Photography (Photography)

YUMA o la tierra de los amigos (YUMA, or the Land of Friends) by Carolina Caycedo is a large mural containing a series of satellite photographs mounted on acrylic. The mural contrasts and mixes multiple layers of these satellite images capturing the progressive devastation of the El Quimbo dam on the Yuma river (Magdalena), in the Department of Huila. The project was originally produced for the 8th Berlin Biennale, and developed out of the artist’s research into waterways, their political and cultural impact, and their historical development.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Lonely Age by Connie Zheng is the first chapter in a trilogy of short experimental films about the complex temporalities of navigating ongoing environmental crises, as seen through the lens of seeds real and imagined. The film is set in a highly toxic and ecologically ravaged near future, in which people begin to hear rumors of seeds that have washed up on the shores of California after escaping from a factory in China. The seeds are rumored to possess curative properties, but they are also said to be sentient.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Noémie Goudal’s short film, Below the Deep South , is based on the work of palaeoclimatologist James Bendle who, while drilling in Antarctica, discovered coal beneath the ice. Bendle’s theory is that the coal is an indication that Antarctica was once a lush, green forested environment with insects and animals. It only arrived in its present position due to the shifting of tectonic plates.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Jes Fan’s video work Xenophoria , as opposed to the term ‘xenophobia’, refers to a love of the foreign and is inspired by the name of a mysterious species of aquatic carrier shell. This creature, Xenophora pallidae, calcifies free-floating objects in the water to its spine, bringing foreign bodies into its own structure. Likewise, Xenophoria stages a delirious search for the melanin pigment – the molecule responsible for skin color – as it manifests in both human and non-human bodies.

Installation (Installation)

Part of the exhibition PIÑA MATRIZ (2014) at Despacio Art, this untitled work by Carlos Fernández is a wood panel (formerly a section of a wooden table top) that bears the residue of insects interacting with fermented pineapple. The exhibition considered the production of pineapple monocultures and the agricultural monopolies for this product. Fernández used the exhibition space to portray alternative possibilities of diversified and ecologically sustainable production that could be mobilized in place of mass produced pineapple monocultures.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Anointed by Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner and Dan Lin is a poem recital/video that addresses the American nuclear testing legacy in the Marshall Islands that occurred between 1946 to 1958 in Bikini and Enewetak Atolls. The artist’s words of resilience and healing are uttered as she travels across the northeastern atolls of her vast island nation. The climax of the short film takes place when the artist, holding white coral stones (a Marshallese funeral ritual) stands on top of the massive concrete dome erected on Runit Island in Enewetak Atoll to contain 73,000 square meters of radioactive waste—only a small fraction of the debris generated by the nuclear tests, the rest of which was never cleaned up.

Installation (Installation)

Aqua by Fernando Palma Rodríguez is an installation formed by four gourds and one movement detector that activates them. Once put in motion, the gourds open and close hinged hands that are cut from their bodies, catalyzing a sophisticated, choreographed conversation among them. Following Indigenous notions of personhood, Palma Rodríguez grants agency to ordinary objects and therefore the ability to relate to others—humans as well as non-humans.

Installation (Installation)

Produced for the Prix Marcel Duchamp and presented at the Centre Pompidou in October 2017, the installation Uncomformities is comprised of photographs, archaeological drawings, and narratives, based on the analysis of core samples from different sites in Beirut, Paris and Athens. The work questions how, at a time when traces and memories no longer exist, and the earth remains the only witness of our past, history is produced, and how the stories of our civilization are written and told. In each location, the artists collected soil samples, which they asked experts to analyze before creating a series of narrations and coded drawings.

Advanced Technology (Advanced Technology)

The virtual reality work Aquaphobia by Jakob Kudsk Steensen examines it’s title subject matter – the fear of water. Inspired by psychology studies used to treat aquaphobia, the work employs VR technology to merge imagery of past and future geological landscapes, as well as external ecosystems with internal psychoscapes. Steensen mobilizes the visual exploration of the fear of water to transform viewer’s perceptions on water-related climate change, such as rising water levels.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Cardón Cardinal by Patricia Esquivias is part of a series of video works in which the artist develops a narrative in front of her computer screen. In this work, the computer sits on a covered piano keyboard, and the reflection of the artist is sometimes visible on the black surface. Cardón Cardinal is a collage of references that revolve around the removal and displacement of a 46 foot tall Pachycereus pringlei , a type of giant cactus also known as a cardón , from Baja California, Mexico to Seville, Spain.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

