Barbora Jamrichová, Kristína Jamrichová: Quaestio de Aqua et Terra
Is there a view that is neither a techno-optimistic invocation to green technologies, nor an eschatological breaking of the stick and a summoning of "the flood is upon us"? Can we even imagine that technologies would not lead to a concentration of profits in the accounts of Silicon Valley creatives, but they would be an evenly distributed emancipatory tool?
The title of the show refers to the title of the little-known treatise by Dante Alighieri, a poet's contribution to the medieval debate on the mutual ordering of the spheres of water (aqua) and earth (terra firma).
It is the relationship between water and land that is the central motif of eco-fiction, prefigured by a particular landscape in the region of Záhorie. Just as the boundary between water and land fluctuates, and what is now land can become water, and conversely what was water can be dried up, so the boundary between the cultural and the natural does not exist either, because there is no such thing as culture or nature. The exhibition is an excursion into the tangle of human conceptualizations of landscape, and it bends romantic clichés nurtured by nostalgia for wildernesses and for lost paradises towards conscious disenchanted (fictional) acts of renewal and redistribution, which have finally overcome the division into nature and culture. To stop seeing nature as an innocent and apolitical background to human activities, where nothing is a contingency, means to replace folklore by geopolitics.
Collaborators: Tomáš Šenkyřík, Veronika Švecová, Natálie Pleváková, Daniel DONE Randus, Markéta Fránková, Ivana Rumanová, Jakub Polách, Jakub Trojan, Zuzana Plesková, Ela Lehotská, Tibor Ivanko, Martin Chrastina.
Paraphrases from B. Bratton's book Terraforming are used in the abstract.