To See Our Common/Place (17/09/2020)

UGM Maribor

Maribor, Slovenia

17/09/2020 a 01/10/2020

individual

To See Our Common/Place is an exhibition curated by Eszter Erd?si and hosted by the UGM Maribor, in Slovenia, as part of the 3rd cycle of Parallel Platform. The exhibition, which features Gustavo Balbela's Letters to Ultramarine "attempts to defy the implausibility of the environmental crisis by dissecting its dominant socio-political structures through the lens of local and personal experience, and thus ask if it is possible to overturn its characterization as an inconceivable reality. We are embedded in abstract, global power structures, and it is the personal, local, and banal construction of everyday life that may constitute the only means by which the individual can connect to them."

On the exhibition's essay, Eszter comments that Letters to Ultramarine "reflects on the way in which processes of colonisation and self-colonisation manifest in suburban Brazil. The series in the project that depicts the Statue of Liberty conveys the urge to conform to an idealised, albeit empty image of Americanness, while giving up on a sense of local identity during the process. The figure of the American landmark is a decoration of a department store in Brazil that imitates the outer façade of the White House and is owned by a far right-wing billionaire. In fact, this self-colonising procedure of locality deprives both signifier and signified from meaning. On the one hand, the culturally loaded American symbols lose their historic significance when used as indications of a capitalist venture in a Brazilian context. On the other hand, the Brazilian cultural landscape loses its own identity by imposing foreign landmarks on itself. A similar denial of local identity is present in another part of the project titled Bem-te-ví, albeit from the perspective of local fauna and flora. In these images, there is a contrast of identity between the non-native banana tree species and the bird that is native to the country. The bird that has always belonged to Brazil appears to be a distraction in an otherwise perfectly composed picture frame, thus underpinning a discrepancy between how locality is perceived and how it may be subjected to arbitrary anthropogenic constructions. The photographs in Letters to Ultramarine are devoid of human presence, hence underlining the alienation that permeates the artificially constructed, self-colonised identity of the suburban environment."

The exhibition (that also featured the works of Indre Urbonaite, Domonkos Varga, Shelli Weiler, and Johanna Karjalainen) was part of the EKO program, the International Triennial of Art and Environment, and was moved online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to the virtual exhibition and the publication of a printed catalog, the UGM Maribor also hosted a webinar with the participation of the artists, the curator, and mediated by Alessandro Vincentelli, that can be watched below.