"Monteverde a"
Photo series "Monteverde a" / Sculpture installation "Parasite" / Wildclay paintings "a Soil"
"Co-dependency"
„DARIEN a“ exhibition at OKAPI Gallery
8th - 26th of May 2024
The exhibition “Darien a'' offered a glimpse into the Darien jungle that straddles the border between Panama and Colombia. Exploring the complex relationship between the Guna Yala community and nature through the artist's lens. The exhibition captured the initial image of a seemingly harmonious jungle village by the Caribbean Sea, which gradually fount it's way to a dystopian reality, profoundly capturing glipses of contradictions between nature and the local community.
The exhibition comprised material produced during the artist's art residency in the village of Armila, Panama, in 2022. Featuring sculptural pieces complemented by a series of photographs of the rainforest, captured in January (2024) during the artist's Costa Rican art residency. The artist draws on Jaques Lacan's idea of the “small object a” in their work, which symbolises the eternal unfulfillment of desire.
Exhibition comprises three parts: documentary; art photography and sculpture installation.
Details of "Co-dependency"
"Parasite"
“Real or Not”
Altered documentary
Digital part was about a raw and robust travel documentary. The Armila village is situated in a dense rainforest with lush vegetation. There are animals and wilderness, but the surraounding also hides illegal and inhumane activities like drug-, animal- and human trafficking, and locals profiting off illegal migration. Since it was forbidden to record this flow of migrants, whose trek is enabled by the villagers, the photo and video material of the exhibition was comprised of uncontrolled footage, later filtered through the artist’s experiences, perceptions and interpretations.
Documentation of "Real or Not" materials (video, sound, post-cards) / painting from wildclay series "a Soil"
Post-card series "Dear American Dream"
Photography
“Real or Not” & "Monteverde a"
Photo series "Real or Not" is playing with truth distortions and visual illusions, emphasising the nature of desire and unfulfillment. It is complemented by a personal fairytale-like photo series “Monteverde a”, that observes the construct of a dystopian primal nature, and illustrates the unfulfilled hopes and expectations of life in the jungle, existing as one with nature and the search for unshackled freedom. It also reflects the unobtainable mysticism along with the artist’s yearning for primal forests, belonging and one’s roots.
Sculpture installations
"Parasite" & "Co-dependency"
"Darien a" sculpture installation ponders on addictive relationships and parasitism which are abundant in the rainforest, both as biological forms and as human activity. In nature it’s about the biological existential struggle, where plants use one-another for their needs. They share and mediate without any negative connotations, and everything is in constant change: death also means new life, fire means cleansing and the absence of light or nutrients means adaptation. With humans though, it is questionable.
"Monteverde a" / "Parasite"
"DARIEN a" visual stories raise the questions of values, power and cultural losses. And ask about the nature of the “object small a” - that is desirable but ultimately elusive? Does striving towards this “something” nurtures the soul or instead destroys it?
"a Black River"