Blanca de la Torre: Con Los Pies En La Tierra

Beez And Honey

Con Los Pies En La Tierra: CAAM, Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. October 7th 2022 – January 29th 2023 Curators: Blanca de la Torre and Zoran Erić Artists: Ravi Agarwal / Amy Balkin / Luna Bengoechea Peña / Ursula Biemann / Saskia Calderón / Javier Camarasa / Tania Candiani / Tomas Colbengtson / Teresa Correa / Acaymo S. Cuesta & Branislav Nikolić / Mark Dion / Olafur Eliasson / Tue Greenfort / Gloria Godínez / Lungiswa Gqunta / Igor Grubić / Tea Mäkipää / Marija Marković / Mary Mattingly / Ana Mendieta / Santiago Morilla / Michael Najjar / Fernando Palma / pluriversal radio / PSJM (Cynthia Viera & Pablo San José) / Nikola Radić Lucati / Tabita Rezaire / pablo sanz / Zina Saro-Wiwa / Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle / Robertina Šebjanič & Gjino Šutić / Theresa Traore Dahlberg / Tanja Vujinović / Juan Zamora / Bo Zheng Con los pies en la Tierra seeks to explore the complexity of the ecological problematics connected to the current state of late capitalism, through realms like the struggle for indigenous sovereignty, gender equality, resistance to different kinds of extractivisms, land and water exploitation, and the legacy of colonialism and economic neocolonial strategies. We have to embrace the potential for resistance to all forms for environmental justice and propose an interconnected approach between visual arts and the newly opened eco-political spaces that are challenging the trinomy of Capitalism, Patriarchy and Colonialism. This exhibition is conceived as the second part of a broader project, which had the first phase in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade (MoCAB), after three-year-long research. Under the title Overview Effect, it was referring to the concept coined by Frank White, that described the cognitive shift reported by a number of astronauts having looked back from Space to Earth. We took it as a metaphor to show the encompassing view needed to understand all aspects of the global eco-social crisis in a moment where we are surpassing the biocapacity of the Earth. In this second part, the new exhibition at CAAM, titled in Spanish Con los pies en la Tierra we decided to shift the focus “down to earth”, with an earthbound approach to the environmental issues, showing how this “all the way around” position brings us, at the end of the day, to the same views of interconnectedness and ecodependency. Moreover, we have to consider that the word tierra is a homonym in the Spanish language, meaning both the planet Earth and the soil. The “mirroring” of these two perspectives would give deeper insight and tackle the discourse of environmental justice, as a result of a large project that involved a series of workshops, lectures, panel discussions, encounters with activists, and theoretical events.