with Amy Casilda Bartoli, Dominik Buda, Cătălina Cosma, Vlad Dinu, Flora Franke, Elena Kristofor, Denise Lobont, Patric Pavel, Diana Păun und Nora Severios
Galeria Posibila, Bucharest, Romania
2021
The project began with a simple yet far-reaching idea by Jean-François Lyotard. In his 1989 essay titled “Can One Think Without a Body?”, the philosopher reflects on the relationship between humanity and nature and how one might conceive of this relationship in light of the sun’s extinction and, consequently, the end of the Earth. Lyotard’s reflections express a new perspective on the Earth that we have been confronted with since the 1980s: we experience and observe environmental destruction and climate change, yet ultimately, we have forgotten nature in human life.
The works in the exhibition take up this mood. As an artist, exploring this human-nature relationship and directly experiencing and observing the Earth on which we stand with such profound consequences, that was also the real challenge in the year-long process of this workshop. To work through the notions of nature, concepts of nature, ideologies of nature, utopias, and technologies of modernity, to detach from them, and instead to attempt to intuit nature without words from within oneself, and, if necessary, to fail in the working process due to the reality, the time, and the scale of the task, perhaps it is rather the unsettling condition of postmodern humanity, and less that of nature, that resonates in all the works on display.
