03_Island of Simulation / Exhibition
Museo Jumez /
Cd. México / 2021
Island of Simulation: A Tropical Playground is comprised of a performative sound/video installation that explores the technological, ethical and aesthetic implications embedded in the simulation of tropical ecosystems. The narrative is set against the Climatron, a geodesic dome greenhouse built in the 1960s in St. Louis, Missouri that attempted to simulate the climate zones of Hawaii, Java, the Indies, and the Amazon for research and spectacle purposes.
The work draws upon the complex issues around the production of the landscape, revealing colonial logics and principals of exoticism, the relationship between power and spectacle, and how western knowledge has been legitimized through science, technology and aesthetic means. Fluctuating between fact and fiction, the work attempts to subvert the ways in which we come to understand this tropical landscape and speculate on new forms of approaching nature. Through the use of animism multiple non-human sensibilities are brought forward, sharply manifesting a super natural dimension linked to the body and the sensorial. The characters of the story; the dome, the plants, and the fake rocks, are able to weave narratives around the ethnocentric obsessions of reproducing mini foreign worlds in enclosed spaces, posing larger questions around our complex relationship to nature as an “Other”. Through desire these characters attempt to seduce the audience as a way to bring the tension between the desire of the object and the absurdity behind it.
Isla, roca, glaciar, Museo Jumex, Mexico City, MX, 2021
Jardín Satélite, Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Tenerife, ES, 2021
A la sombra del árbol, Casa del Virrey de Mendoza, Mexico City, MX, 2019