or
The cultural construction of pure nature, based on edited and dated images of natural sites preserved through strict regulation of the wild.
Video 5.57′, 2018
Municipal Library Almeida Garrett, Porto.
GRAZZINI, Giuseppe, Parques Nacionais do Mundo, published by Replicação, Lisbon, 1996. Original publication National Parks of the Worldby Giuseppe Grazzini, published by Crescent Books, 1 Nov. 1991.
from the series:
Every Square Meter Of The Earth
This world is getting smaller by the day. Our domestication of the planet, or rather the frantic conquest of every last bit of land, has squeezed out most of what could be named ‘wild’. And through this shrinking of habitat, accompanied by our ever more urban lives, we seem to have entered a state where the natural world is no longer familiar to us. No longer something we understand for what it thrives to be. We rather see it as something that feeds our consumption desires or something that we must desperately try to preserve as it is. These two reactions are completely comprehensible. The first as it creates better conditions for our species, the second, in reaction, for trying to avoid the absolute destruction of the earth’s ecosystem. But both perpetuate a very specific image of nature. An objectified nature, disconnected from our existence, and a ‘pure nature’, untouched, which at some point was perfect, and that we humans endangered. An image of nature that presents the possibility of modern day Edens, and the subsequent thrill of being able to preserve the last known paradises, while consuming others. But is our idea of nature truly capable of ignoring itself?
This exhibition explores our notion of nature along with the clash of the human world and the natural world, dealing with concepts such as natural and anti-natural, purity and reality, winners and losers, the condition of wilderness, depletion and abandonment, misplaced life, the systematic conquest of territories and the process of layering the new on top of the old.
Presentations:
May 2018, Every Square Meter Of The Earth, Galeria do Sol, Porto.