VARIABLE DIMENSION, 2002/2004

Self portrait - Camila - Daniel - Mario, 100 x120 cm edition of 4 / 2004

"There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism" Walter Benjamin(Thesis about philosophy of history, 1940)

Rationalism, the axis around which the ideas of modernity turn, installed within western society certain values or ideas which were consolidated during the XIX century: man’s destiny was the progressive conquest of his well-being, his freedom, his happiness.

"The illusion of the end" is a sharp reflection about this Utopia of the modern world, in which the story of the natural tragedy becomes a metaphor for the perverse logic of existence. In which instance of the conquest of rationality did Hiroshima, the massive concentration camps, Kosovo or the recent Iraq war take place?

As Tagore said, man spends his life defending himself from the consciousness of being an impotent object within universe, but is the individual human being capable of acting so as to twist the development of history? Are human beings capable of changing the course of the stars only by their will? As these questions are seeking for answers, civilized world - through the contributions of science and the advances in technology - continues its arms race and builds more sophisticated and infallible forms of destruction.

Andrea Juan´s work confronts us with the paradox nature of human reason, with its conflicts and contradictions and summons us to re-think the bond existing between will and power, between impotence and resignation and finally, as Benjamin said, between civilization and barbarism.

Mariela Delnegro

The above written text is part of a work about the artist which at present is being written by Valeria Gonzalez and Mariela Delnegro / University of Buenos Aires.

Horacio Zabala

I consider there are three categories concerning catastrophes -the mythological, the historical, and ones in nature. The universal deluge, in the Bible, would be among those of the first category. The second one includes those caused by men: the Holocaust, the genocide in Rwanda, Hiroshima, and many of the like and, obviously, the ecological catastrophes at present. And finally, nature's catastrophes that every now and then scourge mankind such as earthquakes, floods, epidemics, etc.

Los desastres de la guerra (The disasters of war) by Goya; Guernica by Picasso, and the negative utopias in literature such as Gulliver's Travels by Swift and 1984 by Orwell, are all samples of a representation of catastrophes, accidents, and phenomena which escape comprehension.

In our civilization, that of the image, we know that the more the mass media are perfected, the larger is their capacity to misinform. Ever since the era of technical reproduction, production, circulation, velocity and consumption (real and symbolic) have been incremented to the nth power. If a catastrophe is not filtered by the media its degree of reality tends to be nil. But the scenographic ill-assortment and the iconic saturation enervate our human sense of tragedy in its true context as far as catastrophes end up being trivial, daily shows.

There are artists who tackle the subject of catastrophes and their images. They do it using the new technologies, but with an orientation that is not on the side of the spectacular. Instead, they try to create subtle exchanges between memory and imagination. If for the media organism (just as for the ancient idolatries) every image is worth a thousand words, for the artists an image is worth an image and a word is worth a word.

In the era of the image, the so-called "social function of art" is not only unpredictable but also temporary and uncertain. In a world where technology has abolished distances and where everything is visible, we, artists, have a narrow margin to restore distance and the invisible.

Juan Carlos Romero

The idea I have is one linked to a philosophic theory, associated to my personal idea of man's destiny and that of the inhabitants of this planet. It also has to do with the theory of contradiction since where nothing was once, something can be at any other moment and, then, again, this something can go back to nothingness.

This would be man's fate; once born he will sometime have to perish. This is not referred to man being born or dying individually but being born as a species on Earth, that will sometime cease to be there.

This is my idea; man will disappear sometime. I just don't know when. And I'm always distressed by this idea.

When we speak about the universe I always think there is something behind such place, and then I think of what is there further behind... so on and so forth, since I have the need to know which are the limits of the universe. This is related to my existential anguish of why we are on earth, what we are and where we are going next.

On the other hand, I'm also worried about man's suicidal act. Let's say he is a suicide or at least he is so under the present day circumstances: wars, the greenhouse effect and, basically, the ever growing pollution -to the point no one knows where to dispose of the world's daily waste.

I believe, in a pessimistic spirit, that man won't give nature the necessary time for it to recover. I feel he is going to self-destruct or, in fact, we are going to produce our self-destruction. I sometimes feel fear when at the Reserva Ecológica (a park in Buenos Aires) I see all the material used for refilling the soil -particularly the plastic one- emerging, which means it is not biodegradable. Actually, non-biodegradable materials is one of the Earth's most serious problems. It is said that in the sea, not far from the coast of New York City, there's a whole island exclusively made of waste.Then, when I think about it I'm ready to confirm our suicidal attitude. And another contradiction: while building we are symmetrically opposite way, we are also destroying.

On the one hand, construction never comes to a halt. Not only new cities are built but also everything is organized around the idea of welfare, man must have the best of comfort, life expectancy has increased, and some long-time incurable illnesses can now be cured. Everything gets better. Just think of life in the great urban centers where air-conditioning systems give you the desired heat or coolness. Feeding on healthier food is also possible.

Yet, all this ends up being disposed of as waste. An ever growing amount of litter that we pile up, tons of litter in different places, in the cities, and in the countryside. In Argentina one can see hundreds of empty containers just abandoned near the port. Sometimes I feel they are about to invade the city, that they are going to appear even in Plaza de Mayo.

This containers´ issue is an example of what I feel regarding the accumulation of litter. Well, I'm really being catastrophic.

