Entangled

Aguilas 2020

„How to speak about the Earth without taking it to be an already composed whole, without adding to it a coherence that it lacks, and yet without deanimating it by representing the organisms that keep the thin film of the critical zones alive as mere inert and passive passengers on a physio-chemical system?“

— Bruno Latour

We live in an era of a crises. In the past, they might have been called plagues, in the wrong but reassuring understanding that they come from outside, sent by some dissatisfied gods. The Anthropocene teaches us that it is our own fault. Every day anew: rainforests, glaciers and thousands of species disappear, the CO2 values in the atmosphere rise just as continuously as the sea level, storms sweep over the infertile earth.

Here, in the area around my studio in southern Spain, the Anthropocene is commonplace, obvious, inescapable and shattering. A few kilometers from here, within sight, begins the ‘mar de plastico’, for which the formerly picturesque hilly landscape was rolled down, fish farms out in the sea, in between the ruins of failed construction projects. As if I hear the earth groan. Why listen? Why imagine the crisis?

I am reading. Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Charles Eisenstein, Robin Wall Kimmerer, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulies. Nature and culture, humans and animals, grown and made, eternal and ephemeral: the dualistic construction breaks down and reveals a confusing, matted, knotted braid, torn, intertwined fragments, that were never a whole. What to do? Nature, reliable, unchangeable and sometimes untouched, no longer exists. Has it ever existed? The ecological crisis is not just a crisis of nature, it is, to the same extent, a crisis of culture. There is no nature that opposes the human world. We live in the midst of a complex network of countless things and living things. 

Why are there still people naïve enough to belief in a supposedly deanimated material world? The earth, Gaia, is not a dead heap of stones that tumbles through an equally dead space, but an ancient goddess, literary figure, scientific hypothesis, body and fact. Many questions arise, familiar and yet not answered. Questions that get stuck in my head; which I repeat over and over again. Listening to the land, the plants, to the sea, I integrate the words into the paintings, recombine them, play with the words that I've been circling for weeks. 

Painting becomes a diary of an escalating situation. Illness, death, lock-down. Another crisis, Covid-19, reveals a world between shock and panic. A quiet world, where people hide and animals roam through deserted streets that are slowly overgrown by plants. As the silence passes, I go on reading, listening, painting. More and more questions have to be asked, facing the entangled banks of Gaia.