This exhibition is the result of the imaginary evoked in the science fiction, climate fiction and autoethnography stories written by Regina de Miguel between the spring and summer of 2020. The stories place us in a future in which the colonization of space has been going on for several centuries, to such an extent that ruins, old-fashioned tourist complexes, even a museum with the most important and well-known art collection including replicas and copies of all the art produced by humanity throughout history.
A scientist, a sort of alter ego paralyzed in transit on a planet by an unknown cosmic epidemic, lives in front of a swamp describing and painting mutant life forms, multi-species, holobionts with the nervous system of a cuttlefish, corals, parts of fungi, flowers, insects, fragments of pottery, masks, necklaces, and representations of the cosmos; animist totems that appeal to co-dependent relationships.
Levitating beings that appeal to the construction of new material assemblages, not only biological, but also between intangible events such as affections, in a space in which they are placed as an Axis Mundi or vertebral axis on a stratigraphic plane understood as the articulation between thought, memory and territory.
The same voice also emerges in a film trying to understand what its mission will be in this place. The mythopoeic scenario of the swamp as a place of cohabitation, of multiplicity and dilemmas on a planet of nostalgia, as an interface from which to talk to comets and sounding lines never seen again, to convene a meeting of suicides or to dream of intoxicated waters.
As a backbone, small offerings of coral from the Great Barrier Reef that define the largest living animal being in the world. Painted in gold and floating in a metallic blue, they appear as a central figure surrounded by mysterious objects, archaeological remains, plants, organs, and animals.
A small offering made from the desire for protection and Thaumaturgy (from the Greek words θαῦμα ‘miracle’ ‘wonder’ and ἔργον ‘work’). An extravagant bestiary in which the immediately threatened reminds us that the process is slow, invisible but inexorable over the living and the inert.
What happens to bodies is not immediately visible; it accumulates implacably, like the acidification of the seas.
Regina de Miguel (Málaga, 1977): Her interdisciplinary artistic practice is characterized by research and development of processes aimed at the production of knowledge and hybrids objects. Read more about the artist and her work on her website.
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