I Remember Earth

Brígida Baltar, Chiara Comoni, Judy Chicago, Carolina Cordeiro, Edith Dekyndt, Agnes Denes, Célia Gondol, Iconoclasistas, Rachel Labastie, Maria Laet, Barbara & Michael Leisgen, Teresa Murak, Gina Pane, Katie Paterson, Àngels Ribé, Michelle Stuart, Sabrina Torelli, Celeida Tostes, Adrien Tirtiaux, Marie Velardi

The works of art brought together in our new exhibition propose a way of relating to the Earth as a living being and to earth as a physical object. They echo the diversity of contemporary debates on environmental issues. Driven by a keen awareness of the fragility of the natural order, these artworks articulate a plea of intercession for the environment and a summons to heed the heartbeat of the world and engage with the secret life that animates it.

The featured works act as intercessors between living beings and physical matter and assert the connection between the world of art and the realm of nature. They have a troubled relationship with form and function since they are destined to be consumed and are consonant with the energies of the world. Straddling belief and fiction, and located at the fringes of ancestral spirituality, these works radiate incantatory, healing power. 

Works by Gina Pane, Ágnes Dénes, Teresa Murak, as well as Celeida Tostes and Judy Chicago have prepared the way for current artistic practices. Undisputed precursors of the movement, their work went unheeded at the time of their creation. The present exhibition places these pioneering works at the heart of the history of art, as seen through our contemporary eyes and our minds, obsessed as we are by impending catastrophes and the future of human life on this planet.

Contemporary artists, such as Edith Dekyndt, Sabrina Torelli, Rachel Labastie, Carolina Cordeiro, Mara Laet, and Chiara Camoni, similarly engage the earth through humble, quasi-vernacular practices such as calling on the elements and capturing the invisible threads that tie together the components of the universe.

The exhibition is not limited to a display of inert and deactivated objects. A dozen different Rituals, performed by artists and other healers, will breathe life into the exhibition spaces (in other words, animate them).

Active vigils, photographs, videos, drawings, sculptures, installations, and rituals compose a grand and beautiful ode to the enchanted, nourishing, inhabited, cherished, and memorialized Earth. At the intersection of poetics and politics, the exhibition constitutes a critical exploration that is simultaneously metaphysical and telluric, philosophical and social in nature.