its nonconformity. Contemporary practices are processes that are measured by the experience that is built with the community, the problems that the world is experiencing, the void provided by the institution, or life itself. Current art is discursive, and the work is the same text, which does not have a single meaning but is polyvalent, is not defined from established paradigms, is an art that is transformed from its very existence.
For its part, the spectator approaches and participates in these practices, engages in dialogues from the closest to the artist (s), experiences the works in their singularity and is situated as close to and from this perception, creates their own discourses and experiences. Thus, not only artists, but biologists, peasants, students, ecologists, psychologists, designers, communicators and many people connect with the earth and the environment in a multidisciplinary way in their proposals.
Only through the actions led with an altruistic spirit, activist practices that supposes a political position in the noble sense of the word, it is possible to approach micro utopias that go against all kinds of violence and corporate manicheans.
The sample infers on what is happening in the moors, rivers, endangered animals, non-biodegradable waste, chemicals in food, seed patents, climate change, indiscriminate logging of forests , Destruction, pollution of water by mercury and arsenic used in mining and plastic that cancer for the planet.
Mother Earth, officially nominated by the UN and the interdependence we have with it, went wrong.
Our Pachamama riots and us with her!”
María Elvira Ardila
Curator of the Museum of Modern Art of Bogotá
Original article in Spanish: Mambo
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