Replacing economy with ecology creates new relationships and puts nature at the center. Human development must be rethought with the addition of not only monetary, but values such as equality and balance. »The world has enough for everyone’s needs, but not for everyone’s greed,« wrote Gandhi in reference to the planet’s resources.
There are plenty examples. The flower fields along the Yamuna River in Delhi have existed for more than 200 years. Here the river is still clean, remains untouched by the city’s sewage. The soil of the riverbanks is very fertile – every year it is washed down by the floods from the Himalayas. Farming families have been cultivating hundreds of marigold fields here ever since, without using pesticides or fertilizers. The flower trade sustains the country and its people in a sustainable way.
But there are already new plans to transform the banks into luxury residences with river views for the new elite. The old farmers’ market is also to make way for the »global« city. Farmers face the dilemma of a competitive situation between their local economy and global fantasies for the future.
The fertility of money has replaced the fertility of the earth.

Mexico’s natural environment is threatened by deforestation that is expanding at an alarming speed. The destruction of forests is resulting in a state of emergency for a wide variety of endemic species affecting ecosystems worldwide. Each year Mexico looses 1,235,000 acres of forest and tropical rain forest endangering 900 species of animals and plants. Institutional programs as well as market demands have pushed diverse communities to change the vocation of entire ecosystems into harvesting fields or pastures; also uncontrolled fires are contributing to accelerate deterioration of natural environments. The year 2050 will be the point of no return and the consequences of deforestation that are not only affecting wildlife will also be fatal to human ecosystems drastically reducing water supplies and exacerbating climate change. The installation 2050 is comprised of a series of postcards designed as an intervention inside the gallery setting and outside into the public space. The piece includes documentation of a large-scale intervention on the Cathedral of Puebla Zocalo and an ephemeral sculpture constructing the number 2050 made out of postcards.

When we talk about saving the planet, we normally focus on scientific perspectives. We believe in the omnipotence of science. But crucial to whether we can save the planet is our social behavior, our consumer behavior, and our treatment of all living beings. And if we can accept and support their equal rights to live on our earth. »Fantastic Dolly« is an artificial creature created to bring hope. Its journey started in the studio, then it began to explore the world by visiting his conspecifics in the natural history museum in Berlin. Curious to see them. Inspecting the collection of animals conserved in glasses filled with alcohol. Nosy to see the evolutionary forerunners, millions of years older. Amazed at how humans preserve animals. Their wishful look at once exotic and now threatened life on earth. Their distant and half-hearted desire to keep the evolution and at the same time ignoring that they are responsible for all the destruction. »Fantastic Dolly« focuses on how we deal with people, it tries to keep the focus on sympathy and compassion to all other beings. To create a better world in the future, but also in each rising moment. Life is more than consumo ergo sum: I consume therefore I am.

The work »still-living« considers the aesthetics and meaning of objects unnoticed in urban space in our disposable culture – still lifes. The objects have been photographed on the streets of Berlin. Objects of our every day culture like colorful drink cans, scrunched and driven over, take away cups crumpled, leftover food careless scrapped.
Still life in the European art tradition is about lifeless and motionless objects. The choice of objects was substantial (often symbolic) and an aesthetic issue. The concern of the painters was on one hand to conceive the objects of nature and everyday life and at the same time to communicate an encoded message.

The issue of still life works in Baroque was the wealth of individuals, of aristocrats and the rich bourgeois. Beside the opulence impermanence was a central aspect in still life works. The opulence was shown by realistic and sumptuous embodiment of grapes, apples, the decoration with flowers, food in abundance and wine in beautiful wineglasses. This display of opulence was sometimes combined with signs of impermanence like dead animals, skulls or a candle.

The work »still-living« is a contemporary interpretation of the classical still life. It´s not about the richness of individuals. It´s about the richness of our society.The theme of vanitas plays a central role. In the centre of the work is a dead pigeon – as a sign of impermanence of worldly life. Their wings are widly spread. It´s lying on the asphalt. You can see it´s featherfin plumage in all their nuances of colours – beautiful and impermanent. The whole scenerie is contemplated by a creature in a golden yellow fur – looking through a glas vitrine on still-living.

Biography

Marc Aldinger (*1968 in Göppingen) lives and works in Berlin.

Material

Biography

Always true to her language and thought, Marlene Almeida surpasses herself constantly. Her senses are sharp and always thirsty by nature. Her view maps the path, directing in a tireless search for new natural discoveries. While always focusing on the concern about the ‘nature of time’ and being faithful to the connection with the earth, the artist uses this as material for her paintings and objects. The artist presents now, for the exhibition at the Latin America Memorial, an intervention in the external space – exactly where the concrete replaced the green, the artist presents a sort of redemption or Memory of the Atlantic Forest: a long list of names of trees cut in adhesive and applied as a catwalk on the ramp entrance to the gallery Marta Traba.
Text: Tereza de Arruda

Marlene Almeida, born 1942 in Bananeiras, Brazil, lives and works in João Pessoa, Brazil.

Alÿs enacted Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing) in 1997 in Mexico City. The film depicts a simple and seemingly pointless endeavour – a large block of ice being pushed through the city streets for 9 hours until it melts away to nothing.

