FUTUROLOGY

By Lara Marmor
December 19, 2022
Charly Nijensohn"Dead Forest #8", 2009
Charly Nijensohn"Dead Forest #8", 2009

            Sixty-five million years ago, the last dinosaur became extinct. The fall of a huge meteorite plagued the sky with millimetric particles. Although some theories speculate that the radioactive fallout may have been the determining factor in wiping out almost half of the species that populated the planet, it is certain that the absence of the sun's rays and the expansion of greenhouse gases were the triggers for the deadly change. 

            When has a species ever been affected in such a short period of time, as was the case with the latest SARS-CoV-2 viral spread? Was it during the end of the Cretaceous period due to the lethal impact of the asteroid? At what point did humans became involved in a single phenomenon in such a short period of time? The political and economic vicissitudes that accompany climate change had been predicting for decades a very acute socio-environmental crisis, but who could have imagined that barely a hundred years after the Paris Conference, the first global event in history[1], the year 2019 would mark not only the end of a decade, but also–perhaps–of an epoch.   
                                                                                                   
Clara Esborraz "Sin título", de la serie La hora rota, 2019 
 
            At the beginning of 2019, the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires exhibited works by Clara Esborraz. It was the first time this institution presented a solo exhibition of such a young artist. The drawings belonged to the series La hora rota (2019). Also, that same year, Santiago De Paoli painted White moon. With insistent and frenetic strokes, made with the basic colors of cheap pens, Esborraz represented domestic fragments, intimate and desolate scenarios where tears of plants, lamps, and chocolates run; in contrast, with a palette also synthetic but pastel and pale, De Paoli gave life to a moon that smokes and a hypersexualized pitcher.
 
Santiago De Paoli, "White moon", 2019
 
To these pieces, maybe part of the great family of surrealism in a non-programmatic version, we can add La fe de los conversos (2005), where Alberto Passolini painted two human bones sparkling with brightness as they applaud a Greek adonis.
 
Alberto Passolini "La Fé de los conversos - de la serie el movimiento abstracto", 2005
 
            Comic and melancholic, influenced by animist ontologies, these artists do not anthropomorphize, but the subjectification of objects could be the operation that runs through their works. In 2014, the writer Ursula K. Le Guin gave a beautiful lecture in which she addressed the imperative need to relearn how to live in our planet differently than we used to, and described some missions she believed science and poetry (perhaps art?) had:  “And now, both poets and scientists are extending the rational aspect of our sense of relationship to creatures without nervous systems and to nonliving beings—our fellowship as creatures with other creatures, things with other things” and “One way to stop seeing trees, or rivers, or hills, only as ‘natural resources’ is to class them as fellow beings—kinfolk. I guess I’m trying to subjectify the universe because look where objectifying it has gotten us"[2]. Graham Harman, on the front lines of speculative realism, also sought to broaden and alter our perspective on the non-human by pointing out that “we tend to notice objects only when they somehow malfunction. The light bulb is ignored until it burns out”[3] or when it cries, as Esborraz's work demonstrates.
 
                                                                        
 

            Facing a panorama that had everything (or nothing) to do with any perspective of the future invented by fiction or imagined by surrealism, at the end of 2019 an unknown virus began to circulate through the air, adhering to human skin and to every terrestrial surface. Indeed, in a few months, individuals, families, cities, countries, and continents became isolated. Not even the Afrofuturist Octavia Butler in her saga of parables[4], in which decades ago she terrifyingly projected a future of walled neighborhoods and evangelical presidents, ventured to make deadly microorganisms fly through devastated cities. The shock of 2019 with the economies of the world paralyzed, while security forces controlled the circulation in the cities, found us in a state of unprecedented social atomization, thanks, paradoxically, to the brutal interdependence generated by capitalism.

            We are falling into the landfill, we are transforming the planet into an unhinged garbage dump, Michael Marder tells us.[5] And that sensation of free fall is what Sebastián Gordín represented, around 2011, in Días sin episodios 16318. In this work, furniture, paintings and a still lit light rail mysteriously sink in a scene part of the series of models in which the artist encapsulated forever small catastrophes that take place in libraries and museums, the favorite archives of knowledge.
 
