Postnature. The Future is Present.

Text by Daniel López del Rincón

Urgency, Desire, Fear, Utopia, Collapse, Immortality… What will we face in the future?

In a world—our world—where the concept of nature is now obsolete, provisional concepts such as post-nature have allowed us to raise many questions about the meaning of these transformations, especially the demand for answers and ideas. Art has not come late to this revolution.

Why refer to this reality in terms of “post-nature”? What role does the human being play in shaping a post-natural age? Is it a recent reality or an old reality with a new name? What are the connotations of a term such as this today? What alarms does it set off? What imaginative and utopian practices does it generate?

In the exhibition POSTNATURE. THE FUTURE IS PRESENT, the concepts of future, nature and Anthropocene intertwine and dialogue with the answers offered by the artists Brandon BALLENGÉE, Joaquín FARGAS, the QUIMERA ROSA collective (in collaboration with Roger Rabbitch + Rebeca Paz) and Maja SMREKAR,  have given to the question of the future in the Anthropocene era.

Joaquín Fargas, The Biosphere project / Utopia (2006 / 2011-2019)

What if we could view our world, Planet Earth, from an alien’s perspective?

How does life develop in this sphere that we can hold in our hands? How is the necessary oxygen generated? What emotions do I feel when I perceive the world, my world, as something external? Fragility, domination, care, compassion, power, guilt, responsibility? How do plants survive in the biosphere? What are the functions of the microorganisms we “do not see” in the biosphere? How important is it for the artwork to be biologically alive? How do I relate to a work that can die? Does it aim to make us reflect on nature’s fragility? Does it aim to appeal to our responsibility, as viewers, as inhabitants of that which we are looking at? Could imagination, utopia even, be the best weapon to reverse ecological collapse? What if the artist created fans to cool down Antarctica’s ice, like a Don Quixote fighting climate change? What if he created a robot that flattened the glacier’s snow, to stop it melting?

Q.R*3: [Quimera Rosa+ Roger Rabbitch + Rebeca Paz], Trans*Plant: Connecting with Mycorrhiza Intranet [edible version] (2017-2019)

What happened to humanity that fateful year 2024, when all of Earth’s resources ran out?

How can we find out more about the lives of these biohackers? Are they still alive? Could we reconstruct what they did in the ecological collapse of 2024 through archaeological remains? How many of them were there, and how did they breathe that polluted air? What are all these laboratory objects that they’ve left us? What was all that equipment for? What did they eat? Did they create that laboratory food with such a peculiar taste? Or was that what destroyed them? Or just transformed them? Are they smiling in the voice recordings we have of them? Or are they crying? Did they find out how to communicate with plants? Did they learn to connect to mycorrhiza, the symbiosis between roots and fungi that allows plants to communicate, as they explain in their journals? Did they manage to adapt to their environment? Or was it the other way round, the environment adapted to them? Perhaps biohackers didn’t actually disappear at all, they just hybridised with plants? Being a plant: what would an existence with no interspecies limits be like? Can we imagine ourselves as the result of an entanglement between human and human? What does the year 2024 tell us about who we are? What does it tell us about who we are not?

Maja Smrekar, Survival Kit for the Anthropocene – Trailer (2015)

What if the artist could design a survival kit for the Anthropocene era?

What has brought us to this apocalyptic, hostile, barely habitable context? What should the kit contain? How will we detect radiation or protect ourselves from polluted air? How will we purify water and find food? Who should design this device? Will we once again have to trust a system, an industry that satisfies our needs? Or should we be the ones designing it? What kind of relationship will this survival kit allow us to have with our environment? Exploitation, cooperation, confrontation, harmony, colonisation? Will we revert to the dominant position of an ethnographer, a zoologist, or a conqueror of nature? How should we revise the modern definition of the human being as an entity isolated from nature? What are the possible contradictions involved in the existence of a kit to enable humans to live in the hostile world that they have created themselves? What notions sustaining our present relationship with nature should be revised?