Memories of an unrevealed disaster

About

These four artists have entangled practices, each addressing common issues from a unique perspective. Drawing is presented as the leitmotif of these four parallel projects, generating a sense of continuity and charting interrelated questions; the representation of landscape, the nature-culture dichotomy, the irreversible effect of humans on planet earth.

Luisa Ungar’s work focuses upon animal-human relationships, raising questions about how animals are often treated as objects and examining the language commonly used to refer to, and represent them. Returning to the Place of Things: Manual for a Performance on Animal Behaviour is a series of drawings that explores some of the histories and narratives underlying our own animal behaviours. These drawings seek to bridge the representative gap, which exists between human discourse and animal actions. Simultaneously they become scores and choreographic plans for the artist's future performances.

Milena Bonilla’s project departs from a series of found images from the Jardin des Plantes' Grand Serres conservatory in Paris where tropical plants are kept and cultivated within a precise artificial environment. A constellation of images and drawings, The Last Drink is for The Sun, reflects upon the impossibility and ‘failures’ of representation of the tropical landscape.

El Libro de las Hojas (The book of leaves) is a series of drawings by María Isabel Rueda in which she documents the fallen leaves of a Croton tree in her backyard. Every day for an entire year she has drawn a single leaf, meticulously documenting, reinterpreting and reconstructing the life of this particular tree.

María Isabel Arango has been collecting fragments of dead tree and abandoned bird nests in the forests of Devon (UK) and Medellin (Colombia). This series of drawings and monotypes has been made from pigments made from charred branches, leaves and moss. Both her installation and works on paper are an attempt to evoke the soul of these trees and to tell the stories of the birds that once inhabited the nests.