Measuring Geography: New Territories
(Excerpt)
“There is always a geography that corresponds to a temperament. The challenge is to find it.”¹
Arriving at a place hitherto unknown, whether geographical or mental, is also the beginning of ordering it based on the very human need to situate oneself within it. This research project posits that one of the ways we position ourselves in relation to our immediate geographical context is through artistic practice. It is important to clarify from the outset that this practice is understood here as a form of research in itself, thereby blurring the disciplinary boundaries between practice and theory, research and creation. Such dualisms are the result of a conceptual heritage from which we seek to take a critical distance, aiming to establish more flexible and multidirectional relationships of thought.
“Measuring Geography: New Territories” is the title of a curatorial research project that has also fulfilled the purpose of situating itself in a place, re-knowing it, and establishing networks of collaboration and dialogue within it. The title directly references the exercise of measuring the Earth undertaken by Eratosthenes of Cyrene around 250 B.C., creating a conceptual shift to consider how artistic practice can also be an experimental means of better understanding the context that surrounds us and positioning ourselves within it in a critical way. Especially when that context, as has occurred in recent years, reveals itself to be volatile and subject to rapid changes, configuring itself as a new territory to be explored.
To this end, the research begins with the study of the work and dialogue with three artists from the island of Mallorca who share a similar generational moment: Julià Panadès (1981), Laia Ventayol (1984), and Mar Guerrero (1991); as well as the relationship of their artistic work with the concepts of geography, body, and ecology. The main idea underlying these approaches is that their work can be analyzed and understood through these concepts, which are also of great relevance in contemporary art theory today, as the aesthetics of a new geological era characterized by environmental crisis are being formulated. Additionally, interesting conceptual and aesthetic relationships are established between their respective practices: from reflections on the remains of the Anthropocene, to geographies splashed with memory, to fictional and speculative territories.
Theorists like Donna Haraway have recently emphasized the need to create new symbiotic relationships with our context, taking into account ecological, relational, and also aesthetic issues: “we need each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. We become-with each other or not at all.”² The process of this research has been experienced as that becoming-with, as it has taken place through dialogue with the artists rather than through solitary speculation about their practices, as we will see later in the methodological notes. However, in this hot compost pile, there are also certain doses of speculation, questions that have not found an immediate answer, mental drifts, and various conceptual constructions.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that the concepts of geography, body, and ecology are of great importance in the insular context of the Balearic Islands. How can this context be thought of from the perspective of curating and contemporary artistic creation? Just as in the symbioses proposed by Donna Haraway, artistic production linked to a specific context sometimes raises common and shared questions. With this in mind, is it possible that the geographical specificity of these artists imprints similar questions, interests, or lines of inquiry? Is it feasible to think that their frequent use of natural materials such as earth, stones, or beach sand is mere coincidence and has nothing to do with the geographical context and the ecologies of the island? If parallels are observed between their practices, such as the close dialogue they maintain with the sea, could they not be partially explained by the same geographical substrate from which their multiple displacements and returns take place? These are some of the questions this research project aims to answer.
¹ Onfray, Michel. Teoría del viaje. Poética de la geografía. Barcelona: Taurus, 2016, p. 25.
² Haraway, Donna. Seguir con el problema: generar parentescos en el Chthuluceno. Bilbao: Consonni, 2019, p. 24.