TIZ 6. Planet A: Green World

The Museo organises Collective Mourning and Planetary Mourning, with a live arts programme which participates in the 40th Autumn Festival of Madrid. The first part features the performance of MONUMENT 0.6: Heterochrony, a stage piece by Hungarian choreographer Eszter Salamon, who creates an imaginary scene between past and present. The work also includes echoes of music archives from Sicily with choreographic impressions inspired by the mummification rituals of the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, presenting a continuum between life and death, a phantasmagorical co-existence, while inventing its own utopian body: a dancing, acoustic body. The performance is followed by a conversation between Eszter Salamon, Isabel de Naverán, Germán Labrador and Alberto Conejero.

The second part of the Collective Mourning and Planetary Mourning programme presents the performance Unending love or love dies, on repeat like it's endless, a choreography by Alex Baczyński-Jenkins which explores relationships between desire, dance, fragmentation, love (understood as communality), mourning and time. Through the gesture, sensuality, relationality and touch, Baczyński-Jenkins’s practice unfurls structures and politics of desire. Relationality is present in the dialogic forms of developing and performing the piece, and in the materials and poetics it invokes. This includes the study of the relationships between feeling and sociability, embodied expression and alienation, the textures of daily experiences and latent queer utopian legacies.

As the sinking of the Prestige off the Galician coast in 2002 demonstrated, most contemporary environmental disasters have given rise to significant mobilisations of mutual aid and demands in the places where they occur. In this encounter, different researchers, artists, activists and citizens reflect on the relations between ecology, memory and democracy today. The programme revolves around four axes: environmental traditions stretching from the anti-Francoist struggle to the present; memory and citizen creativity following the Prestige oil spill; authoritarian threats that loom from the depletion of fossil fuels; and controversies around imaginable futures.

Rising inflation, a dearth of resources, armed conflicts and alarming high temperature warnings, among numerous other issues, show that the environmental crisis is not simply a partial problem considered and resolved exclusively from environmental sectors. It concerns a systemic crisis that affects the entire social and organisational order, including a capitalist system that does not provide us with a viable response. As a coda to the course The Future is Unwritten, organised by Fundación de los Comunes (the Commons Foundation), the Museo welcomes this open encounter which prompts a collective evaluation of forms of organisation and the political strategies applied to date.

The programme Free Unions is structured around a series of events, surveys and activations in the rooms of Communicating Vessels. Collection 1881–2021, the new rehang of the Museo Reina Sofía Collection. This particular edition activates Rosa Barba’s work Bending to Earth (2015), a 35mm film installation which explores nuclear waste and the way in which it radically transforms the landscape. The encounter continues with a conversation with the artists and concludes with the live presentation of Wirepiece (2022), a machined concert played with a drum string, a strip of film and a modified 16mm projector.

When Destiny Catches Up with Us addresses the contributions of popular knowledge and scientific research on the extinction of animals that are key to the biosphere and are often found outside the scope of human perception. Therefore, it sets forth different sessions with talks and concerts that explore in more depth the problem of mass extinction, looking at the disappearance of bees and microorganisms from the ocean. The title of the activity is a translation of the Spanish translation of the film Soylent Green (1973), directed by American film-maker Richard Fleischer.

This study group ties in with the same-titled live arts programme. Across six sessions, artists and researchers share their investigations, readings, experiences and artistic references, contributing to an enrichment of reflections and debates which set up a dialogue with mourning a process of human loss and the mourning engendered by the gradual destruction of the planet. In this context of social disturbance, forms of rituality and collective care arise, inviting us to reflect on the potential of mourning to reshape relationships with the world.

This room explores the modernisation programme of Francoist Spain in the 1940s and 1950s. Leaving behind the Republican project of land distribution, attempts at creating land were only made possible with irrigation fed by reservoirs. Yet this policy would not manage to avoid mass rural exodus that emptied the countryside and filled cities like Madrid. The Regime looked to symbolically compensate for this rural migration through new towns, some of which appear photographed in this room. As a counterpoint to the extractivist gaze that still prevails today, the space also features the works of Josep Guinovart, who still imagined the possibility of a good life in the country.

