Expositions
Joon. Plastic footprints
Espai Transversal
The Marxist psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles proposed displacing thought towards the feet because when we walk through the world it is essential to know where we are treading. Feet allow a territory to be read and leave their prints in it. But what happens if the footprint that you leave is not of human proportions but of hyper-consumption on a global scale?
Walking always leaves a trace and, at the same time, displacement constructs space. That footprint stamps its own identity (weight, position of the body, etc.). but the marks of singularity fade when the prints take on the figure of what we consume rather than what we create.
In 1860, John Hyatt invented celluloid, and since then plastic has been conquering the planet – a material that is at the same time essential and unnecessary, vital and deadly. Today, some 400 million tonnes of plastic are produced each year, and half of this is for single use, while less than 10% is recycled.
The acute global ecological crisis is not limited to environmental, ecocentric, or biocentric solutions that reproduce the tension between society and nature. An ecosophical thinking – such as that proposed by the philosopher Félix Guattari – points to a multifaceted movement that involves the political, the social, the artistic, the environmental, and the production of subjectivity.
These ideas are expressed in the work of Joon, with an installation composed of various elements that weave a particular connection between plastic and nature, favouring the interrelationship of the pieces more than individual objects.
Huellas plásticas [Plastic footprints] spurns narrative to become the evocation of a passage across the Earth. And as each step demands that we pay attention to the ground, the dispute over the symbolic value of the gaze in the space of art here loses its supremacy.
The installation forces the direction of the gaze to ask us how we see and whether we can perceive our own existence in the space and between the works. Basically, it is an invitation to practice the space so that a change of perspective can take place.
Queer ecologies. Naturally subversive aberrations
Espacio 0. Centre d’Art La Panera
Annie Sprinkle y Beth Stephens, O.R.G.I.A, Brigitte Baptiste, Liu Xi, Ona Bros, Karim Boumjimar, La Erreria (House of Bent), Joël Harder, Guiu Gimeno Bardis, Roger Bernat, Eva Chettle, Graham Bell, Alba García i Allué, Projecte Úter, Bárbara Sánchez Barroso, Alex Francés, Eulalia Valldosera, MITO Collective, Aina Mestre, Neus Solà y Marta Garcia Cardellach, Elsa Casanova Sampé.
The unnatural homosexual, the inverted lesbian, the degenerate bisexual, the grotesque transexual… These figurations show that there is an institutional, scientific, and political relationship between sexuality and nature. A relationship that determines our ways of feeling, thinking, and acting. This is the starting point of “Queer ecologies”, a group exhibition that questions the supposed moral neutrality of heterosexist discourses constructed around ideas of sexuality and nature and reconsiders the relationships between species and environmental politics from the queer perspective. This vision states that the destruction of the planet cannot be separated from gender, sexual, and racial violence.
If ecology was originally understood as a feeling of conserving a natural world that had deteriorated through industrialization, or as a technocratic politics of environmental restoration that ignores the responsibility of capitalism, today it is understood as an ethical and critical practice that constructs multispecies relationships based on the well-being. If the word “queer” was initially used to refer in a disparaging way to the attraction between members of the same sex, today it is reclaimed as a way of resisting heteronormativity and of questioning the fixation of identity categories (lesbian, gay, bisexual, asexual, etc.).
Queer ecology defines a symbiotic, trans-specific, post-anthropological, and anti-essentialist sensibility, and to a politics of hybridization, mutation, coevolution and solidarity between damaged bodies and ecosystems. Inspired by the biological exuberance of matter, this perspective shows us how to be less human and more bodies in constant friction with other bodies. Questioning the romanticization of nature and the capitalist exploitation of LGBTI+, queer ecology appropriates the discourses of unnaturalness that are used to oppress dissident bodies and puts into practice new ways of dealing with, understanding, and relating to the sexualized, racialized, naturalized, and enabled other.
Collaborators: Morera. Museu d’Art Modern i Contemporani de Lleida, Colors de Ponent, Biblioteca de Lletres de la Universitat de Lleida, Museu de Lleida.
