A world connected by catastrophe. Ursula Biemann’s lens focuses on a mass of people carrying bags full of mud to create dams to contain the stormy advance of the sea. They want to stop the water that threatens their populations in Bangladesh. The women, dressed in their colorful saris, fill the bags and an army of men carry them, hurriedly, so as not to waste time in the nightmare they suffer, a consequence of the climatic alterations caused by an economy based on the burning of fossil fuels. The lens moves with the same speed of these men, pressed for survival. It is Biemann’s cry of warning about climate imbalance, which she reaches at the University Museum of Contemporary Art (MUAC), in Mexico City, to remind us that extractivism, dispossession and destruction have serious consequences. They drown in their sleep, alerts the voice that accompanies the video, an apocalyptic vision of a planet on the brink of disaster.
The images, however, are not repulsive. On the contrary, they are poetic. The succession of frames attracts the viewer in the desperate coming and going of these humans, “like ants trying to overcome a titanic problem,” says Virginia Roy, curator of the exhibition. The movement of the waves as they thunder on the dams, the expressions of fatigue of these people in their struggle to live and the hands of those women covered in mud are connected with other images filmed thousands of kilometers away, in the enormous oil explorations. in the north of Canada, where an immense area is exploited: the one shown by the artist is the size of England. Biemann’s camera is placed on those modern machines that violently penetrate the earth to extract the oil that keeps the global industrial machine running. The artist reminds us of the connection between the savage destruction of the planet and those who suffer it.
The exhibition, titled Becoming Earth, is made up of long videos that show the Swiss artist’s commitment to the planet. And her work to save him. “They represent a shift in her production towards the ecological,” explains Roy. Biemann had dedicated a large part of her career to migration issues, but starting in 2013 she turned her interest to ecology, becoming a pioneer in addressing this issue through art. “She pivoted toward what she was concerned about was ecology and understanding that we are mired in this moment of a global eco crisis,” says Roy. What Biemann seeks is for us to understand it and to do so she makes use of cinematography, sound, scientific research, testimonies and current events. It is demonstrated, for example, in the piece Forest Law either Legal Junglewhich reviews the struggle of the Sarayaku in the Ecuadorian Amazon to protect the jungle and its resources.
The indigenous communities sued the Ecuadorian State for a violation of article 71 of the Constitution of that South American country, which establishes that “any person, community, town or nationality” can demand that the authorities respect nature, “its existence, maintenance and regeneration.” The lawsuit originated from the concessions granted by the Ecuadorian Government to mining companies to exploit an area of the tropical forest. The Sarayaku had already raised their discontent to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, where they accused the State of the destruction of their territory and their way of life. In his work, Biemann demonstrates the tensions suffered by these communities that were left adrift by the greed of the mining companies and the negligence of the authorities.
“This is the piece that made me fall in love with her,” says Roy. “We see where their field of research on these communities in Ecuador is heading, on the rights of the jungle as a legal subject and that blew my mind, because it helps us understand how nature can have a legal legal space, something very suggestive. , very pioneering and very revealing. What she does is explain these different cases and their importance, because knowing that there are those legal instruments of complaint, those tools in the power of the communities, tells us about an awareness of change,” explains the curator. Biemann shows us in his films and his testimonies how the inhabitants of these regions see nature as a part of their body, “like an arm or a leg,” says Roy, and that, therefore, their defense is also a personal struggle.
Ursula Biemann was born in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1955. As a video essayist, she has focused her work mainly on indigenous territories and has investigated the impact that modern life has had on those spaces. She uses research, science and other fields of knowledge to help understand the relationship between the exploitation of oil or coal and their impact on forests and water. “The beginning of modern science is closely linked to the project of conquest and colonization,” warns Biemann. Her proposal from art is to explain that there may be other, less violent and predatory ways to relate to nature. And that’s what her exhibition at the MUAC is about, open until October: a proposal that makes us reflect on the damage we do and how we can heal the planet’s wounds. “It is a very poetic thing, with its strategy of mixing testimonies, images, texts,” says Roy.
The exhibition is a journey between the equatorial jungles to the cold northern territories, where a aquanaut, a marine biologist from the Sami community in Norway, places hydrophones in the sea, sophisticated devices that allow us to record the sounds of marine life and thus make us hear what is happening in that immense darkness. What do the whales want to tell us? What messages do sea butterflies send us? They are sounds that have also varied over time, perhaps some have become silent, because climate change affects the oceans and their ecosystems, threatening their species. These sounds startle, bother or move us. Biemann reminds us that it is in human hands to preserve them.
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