Sebastián Gordin "Días sin episodios 16318", 2011
 

            Some time ago, Charly Nijensohn, far from fantasy and surreal metaphysics, produced Dead forest # 8, an ambitious project where he recorded in video and photography the state of an enormous piece of land in the Amazon jungle transformed into a hydroelectric dam to supply electricity to Manaus. Not only were almost two thousand four hundred kilometers of nature destroyed, but the Waimiri-Atroari were displaced in pursuit of the construction of the artificial lake. Away from the figurative narrative, also in 2009, Eduardo Basualdo gave shape to La perla and La voz, two sculptures made of copper wire, a material used to make most cables, as it is an excellent conductor. Of magmatic or hydrothermal origin, this metal is extracted from the Pacific Ring of Fire, China and Russia.  It is estimated that if it were to be extracted in the same way in Argentina, the income from mining exports by 2030 could be three times higher[6]. These double-sided pieces, due to the presence of the material in its raw state and the abstract form of the figures, have the power to transport us to the realm of fantasy and simultaneously alert us to the possibilities and consequences of the massive exploitation of this metal. 

            Realistic and fantastic, Nijensohn and Basualdo produced their works in the same year that Andreas Malm introduced the term capitalocene. Also by this time, in Australia, the worst bushfire had been recorded after the thermometers marked the highest temperature in its history. Coincidentally, a few days before this ecological disaster, Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that would revolutionize the financial world, was created. With or without metaphor, artistic imagination has always been throwing all kinds of epiphanies about the future. It's just a matter of looking at what surrounds us from other perspectives. “La fuerza e incluso la belleza de la obra, en cualquier caso, parecen anidar precisamente en lo que no vemos”[7] [The strength and even the beauty of the work, in any case, seem to nest precisely in what we can’t see] writes critic Graciela Speranza with a resounding vote of confidence in the visionary power of art.
 
 
Eduardo Basualdo "La perla", 2009
 
Eduardo Basualdo "La voz", 2009
 

            If a cyber currency was created in 2009, ten years earlier, in 1999, technological issues and economic efforts were focused on solving the programming error of a short-sighted software that, when created, had not contemplated its operation in the future. It was believed that because of this error the systems of nuclear power plants, communications, hospitals, and all computers could hatch. To avoid this catastrophe, a fortune was invested worldwide and so, when the clock struck 00:00 on January 1st, many sighed with relief when they realized that the programming error had not triggered the computer apocalypse. 

            But as we approached the end of the millennium, concerns in Argentina were much more immediate and earthly. On December 10, 1999, the radical Fernando de la Rúa took office as president, a position he would resign two years later with the bank “corralito”, the death of dozens of citizens in demonstrations and a country in turmoil due to the level of conflict. Before the outcome of the huge economic, political and social crisis of 2001, Cecilia Pavón and Fernanda Laguna opened Belleza y Felicidad (B&F), a shop in the Almagro neighborhood of the City of Buenos Aires. There they sold souvenirs, books, and artwork while holding exhibitions and parties with neighbors and artists. That same year Laguna painted Perfecto, from the series Formas negras parecidas a algo, which she exhibited for the first time at B&F. The painting depicts the silhouette of a character with a tongue-testicle-teardrop instead of a head. The work, like all the others in the series, is a composition that relates openwork organic forms, reminiscent of plants, animals, or humans, with painted geometric figures that absorb elements of surrealism and geometric abstraction, a legacy of the modern avant-garde. Laguna seems to say, in a nihilistic spirit, through these paintings: if reason is an attribute that leads humanity to the state in which we are now, it is better to transform ourselves. Dematerialize ourselves.
 
                                                                         
 

            While the virus “puso de manifiesto el agotamiento de un determinado modelo de globalización, cuestionado desde hace décadas por tantos movimientos sociales”[8] [revealed the exhaustion of a certain model of globalization, questioned for decades by so many social movements], it updated all the versions of the end that were already imagined and also those yet to be conceived. It was in 2000 that, in addition to having escaped the cybercollapse, Paul Crutzen, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, unveiled the term anthropocene to designate the geological era in which man-made activities began to generate biological and geophysical changes on a global scale. Regarding the novelties brought by the new millennium, Franco Bifo Berardi identified “los últimos años de la década del 2010 en la que el caos, el dolor y la impostura se desparramaron por todo el planeta”[9] [the last years of the 2010s in which chaos, pain and fakery spread all over the planet].  