“There is a tapestry of sounds around us.” – Tania Candiani Tania Candiani has long been interested in Acoustic Ecology: the study of relationships between humans and our environment mediated through sound. A poetic text by Candiani narrated by writer and MacArthur fellow Josh Kun is featured in this three-channel video, For the Animals. The artist carried out visual research for the project: scanning, sampling and borrowing from books, vintage videos and images of material that informed her process.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Ecotone by Enar de Dios Rodríguez is a video work presented in six chapters, each beginning and ending with a one-sided telephone dialog with an informal, friendly and conversational tone, that leads quickly into complex philosophical subjects. The first chapter is an introduction, and the last is an epilogue, and both employ interfaces (a smartphone screen, and an optical illusion, respectively) to invite the viewer to make conceptual connections across the chapters. An “ecotone” is a region of transition between two biological communities.

Photography (Photography)

To the Cardinal Gods: Central Axial Consecration (Site 6) is from a 2017 series made by Ren Zi during a residency in the Arctic Circle. The work reflects upon the serious ecological issues we face today. During the residency Ren Zi was joined by other artists, scientists, architects and educators exploring the high-Arctic Svalbard Archipelago in an interdisciplinary and collaborative endeavour to create work addressing such issues.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The three cut-outs are made of three aerial photographs coming from the archives of the Ecuadorian Military Geographic Institute. These are views of the Amazon forest. The photographs are cut following an optical illusion pattern called “reversible cubes” or “tumbling blocks”, based on the Necker cube, a multistable object of psychophysics that is constantly switching perspectives.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

From afar, Chimeric Antibodies by Angela Su may look like scientific drawings or botanical illustrations. Yet, upon closer look, sexual organs and imagined human and plant elements start becoming recognizable, and realistic. Each intricate, large-scale drawing indeed mixes human body parts, machines and other organic constructions as they become intertwined and inseparable.

Installation (Installation)

Created during Zhao Renhui’s residency at Kadist SF in 2014, Zhao Renhui began observing and cataloguing insects inspired by the scientific impulse towards exhaustive taxonomy of Sacramento-based Dr. Martin Hauser, Senior Insect Biosystematist at the California Department of Food and Agriculture, and longtime acquaintance of the artist. In Villa Dei Fiori, September to November, Zhao Renhui tracked and collected multiple insects within the everyday urban environment, either finding the insects dead or following them around for few days.

Installation (Installation)

Misting Miner is a vapor sculpture by Alexey Buldakov from the Urban Fauna Lab collective that gives material form to the invisible phenomenon of mining cryptocurrency. The work is comprised of a water cooling system attached to technology that continuously mines cryptocurrency, and in the process also generates an extraordinary amount of heat. As a latent and untapped source of energy, the artist harnesses the heat and reveals its transformative potential by turning it into fog through the water cooling system, which he then reroutes to follow a cycle of evaporation, condensation, and precipitation.

Photography (Photography)

In 2011-12 the San Francisco-based collective Futurefarmers staged a 10-part series of conversations and collaborations with scientists, theorist, and philosophers inspired by Charles and Ray Eames’s film, Powers of Ten (1977). PoT was an IBM sponsored documentary that visualized the relative scale and limits of the known universe, both macro and microscopic, through a sequence of magnifications by 10-to-the-x-power. Using the picnic as human-scale index, Futurefarmers capture their meetings with scholars through audio, photography, and then distributed the results publicly through a website and publication .

Photography (Photography)

Santu Mofokeng is a South African photographer. Mofokeng was born in 1956 in Soweto. He began his career as a street photographer when he was still a teenager, then worked as an assistant in a darkroom and later became a news photographer, working on the Apartheid.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Pudic Relation between Machine and Plant shows a looped scene where a robotic hand touches a “sensitive plant” — Mimosa Pudica, a species characteristic for closing on itself when touched. The name of the plant was derived from Carl Linnaeus sexual taxonomy of plants: pudica referring both to the external sexual organs, shyness and modesty. In a poem written by Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin’s grandfather) titled The Loves of the Plants (1789), this plant is associated, jokingly, with British Botanist Joseph Banks’s famous sexual adventures during his botanical expedition to the tropics.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Ana Vaz describes her film É Noite na América (It is Night in America) as an eco-terror tale, freely inspired by A cosmopolitics of animals by Brazilian philosopher Juliana Fausto; in which she investigates the political life of non-human beings and questions the modern idea of the exceptionality of the human species. In parallel to the feature film version, Vaz created a three-channel installation format meant to be displayed in contemporary art spaces. This edition includes three complementary video works that expand on the conceptual frameworks of the film.

