A Landscape Study

After living through the pandemic and reorganizing our lives around the radical changes it brought to our daily experience: our ways of working, consumption habits, our way of relating to humans and non-humans; it has become vitally important to review how artistic production can inform and promote the restoration of the social ties that have become blurred. On the one hand, collaborative practices are fertile ground for the emergence of ideas, concepts and innovative ways of gaining agency. On the other hand, art has constantly been an important mediator between humans and the natural world, being an input to understand and interpret it; but it has also been a way of organizing nature, idealizing her and establishing a distance between her and us. Many contemporary practices are currently reflecting on repairing this gap and this distance, creating semiotic forms capable of creating bridges between us and the other species that inhabit our world.

Curators: LZS [Paulo Licona, Gabriel Zea and María Adelaida Samper]

LZS [Paulo Licona, Gabriel Zea y María Adelaida Samper]

Paul Licona

As an artist Paul is especially interested in educational processes, punishment, misbehavior, and confronts the viewer through a humorous tone that borders on irony and mockery. Among his most recent work we find his participation in various national and international group exhibitions, and individual exhibitions such as Of the mysteries and the twins (SGR Gallery, 2021), This is very loose (Gallery Polychrome, 2021), Returning the obligatory (SGR Gallery , 2018), among others.

Gabriel Zea

Plastic artist. His research critically explores the conditions of artistic and productive work today through works that explore the materials and processes of different productive and economic systems, both material and immaterial. Among his recent exhibitions we find
the following: Monument to the unknown screw, within the framework of the X Luis Caballero Prize; 268 pieces of wood 1178 staples, independent gallery Beyond; the IV Biennial of the Gilberto Álzate Avendaño Foundation, of which he was the winner, among other collective and individual exhibitions.

Maria Adelaida Samper

Master in Plastic Arts from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and graduate of the Master´s in Criticism, Curation and Cybermedia from the Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD), Switzerland. Samper develops her curatorial and thought practices starting from research methods applied to different art media; understanding artistic practices and their specific ways of making and elaborating artifacts as forms of knowledge production. She currently works as a permanent curator at SGR Gallery.

Activities

Station 1: Contemplation

A mediator receives the group and introduces the section´s thematic axes. This is the moment to explain that A Landscape Study is a space for studying, reflecting on and doing things about the landscape with all the variations and expansions that the public wants to contribute.

Station 2: The Expanded Landscape

The history of the landscape, its representation and how this history is intimately intertwined with the way in which we relate to our environment will be partially addressed.

Station 3: Earth Arts

Explores the artistic practices that strive, through the materials they use and their ways of doing things, to enter into a dialogue with the environment and create a reflection on how we manage ourselves in our surroundings.

Station 4: The Body

Attendees will be invited to learn about and reflect on how we physically interact with the world. It will seek to explore the way in which the smiling body is a means to exercise multi-species empathy based on the understanding of material communication between particles.

Station 5: The Situated Landscape

Attendees will be taken by the mediator to one of the Fair´s sections (Artecámara, References or Site). Each mediator will prepare a tour of one of these sections that allows attendees to track the different notions of landscape present throughout the Fair.