            This is the general context in which most of the works that make up this tour emerged. These are productions that should no longer be read under the wake of the aesthetic paradigm of the art of the 1990s in Argentina and that also move away from trash, which worked as a vehicle as of the 2000s with the installationist boom. It could be, as described by Viveiros de Castro and Déborah Danowski in ¿Hay un mundo por venir?,esas imaginaciones (que) cobraron nueva vida a partir de los años noventa del siglo pasado, cuando se formó el consenso científico respecto de las transformaciones en curso del régimen termodinámico del planeta”[10] [those imaginations (that) came to life in the 1990s, when the scientific consensus on the ongoing transformations of the planet's thermodynamic regime took shape]. 

            The time frame spans the transition between millennia to the present day and focuses on works with narratives, materials or procedures directly or indirectly associated to dystopian speculations, in which a fundamental feature is the rupture of the representation of linear time (as pointed out by Clara Esborraz in La hora rota). During this period of projections around the future, past and future began to intertwine in landscapes without people or with different beings, such as those created in 2016 by Laura Códega and Nicanor Aráoz. Taciturna y solitaria, and its kneeling, chained woman with plastic bubbling out of her body–a body that by its material composition comes ahead and is associated with the disturbing vision Cronenberg’s Crimes of the future shares in 2022 about the human body and the intervention of art in this transformation–are entelechies without time, with nothing and no one around them.
 
 Laura Códega "Taciturna y solitaria", 2016
 
Nicanor Aráoz "Sin título", 2016
 
            A world with different beings, a world without people and people without a world are three possible versions that represent the future landscape, although... What is the future, when is the future, if “the ecological collapse has already arrived”? In Adaptación Orilla (2007) Florencia Rodríguez Giles unveils a scene of a ritual with strange beings inside a room. There, nature has no restraints to expand to every corner of the room that is no longer under human care.
 
Florencia Rodriguez "Giles Adaptación orilla", 2007
 
Matías Duville, from landscapes such as Eso fue otro lugar (2010) or Una escena perdida (2007), represents territories where human presence has been drastically erased from the map. In contrast, Adrián Villar Rojas in The Theater of Disappearance (2017) portrays in three dimensions a family that might be the only thing left from the aftermath of civilization. This installation exhibited on the terrace of the MET in New York was made with inert materials. In its materiality and location, it is reminiscent of his first large installation Lo que el fuego me trajo (2008), in which he transformed the basement of his gallery in Buenos Aires into a ruin, using hundreds of pieces of cracked clay.[11] 
 
Matías Duville "Esto fue otro lugar", 2010
 
Adrián Villar Rojas "The theater of disappearance (4)", 2017
 
            On a small photocopied sheet of paper, philosopher Emmanuel Biset, recently arrived from the province of Cordoba, distributed among the participants of his seminar[12] some words he wrote to refer to The Mushroom at the End of the World by anthropologist Anna Tsing: “Hace falta un compendio de puntos de vistas que nos enseñen a mirar los paisajes actuales del mundo. Un mundo en ruinas que engendra posibilidades. Un trabajo minucioso que ejercite las artes de la observación crítica para atender a cada parcela…, para sin esperanza ni temor pensar conjuntamente las ruinas y las posibilidades. Sin esperanza, sin temor. Aprender lentamente las artes de la observación para encontrar posibilidades en las ruinas” [We need a compendium of points of view that teach us how to look at the current landscapes of the world. A world in ruins that engenders possibilities. A meticulous work that exercises the arts of critical observation to attend to each plot..., to think together, without hope or fear, about the ruins and their possibilities. Without hope, without fear. Slowly learn the arts of observation to find possibilities in the ruins]. Spirited, neo-tragic and mythical these visual productions resonate when linked to Biset's words.
 
          In Nicolás Bacal's work, La balística del minuto (2017), like a pendulum, a bronze bell passes a few millimeters above the ground and marks a monotonous movement back and forth. A ticking, ticking, sorrowful ticking that reminds us that everything that goes, comes back.
 
