CONFIRMED ARTIST IN THE ¨OPEN CALL FOR ARTISTS¨: CARLOS KLETT

Carlos Klett presents at ISLA the project SENO.

In the project SENO, Carlos Klett (1997) generates relational, inhabitable and performative devices aimed at deceleration, unproductivity, non-functionality and useless action, to talk about the body by putting the body and to reflect on the search for human transcendence, based on narratives of progress incorporated by our system model and its fictitious inexhaustible perspective of vertical development and ascension. In his site specific installation at ISLA, he uses found plant remains and manure from the cattle that inhabit the environment to build, through manual and slow processes, a sort of mound or shelter that brings us closer to the earth and not so much to the sky, and that exists in its own contradiction: between the organic and the synthetic. It is a wall that separates one side and the other, an inside and an outside. It speaks of integration, but also of lack of integration towards ourselves and towards “nature”. It is a limiting space, a physical barrier that speaks to us of this systemic, cultural and constructed separation between the body, the human being and nature.

With his work, crossed by his studies in Anthropology, Carlos defends that this way of understanding reality is geographically and historically situated, not universal, nor extrapolated to other cultures or human groups that do exist within the paradigm of integration. This omnipresent and ethnocentric distinction shapes our way of knowing and inhabiting the world, on the one hand, wounding us physically and mentally, and on the other, ignoring or opposing non-human forms of existence and their macro and micro processes: otherness. This leitmotiv of his work manifests itself here as a literal construction, made of slime, mud, remains, feces: soil, symbol of the construction of “man”. He addresses this ontological separation as a product of the worldviews inherited from modernity, questioning the Cartesian division between body and mind that endows us with individuality, Western rationalism and enlightened and technocratic thinking, which endorse and feed our hegemonic anthropocentric mononaturalism: the fact of conceiving a unique nature and not “natures”, and of understanding it as a category of analysis differentiated from the human being.

 

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