Installation (Installation)

Produced for the Prix Marcel Duchamp and presented at the Centre Pompidou in October 2017, the installation Unconformities is comprised of photographs, archaeological drawings, and narratives, based on the analysis of core samples from different sites in Beirut, Paris and Athens. The work questions how, at a time when traces and memories no longer exist, and the earth remains the only witness of our past, history is produced, and how the stories of our civilization are written and told. In each location, the artists collected soil samples, which they asked experts to analyze before creating a series of narrations and coded drawings.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Luiz Roque’s short film Zero we follow a dog moving alone onboard an aircraft that flies over a vast desert. The dog seems tranquil as if keeping up with its daily routine in an environment in which the human presence is completely absent. The disturbing image of the animal left adrift — perhaps the only remaining living being in existence — is interspersed with the shiny mirrored surface of high-tech skyscrapers emerging out of the sand, in what might have once been an oasis.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Sideways Time by Olivia Erlanger is the result of the artist’s interest in networks, seen and unseen, financial and ecological, the collapse of which has resulted in the fracturing of a middle class American identity. Consumption and the construction of value are a frequent concern of her sculptures that explore the structural friction between a public and private. Erlanger looks to the architecture that connects these systems for inspiration and in this sense, the language of scaffoldings, foundations and facades that percolate throughout her work.

Photography (Photography)

Santu Mofokeng is a South African photographer. Mofokeng was born in 1956 in Soweto. He began his career as a street photographer when he was still a teenager, then worked as an assistant in a darkroom and later became a news photographer, working on the Apartheid.

Photography (Photography)

Ana Roldán’s Primeval forms series looks up close at the fecund shapes of plants often found in the artist’s native Mexico. These botanical portraits, like this one of the Pseudobombax ellipticum, or shaving brush tree, bristle against the edges of the image’s frame, fecund and wild, familiar yet foreign. Ana Roldán works in diverse media such as performance, sculpture, installations, video and collage.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings is a two-channel short film by Bo Wang and his frequent collaborator Pan Lu. It takes the history of the British colonial search for tropical plants as a starting point, revealing how early colonial rule and ideologies shaped Hong Kong through the Western gaze. Through the process of transporting and collecting plants, Joseph Banks, who was the botanist and naturalist of the first British diplomatic mission to China (also known as The Macartney Embassy) and advised King George III on the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens in London with the most diverse botanical and mycological collection in the world.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The film installation Mud Man by Chikako Yamashiro is set on Okinawa and South Korea’s Jeju Islands, two locations at the center of local controversies surrounding the presence of the United States military. Japanese and Korean languages are mixed (a combination of unclear Japanese — Uchinaaguchi , fragments and mumbles in Korean and onomatopoeic sound effects to complement the narration), and the landscape of the two islands (Okinawa and Jeju Island) juxtaposed. The film tells the story of a community visited by bird droppings that resemble clumps of mud falling from the sky.

Photography (Photography)

Más vale pájaro en mano que cien volando (A bird in the hand is worth more than two in the bush) is part of a larger series of pieces developed by Sergio Rojas Chaves in Honduras in 2018 that engages with tourism and in particular amateur-ornithologists that overrun the country in pursuit of the nation’s extreme diversity of bird species. The works include a performance in which artist Sergio Rojas Chaves, dressed like a bird, observes the ornithologists as if they too are birds, another work features an audio recording of amateur ornithologists imitating bird sounds in the jungle of Honduras. This series of photographs was taken during an amateur-ornithologist research trip.

Photography (Photography)

The photograph Proxy II (Beetles) by Robert Zhao Renhui belongs to a series, titled Christmas Island, Naturally, that focuses on the ecology of Christmas Island; a remote volcanic land formation in the Indian Ocean. Since the first settlements in the late 19th century, the ecosystems of Christmas Island have undergone devastating alterations. After nearly 150 years of human settlement, a number of invasive species have been unwittingly introduced to the island.