If you can not go, we bring a video below.
The show throws a spotlight on the rapport between man and Nature, a relationship whose dynamic has been radically altered over the last few decades. Our culture’s way of understanding and looking at Nature has experienced a paradigm shift. Until the end of the 18th century Nature was believed to be a manifestation of a mysterious, superhuman force equated with God. From that moment on, it was identified with a quality that exceeds the human dimension, seen as ephemeral and transitory. In our culture today the attributes of both Nature and the human being have been radically subverted. Nature is now perceived as a fragile system abused and exploited by humans. One only has to think of melting of glaciers, the deforestation of the Amazon rain forest and climate change is enough to perceive the tremendous fragility looming over the environment. Even natural disasters like tsunamis or great floods are seen as the effects of man´s action in a highly vulnerable ecosystem.
Subverted takes a look at the intersection of these two realities from a shared language. Where the hand of God was once seen in traditional representations of Nature, we now see the print of the human being. The devastating environmental and human consequences of oil spills in the ocean or the bed of a lake drained dry by the city of Los Angeles are the images proffered by Burtynsky and Maisel, respectively. Meanwhile, Valsecchi portrays a landscape scarred by human exploitation and industry. Rounding off these three projects is Black and Blue, an installation by Nuno Ramos with over ten tons of sand brought from Brazil, speaking to nature consumed and devastated by progress. None of these projects is innocent.
Each one bears implicit a political charge of activism that borders on the radical, suffused with an unsettling foreboding and an almost elegiac approximation to the landscape.
Venue: Ivorypress Space I C/ Comandante Zorita 46 (Madrid)
Date: Until May 12, 2012.