The Universal Exhibition of Seville showed a side to bioclimatic architecture which, in this instance, did not involve devising structures to make use of the possibilities of the natural environment, but instead took plants from their ecosystems to adapt them to ephemeral designs made from scratch. Once such example was the huge cactus in the Mexican Pavilion, which was transported free of soil, mirroring its appearance in European botanical books and contrasting sharply with indigenous codices, whereby each plant was represented with its soil, wildlife and even its associated oral culture. The essay Cardón cardinal (Cardinal Cardon, 2020), along with other works that include scale models and plans of Expo, expose this contrast between the individualising epistemology of European modernity and that which made visible our current notions of ecosystems.     

The emphasis the conquest of the Americas placed on obtaining precious metals forged an extractivist epoch which stretches right up to our own era, along with the environmental and human effects. In this room, the sculptures show a computer printout: the results of an equation devised to calculate the relationship between kilos of gold transported from the Americas and the litres of Indian blood shed there during the Conquista. Opposite, an armchair symbolises colonial power, in adulation of gold like a god. Only through this divinization could the natives explain, according to Liliana Maresca, the conquistadors’ thirst for gold above all other considerations. In order to understand the whole life of a territory as a resource for a greater end, this end must be something supernatural and all-powerful.    

The beginnings of the current destruction of life involving an economic model based on the extraction of metals and fuel stretch back to the Potosí mines. The works in this room show the culture of violence that had to be unleashed to make exploitation possible: the iconography of arquebusier angels or the adaptation of Saint James Matamoros, not so far away from the violence against farmers already taking place in Europe in this period and echoed even by Dürer. Such phenomena can be seen in the research and documents compiled in the major exhibition Potosí Principle. How Shall We Sing the Lord’s Song in a Strange Land?, held inside the Museo in 2010, and of which this room is at once a sample and a homage. In addition, there are also visual documents and graffiti against the domestic exploitation of women, which even today is disguised within a neo-colonial social structure.

This room assembles examples of the way of life, organisation and expression of Zapatista peoples in Chiapas, as well as their will to be open to the outside, demonstrated by the global tour of listening and knowledge transfer they embarked upon in 2021, also embraced by the Museo. The different pieces show not only a people living from agro-ecological farming, but also the political and cultural conditions which allow them to move away from global extractivism: from the principles of good governance (“lead by obeying”, “Go down, not up”, “convince, don’t defeat”, “propose, don’t impose”) in an awareness of the non-separation between nature and culture, between art and technique. 

In 2002, the Prestige oil tanker spilled 77,000 tons of fuel oil, which reached the Cantabrian coast. Some 100,000 volunteers came together, organising spontaneously and effectively to clean up the coast, beyond the possibilities of public administrations. Photographer Allan Sekula documents this mobilisation in the series Black Tide (2002), which also lends this room its title. In parallel, a protest mobilisation also materialised, along with major cultural production, part of which is shown here from the archive of the Unha Gran Burla Negra (A Great Black Mockery) cultural association. These protests and proposals have been seen as a precedent for other social and cultural movements both inside and outside Galicia.

In his documentary Crude oil (2008), film-maker Wang Bing shows China’s growing economic dependency on petroleum and the effects of the petrol industry on the globalised world. In a mammoth fourteen-hour-long film, Bing records the working day on an oil field in an expanding mining area, introducing us, almost clandestinely, to the private life of the people in front of the camera as they discuss politics and corruption and binge-watch TV series. These shots combine with sequences of the infrastructure, the machinery and the devastated landscape of the site.  

The entire focus of this room is the large-scale work on paper It Is Big Big Business (2016) by Canadian artists Raymond Pettibon and Marcel Dzama. With a style combining proximity to popular culture and a penchant for attention to detail and slow time, both creators combine super heroes, surfers, allusions to police violence and, first and foremost, their main reference: the natural imbalance stemming from a world underpinned by fossil-fuel extractivism.   

