While I gently touched the leaves of a plant with my fingertips, a mobile, geometric drawing delicately germinated on the screen, exploding like fireworks. Excitedly, I felt how the plant interface became a creative tool for me. The metaphors are multiple: thanks to photosynthesis, plants are organic machines for generating oxygen, mediating between the environment and our lives; Thanks to sensors and algorithms, they also become intermediaries in the field of shared representation and vibration.
Interactive plant growing is one of the masterpieces that can be seen and experienced in Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau’s retrospective, The artwork as a living system, which currently occupies the main room of the Azkuna Zentroa, La Alhóndiga in Bilbao. The couple of artists has taken the art of the interface to its maximum expression and makes you enter their biological worlds, with bees or flies, with ferns and heartbeats, to become part of them. It is not about representing flowers as passive subjects, as still life painting has done for centuries, but about co-creating with them. To integrate them into that laboratory that is every work of art that really matters. At a time when we are welcoming into our artistic and narrative structures, in our facilities and museums, the rest of the intelligences (plant, animal, fungal, artificial), Perpendicular to the Sun (Salamandra Graphic), the first graphic novel by Valentine Cuny- Le Callet, who has also impressed me, reminds us that we still have to achieve the real and fair inclusion of other human beings.
The relationship between artists and writers has been hierarchical and vampiric, extractive
The relationship between artists and writers and the witnesses or real characters of their works has generally been hierarchical and vampiric, extractive like the colonial ones. The French author, on the other hand, constructs an artifact capable of not only expressing her own sensitivity and her approach to Renaldo McGirth, the man sentenced to death in a United States prison with whom she relates first by letter and then in person, but also He incorporates drawings of his protagonist into the comic. That hospitality is beautiful.
The book can be read as the story of an improbable, almost impossible friendship, in which both strategies of verbal dialogue and artistic expression are tested. After iconography reminiscent of David B., or exercises that resort to all kinds of techniques to represent the most Kafkaesque dimension of the North American penal system, McGirth’s naive figures, sent from death row, find the appropriate framework to survive. The self and its art then take on true meaning: generous, they create the conditions of generosity and beauty for the you to exist.
2024-02-21 00:03:35
#art #interface #Jorge #Carrión
