Tempo falacioso; Superimposiciones botánicas

Sin Cinta Previa + Chuquimarca are proud to present Tempo falacioso; Superimposiciones botánicas, an online video presentation of works by Luíza Bastos Lages, Nancy D. Valladares, and Chucho Ocampo.

Join us for a panel discussion with the artists on Sat. Sept. 26th at 7:30 PM (CST). Please RSVP for the Zoom invitation here.

This online feature was awarded and selected from our juried SCP+C Open Call 2020. This is the first of two screenings from our open call juried by Malia Haines-Stewart and Giselle Mira-Diaz, generously supported by the Propeller Fund.

Tempo falacioso; Superimposiciones botánicas is a selection of video works by artists Luiza Bastos Lages, Chucho Ocampo and Nancy D. Valladares. This program looks at the technologies and infrastructures that sustained the colonial project, disseminated euro-western epistemologies, and transported colonial projects throughout Latin America. By layering archive footage and oral traditions, history is retold through the alchemy of gunpowder, the slow melting of a pillar of ice, and microscopic worlds of botanical images.

The films reveal the crossings of worlds in their respective geographies, and aim to disobey the temporal lines of history as told by a euro-western lens. Paisagens Ficcionais [Fictional Landscapes] is a slow emergence of the commodification of forms of life and their transit across the hemisphere, Castillo unfolds the various geopolitical forces that drive human and more than human migrants in Mexico, and The Density of Breath meditates on botanical exchanges that produced plantation economies and extraction in Latin America. Tempo falacioso; Superimposiciones Botánicas asks the viewers to reflect on the incommensurability between history, representation, memory and anthropocentric paradigms of domination.

The Density of Breath

by Nancy D. Valladares (2020) 13 min 04 sec.

Shot with an electronic microscope,The Density of Breath is a meditation on plant agency, and botanical representation. What does a seed know about the flavor of the atmosphere; about the texture of the air and its currents, about its ebbs and flows, that we do not? Seeds learned to move in the currents of the ocean and the wind, to float on water and air, to become the first stowaways and hitchhikers. In pursuit of plant matter and the expansion of the human visual apparatus, technologies of plant transportation and representation marked a pivotal ecological and cognitive shift.

Paisagens Ficcionais [Fictional Landscapes] by Luíza Bastos Lages (2020) 24 min 23 sec.

Paisagens Fictionais [Fictional Landscapes] interrogates the ephemerality of the contemporary landscape, and its transformation, as a means as well as a product of a hegemonic and fallacious project of modernity: the idea of progress. The work departs from a place in memory, the continuous dilapidation of mining landscapes of a stretch of the Iron Quadrangle, one of the major mineral provinces in the world, located in Minas Gerais, Brazil, the place where I grew up. The piece goes about the volatility of the landscape in relation to politics of extraction and its translation into capital, geographically transferred and realized elsewhere in the globe. Through the flow of capital, the landscape also moves, traded by means of their mined fragments.

By dealing with the commodification of the landscape and its flux in form of capital, the work seeks to elucidate how this exploratory process continues to structure the world in accumulating centers and degraded outskirts, since, in the dominant paradigm of progress, the sustenance of inequality is the foremost condition for its continuity, not a side effect to be overcome. The film Paisagens Ficcionais was produced from an interweaving of footage produced by the artist and archival footage produced by United States American Research Institutions about Brazil, as well as archival home footage.

Expect People to be Exhausted by Chucho Ocampo (2020) 13 min 19 sec.

Castillo is an artistic research exercise that superimposes information between systems that have no apparent or physical manifestation of interdependence but are capable of connecting despite borders. The research revolves around the movement of human and non human bodies and their relations with ephemeral structures and displays of communication as well as how ideas travel and relate to them. The research exercise explores and superimposes a thread of traveling ideas that deal with displacement and overlapping of symbols, ideologies, cultural practices and language.

About the artists:

Luíza Bastos Lages (b. 1988) is an artist and architect from Itabirito, Brazil. Luíza holds a professional degree in Architecture and Urban Planning from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil (2013) and a Master of Science in Art, Culture and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2020). Her most recent projects poetically address extraction and transnational privatization of forms of life merely seen as material resources; as well as the tentative erasure, by the current Brazilian government, of bodies that challenge predefined social expectations.

Nancy Dayanne Valladares (b. 1991) is an interdisciplinary artist from Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Her work traces the colonial legacies and agricultural histories of Honduras through the lens of human and non-human migration. She received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Master of Science in Art, Culture and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2020). Her work has been exhibited at The Art Institute of Chicago, Sullivan Galleries, SUGS Gallery X, ExFest Film Festival, The Research House for Asian Art, Columbia College, and Roman Susan Gallery in Chicago.