In Bending to Earth (2015), Rosa Barba centres on the places which store radioactive waste to reflect upon the human footprint and its prolonged ramifications. She shows us, on a hand-held camera from a helicopter, the mysterious structures built for the long-term storage of radioactive waste in the desert zones of California, Utah and Colorado, examples of landscapes radically transformed by centuries. Moreover, the room shines a light on a system of looped filming developed to ensure the film is presented as an endless loop. This film equipment lends an in-person and sculptural quality to the work, adding physicality to the intangible of the film image comprised of light, shade and time.

Crossings (2017) is a video installation which shows the social and psychological impact of the 2008 Great Recession in Greece. Melitopoulos bears witness to the impossibility of coordinating and collaborating between an abstract world of financial capital and the concrete reality of people and nature, while the accounts and images captured also suggest that the contradictions of the current world can engender new subjectivities, and thus possibilities for forms of resistance and change.  

19 November 2022 marked twenty years since the Prestige oil tanker sank off the Galician coast, followed by an emphatic citizen response to the sorely deficient management of the crisis. In the face of such an anniversary, the association Unha Gran Burla Negra (A Great Black Mockery) sought to recall, investigate, disseminate and reactivate the popular memory of these events through an editorial and exhibition project, producing O Ghaiteiro Petroleiro (The Bagpiping Tanker, 2022) an artistic pack of cards which satirically combines memories of the Nunca Máis (Never Again) movement and popular imagery of Galicia. To contextualise the project, the room displays other series of playing cards linked by struggle and protest.   

This exhibition presents a cartography of practices related to the appearance and evolution of representations of subaltern identities — workers, servants, proletarians, beggars, the deprived — stretching from the rise of photography to the turn of the twentieth century (more specifically, between the revolutions of 1848 and the Russian Revolution in 1917). Thus, the photographs on show reveal the social consequences of fossil-fuel extractivism during the era of the great expansion, the time of the black world of coal.

Margarita Rita Rica Dinamita is the first European retrospective devoted to Margarita Azurdia, one of the twentieth century’s most emblematic Central American artists. The survey delves into her career, journeying through her vast output, which spans painting, sculpture, non-objectual art and artist’s books drafted with drawings, collages and poems. Retrospectively, it opens an in-depth view of the modern and contemporary art landscape and prompts an exploration of the artist’s creative metamorphosis which led her to examine the paradigm between art and spirit, investigating in greater depth ideas of care and healing linked to nature and the environment.

This anthology by L’Internationale seeks to respond to two key and mutually exacerbating planetary conditions: the accelerated collapse of the biosphere under climate change and the increasingly more devastating dynamics of toxic politics. Yet the reactionary, divisionary politics driven by ruthless forms of authoritarianism, denialism, nationalism, and other globalized forms of oppression are also a call to action. The book incorporates over twenty-five voices from the arts and culture to form an internationalist chorus that responds to a collective need to develop common strategies for solidarity in the face of ecological disaster and which support the most vulnerable and marginalised communities in this racialised capitalism.  

Susan Schuppli is an artist and researcher who lives in the UK, her work examining the material proof of conflicts and environmental disasters. In her practice, she looks to join creativity and science, and through this sound essay she explores the concept of “indirect data”, exposing how to help creative projects produce serious and consequential environmental knowledge around the world we inhabit. She upholds that cultural and historical materials can provide insights about weather and atmospheric chemistry, data which requires complex processes of evaluation and empirical assessment so they can be incorporated into simulations of global climate models with a will to be constructed from the field of science.     

In the Eye of the Storm weaves together multiple stories and voices recounting the aftermath of Cyclone Winston, a super cyclone that hit Fiji in 2016. This climatic event was historically the most intense cyclone recorded in the Southern Hemisphere, causing hundreds of thousands of people to be displaced and dozens of lives to be lost. Its repercussions are still felt today. Written and performed by four spoken word poets, writers and scientists, and narrated through the retellings of a geolinguist, In the Eye of the Storm links together the lived and witnessed experiences of environmental catastrophe with the colonial dispossession brought about by, and reiterated through, the ongoing violence of empire.