Possessing Nature

The curatorial concept juxtaposes Mexico and Venice as “amphibious cities.” While one embraces the sea (“si sposa con il mare”), the other is dried out and its lakes are exhausted under the imprint of colonial sovereignty.

“The project arose from a clear idea: to recover the value of the trace and the cartographic line to create the possibility of shifting and juxtaposing specific realities resulting from the exercise of sovereign power —city of canals, city of drains”. (Karla Jasso)

Across Venice’s alleyways and canals, a trace was drawn connecting the places that have hosted the Mexican pavilion during the twenty first century. The path through sites of noble, merchant, religious and military power reveals the relation between architecture, aquatic space and the history of the West.

Possessing Nature consists of a single, site-specific installation, conceptualized collaboratively by artists Tania Candiani and Luis Felipe Ortega: “a single work signed by two”. Tania Candiani’s aesthetic research regards narrative, language and the phonic power of voice. Luis Felipe Ortega, working with moving image and the reflection of time within it, initiates an intensive search towards the language of matter, the meaning of “journey,” the sculptural condition of emptiness and the tension of the space.

The artists’ piece for the pavilion is a (counter)infrastructure work, a hydraulic system that seeks to point out the unpredictability of a natural disequilibrium circumstance and the different responses to it. In a globalized world and its consensus politics, technology arrogantly aspires to dominate the natural force, only to realize that it soon becomes a vicious and flawed mechanism. In its artistic potency, the pavilion denounces the perversity of colonial sovereignty -still manifest, marking its vital presence in the current governments. Let’s possess nature! proclaim those in power just as the collector in the complex rhetoric of globalization of art, nature and politics.

A recitative sound action in the canals will take place during opening week (May 6-10). It emphasizes the way in which water ‘carries the voice’ making use of the resonant nature of Venetian architecture and the canals’ acoustic.

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