Arabidopsis Thaliana Exhibition Ilona Jurkonytė / Santiago Reyes Villaveces MAMBO Exhibition Cycle 2021-I / Landscape, Nature and Territory The possibility of life beyond Earth.
March 25, 2021 – August 1, 2021
Arabidopsis Thaliana is an exhibition that intertwines a variety of narratives and registers: science fiction and rhetoric — experiential and speculative — evoking the legacies of the Cold War. The objective is to question the limits and excesses of the views of the scientific world, which sometimes turn out to be premonitory of cosmic or ecological catastrophes.
This sample is one of the two winning proposals for Secondary Effects – the call launched in 2020 – which invited artists or audiovisual producers of medium or long career to investigate the environmental and sustainable effects of our uncertain present through a new work that addresses the relationship between nature, landscape and territory.
Based on archival research, Arabidopsis Thaliana is an audiovisual installation that offers a reinterpretation of that specific moment in history when the ecosystem had the possibility to expand beyond Earth. The play recreates a Colombian radio program, imagined in 1982, that plays with the tropes of colonization and exploration of space while hinting at its geopolitical implications in the country. Furthermore, the narration also speculates on the after-effects of the overflow of terrestrial life into the cosmos in the near future.
-Santiago Reyes Villaveces and Ilona Jurkonyté inquire about the potential for the expansion of the notions of environment and landscape. Through the installation they reinterpret a specific moment in planetary history: the germination of a specimen of the Arabidopsis thaliana plant and the production of seeds in space.
-As part of the exhibition, an Arabidopsis thaliana will be cultivated next to the entrance of the MAMBO, in the sixth race, and its growth will be broadcast live in the exhibition space and on digital channels.
-The exhibition will open to the public in person on Thursday, March 25 at 5 pm at the Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá-MAMBO. Space for the press with the artists and with the Curator of the exhibition, Eugenio Viola, Chief Curator of MAMBO from 10 am to 5 pm Journalists and the media must attend the museum by appointment.