The theme of transformation, poetic by definition but also a little subversive, is central to Alÿs work. There is a balance between absence and presence… between the idea and the object… between what isn’t there as well as what is; the space between things in which transformation occurs.

All his actions are made as a response to a context and a moment, therefore he never reenacts them elsewhere.

Biography

Francis Alÿs (*1959 Belgium) lives and works in Mexico-City, Mexico. 

In a playful ironic way and with great earnestness the artists’ group SCHAUM addresses the disappearance of the forest. The forest, one of the greatest treasures on earth, over million of years old, habitat for animals and plants, once a holy place to worship nature, shelter for legends and a variety of tales, inspiration for poetry and songs, vital for our eco system, has become a place of deforestation. Insted of an emergency hammer we have a can of the air freshener “Forest Scent. A product of our modern »wellness oasis« for our homes, as a substitute for the loss of the forest and its scent.

The Artist Collective SCHAUM was created 2009 in Germany

Néle Azevedo’s »Minimum Monument« converses with the long tradition of monument: a landmark earmarked to perpetuate something in the urban space throughout History.
Nevertheless, Néle Azevedo inverts the direction of the inherent exaltation of that tradition and works on the register of the precariousness and the impermanence.The path implies the acceptance that the contemporary experience is partial and ephemeral and no longer everlasting. Traveling to numerous cities around the world, her minute statues of ice perform in the »exalted« urban spaces, instigating a sharp reflection about the tear and the finite that is the life time and the place of the individual within the crowd under the importance of History.
Her statues seem to be entities indifferent to the daily motion of people, to the ordinary appeal of urban advertising and worldly enchantment of the landscape. Therefore, in their cold integrity on refusing the world, those statues give the amazing impression of being more real than human beings to a certain extent. On one hand, human beings are not translucent so, against light, they snuff out. On the other hand, the statues, concentrated on their crystalline interior, continuously inflate a white and blurred cloud inside their bodies of ice like a spine that rises whereas their external shape is consumed. Would there be a better visual translation for the intangible idea of soul?
That is the matter beneath the artist’s work: death as a ritual and mourning as transcendence, that is the possibility of continuation of life. There is the recovery of the notion of »monument« which historic origin is connected to the sacred and funeral rituals—tombs and temples. Her monuments are minimum though. So the movement that establishes the work concerns less to the necessity of perpetuating a collective memory than of the transient individual experience due to the pure presence in a non repeated moment as a sacrificial instant.

Text: Guilherme Wisnik, Translation: Miriam Giovanardi

Other material

Néle Azevedo bei Article | 10

Biography

Néle Azevedo (*1950 Santos Dumont-MG, Brazil) lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil.

KONSTANTIN BAYER sees his work as artist, curator and artistic director of EIGENHEIM Weimar/ Berlin as a unit of artistic practice. As an artist he questions the prevailing consumer culture and throw-away society, environmental awareness and global developments. As curator he embeds these and other themes in deepening contexts and as artistic director he develops an environment of collective practice.

Biografie Konstantin Bayer

born 1983 in Gotha / 2001 – 2004 Berufsausbildung zum Umweltschutz-Technischem Assistenten / 2004 – 2011 Master of Fine Arts – Bauhaus-Universität Weimar und Master of Art – Tongji-University Shanghai / 2006 – Gründung der Galerie Eigenheim in Weimar / seit 2011 selbständig als Künstler und Kurator und künstlerischer Leiter der Galerie Eigenheim / lebt und arbeitet in Weimar und Berlin

Informationen zu den gezeigten Arbeiten

The Wave, 2013
ca. 1.500 geschmolzene PET Flaschen, Stahl / 80 x 50 x 118 cm

Bildobjekt 02, 2016
Vase mit Blumen von Henri de Fantin-Latour (Direktdruck auf Alu Dibond 40 x 40cm), kleines Wandregal aus Plexiglas, Fiji Wasser PET 500 ml

Landschaft auf Regal, aus der Serie Artarticles, 2015
Wandregal (Loggia, 60x15x4 cm, weiß), Mischwald (25 Bäume, 65-150 mm), Rückfahrkamera (170°Grad, Farbkamera), 5″ Monitor TFT LCD Display, E27 3W LED RGB Disko Lichteffekt, Sand (Sahara gold”, formbar 5 kg), Netzteil (12V, 1,4A), Lampenfassung (E27, schwarz), Steckdosenleiste (dreifach, weiß)

One of the perhaps most outstanding pioneering works in the context of environmentalism and ecology is the work »7000 Eichen«, a planting action started at documenta VII. »7000 Eichen –Stadtverwaldung statt Stadtverwaltung« is a work of landscape art for whose realization Joseph Beuys relied on the commit-ment and cooperation of the popu-lation of Kassel. At various sites in the city, he combined an oak and a basalt stele. These contrastive natural materials, in their paired »planting«, were to visualize the contested field between growth and petrifaction. Beuys saw in organic growth a metaphor for the – in his view – necessary processes of change and healing in a society that is becoming increasingly estranged from its natural environment. By extending his notion of art to »social sculpture«, Beuys formulated a utopian outline of a civilization of an »ecological gesamtkunstwerk«.

Joseph Beuys (*1921 Krefeld – †1986 Düsseldorf, Germany)

Other material