"Do not accept the chauvinistic claim that labels our era as the age of mammals. It is the age of arthropods. They surpass us in every respect—in number of species, in number of individuals, and in prospects for evolutionary continuity."
Stephen Jay Gould
"Do not accept the chauvinistic claim that labels our era as the age of mammals. It is the age of arthropods. They surpass us in every respect—in number of species, in number of individuals, and in prospects for evolutionary continuity."
Stephen Jay Gould
Thinking biologically through art, and vice versa, is to enter a fairly vast world where natural spaces inhabited by multiple living beings and different kinds of species are part of a new universe for humans. Science has taken on the task of representing the curiosity humans have for understanding the reasons behind things and their natural laws—of exploring to the limit the different worlds that nature has placed within a single space, where creatures coexist either for survival or companionship.
The artistic exercise is not about aesthetically arranging a series of images, sounds, textures, among other sensations, but rather inquiring, through an investigative process, into a context—finding in images and objects a meaning that turns out to be one of personal or collective symbolization. Hans Belting says: "In the case of photography, the image is understood as a fragment that the camera tears from a space, or as the result of a photographic technique applied to a method. In one case, the photograph is a trace of the world; in the other, an expression of the medium that produces it." The dislocation that photography generates from reality, creating a symbolic map, is located "between the world and the human being. Rather than simply presenting the world, they show it in a dislocated way, until the human being eventually begins to live according to the very images they themselves have created." (Vilém Flusser)
On the other hand, biology has taken on the task of changing the perception of art, applying the scientific method to the artistic process. Science has transformed the formats and concepts of presentation that the artistic field had developed up to that point. Organic materials become tools of creation for artists—butterflies, plants, animals, test tubes, among others—paving the way for the creation of the work. "This dialogue likewise reflects the current interest placed in the life sciences and the influence they exert on culture and art, investigating from a broad diversity of perspectives the different aspects of the life sciences approached from their artistic, political and sociocultural context." (Edith Medina)
Phylum Artthrópoda is a show created by Leo Carreño, who, through an industrial, photographic and performative process, prepares vegetable-latex textiles, "applied as an accessory and epidermal garment on women who carry out an action of material exploration and detachment of the latex from their bodies, as a representation of the shedding of skin that occurs in the biological action of 'ecdysis,' or epidermal molting, among arthropods in nature." (Carreño) What his photographic process generates, related to Aristotelian catharsis, seeks to prompt in the viewer, in the maker, and in the women who are part of the process, an emotional, bodily, mental and spiritual release.
The show will be open to the public from September 5 to 28, 2014
Juan David Quintero Arbelaez
Curator