Nicolás Bacal "La Balística del minuto", 2017
 
The becoming that affects all beings on the earth's surface is exposed by Analía Sabán and Catalina León. For them, the contingencies of space and time are a substantial part, as they intervene in all living matter. While Sabán investigates the processes that traverse the elements of artistic practice, as occurs in Draped Concrete (8 sq ft) (2016), where a concrete slab cracks and folds under gravity on the base of an easel, León in Limbo (s/f) paints a fragment of nature on the cutout of a Durlock slab that she exhibited, as she does with the clothes she hangs out in the sun, outdoors, in contact with erosion on the terrace of her house. The works of these artists, generationally twinned with the previous ones–all born in the 70s and early 80s– put into play their gaze on the passage of time; violent and threatening time that runs through them.
 
 
Analia Saban "Drapped Concrete (8 sq ft.)", 2016
 
 
      
Catalina León "Limbo"       
 
            Does art awaken us? Should we hold this expectation or understand the works as an escape that helps us to live? Can the metaphorical power of art help us to look differently at a world where everything escapes from our hands, as it happens with the animated and self-willed line that exceeds the borders in Liliana Porter's Forty years IIB (hand over Line II) (2013)? The chosen pieces are part of a speculative game about the future. They are refuge and warning; they symbolize and shed lines of approach to the world, possible alternative present or future worlds. They lead us to look at other things, they teach us to think differently. They are mystery and conduits.
 
Liliana Porter "Forty Years IIB (hand, over line II)", 2013 
 

            If the present becomes suffocating and the future, as predicted by scientists, unimaginable, the works can build different experiences on the perception and configuration of the present and the future. Some works sensitize or, as Vinciane Despret[13] would say when he teaches us to look at birds, make desirable other modes of attention; they alert or alter, they stage the past, present and future, modifying our time and space perception. They pivot between reverie and violence, they cancel the distinction between the living and the dead, nature and culture, the human and the non-human, fantasy and the real. They account for a time of transition, they bring us closer to other ways of being, they show the distance from the previous world. “Libertad es saber huir de los fantasmas” [Freedom is knowing how to escape from ghosts], Emmanuel Biset enthusiastically and loudly quoted Anna Tsing at the end of his seminar. The pieces that take part in this journey give shape to the unimaginable; they strengthen us as they enliven our fantasies. 



    November 2022
 

[1]  Berardi, Franco (2021). La segunda venida. Buenos Aires: Caja Negra, p. 96.

[2] Excerpt from the conference “Anthropocene: Arts of living on a Damaged Planet”, at the University of California. https://youtu.be/6BW8YmRAoW4

[3] Harman, Graham (2010). Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures. Washington: Zero Books, p. 120.

[4] Butler, Octavia E. (2021). La parábola de los talentos. Madrid: Capitán Swing (first English edition, 1993) and Butler, Octavia E. (2021). La parábola del sembrador. Madrid: Capitán Swing (first edition in English, 1993).

[5] Marder, Michael (2022). El vertedero filosófico. Barcelona: Ned Ediciones.

[6] Colombo, Alejandro (2021). “Copper, a unique window of opportunity for Argentina”. https://panorama-minero.com/noticias/el-cobre-una-ventana-de-oportunidad-unica-para-argentina/ 

[7] Speranza, Graciela (2022). Lo que vemos, lo que el arte ve. Buenos Aires: Anagrama.

[8]  Svampa, Maristella y Viale, Enrique (2020). El colapso ecológico ya llegó. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, p. 13.

[9] Berardi, Franco (2021). La segunda venida. Buenos Aires: Caja Negra, p. 14. 

[10]  Danowski, Déborah y Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo (2019). ¿Hay un mundo por venir? Buenos Aires: Caja Negra. P.21. 

[11]  Carried out at Ruth Benzacar Art Gallery.

[12] Seminar “Reading Eduardo Viveiros de Castro”, organized in 2022 at the Kirchner Cultural Center in the framework of the Proyecto Ballena, coordinated by Liliana Viola and Pablo Schanton.

[13]  Despret, Vinciane (2022). Habitar como un pájaro. Buenos Aires: Cactus, p. 12-13.