My thought goes out to that which has

Neither name nor meaning...

The purest continues to be the form

Which permeated the mist as it dissolved,

The trodden snow is the only rose.

Ives Bonnefoy

The illusion of the oneness of man and the world, sustained in art through the classical paradigm or the contemplative naturalism of the 19th century, has long faded. Romanticism aimed to recover the relationship with nature, by means of a subjective individualism; the fascination with landscape became something more than a marvelous spectacle colored by the passions, and to mediate with nature offered the illusion of an encounter with what was most intimate and truthful in a subject. The search for original, virgin landscape, indomitable in its entire splendor, then heightened experiences of great emotional intensity.

Contemporary man intervenes in the natural world -for better or for worse- with such a high degree of sophistication which surprises us, unnerves us, sets off alarm bells and -on some occasions- gives us hope.

Ethical debates and the resulting furious polemics are pursued even in circles which are rarely able to transform reality in practice. The advances in genetic engineering and their potential in the near future would have been unthinkable a few years ago, and their correlatives in the promise of life-extension and curing illnesses do not compensate for the spectre of the catastrophe which has already established itself in the collective imagination. However, passivity is the most generalized response. Some international ecology movements have managed to break through partially that veil which covers over the painful reality, in order to penetrate the collective consciousness, albeit for a few instants, often not for much longer than the duration of an action alert 2 image when it appears in the media. The statistics, which put figures to the damage already caused to the planet, are outrageous; however, expectations for the future, far from amending this path of self-destruction, multiply the risks exponentially. The greatest evil continues to be indifference, what Hannah Arendt describes as the banality of evil. Triviality and indifference that keep us distant from our own selves and with a great feeling of impotence and guilt before what would seem to be irremediable.

From science fiction films, futurist tales and children's comics, the suffering planet cries out for vengeance, and at the same time new redemptory figures arise, endowed with mythical, messianic characteristics, whose objective is to save the planet. Meanwhile we hear the voices of specialists who predict new and more serious ecological disasters in the near future; the figures of the catastrophes and the scale of the damage already confirmed are terrifying, and yet….

In order to effect a significant change in this state of affairs it is not enough to achieve ecological awareness and a new political will.

Felix Guattari asserts that an ecological-ecosophic revolution can only be achieved on a planetary scale, as part of an essential cultural, political and social revolution. In order to re-establish the balance -and protection of Nature- there must be change in the systems of thought which sustain it. It is a question of rejecting the systems which tend towards uniformity and absolute control, in order to respect biodiversity and plurality in all their facets -those biological, cultural, economic, formal and aesthetic. We should not reduce the complexity of ecologism to a deeper sensitivity in the defence of an environment without including ourselves as a fundamental part of it; we must reconsider our own nature in order to bring the ecology of society, of the environment and of the individual into harmony. Guattari reminds us that there is currently a growing degradation not only of environmental ecology but of all these ecologies, since they are interdependent.

The video-installation Getting over follows the same line of thought as previous works by Andrea Juan in which the artist developed her poetics within a model which explores the semantics of the accident, the emergency and the catastrophe in different contexts. This new production pushes the limits of her strategy of communication and generates a more profound involvement in the spectator, this time within the center of the scene. The work aims to confront the visitor with his own destruction, caused by the violent action of gigantic fracturing ice masses, and furious uncontrolled volumes of water released in an unbounded magnificence. The spectator finds himself unexpectedly on the screen, the silhouette of his body appears isolated and projected on the screens amongst the millennial glaciers, while new images are constantly created with the arrival of new visitors. We are immersed in a complex system of four simultaneous projections of different videos, which includes the floor we are treading on, and which mobilizes a fascinating, vertiginous and also disturbing experience. Suddenly we find ourselves part of a sublime space which is in a state of collapse; its fracturing comes from its very interior, and its disintegration stands as a metaphor for the subject as creator of an inhospitable universe which furthers dissolution of itself and of its environment.

The work examines the contemporary subject, confronted by his own self and his surroundings, generating emotions of great intensity, which cannot escape a critical reading of the experience. The clues laid down by Getting over require the reformulation of an active spectator. In this project the themes of reception and performance are combined in the ludic and questioning act of the spectator-participant in a complex aesthetic experience.

The mise en abîme of the subject produces at the same time the mise en abîme of the state of reality. The reality of the spectator who enters the exhibition room blends, by means of technology, with his virtual reality, as protagonist in a projection in which he watches himself, watching the scene in which he is included.

The work moves and elicits the most primal emotions, the most ancient fears in accordance with the great age of the physical space in which the scene plays out. An unthinkable fear of the death of everything living, a terror of endless, unlimited and absolute chaos, well up before the fury unleashed by a Nature which is mortally wounded and which assumes power in order to destroy itself.

"“Man projects his desire into infinity, and only feels pleasure when he can imagine that that has no end. But as the human mind is not able to conceive of infinity, indeed, it withdraws, frightened, before the very idea, it has no option but to content itself with the indefinite, with sensations, which, as they merge into one another, create the impression of limitlessness, which is illusory but nevertheless agreeable." Italo Calvino

The project is based on:

• 1 - Jean Baudrillard’s theory outlined in his book “The illusion of the end”, where he describes the fears of humanity at the end of the millennium, and the fears of the latest catastrophe that would take place at the end of the century (Y2K). But nothing did happen in the end: the century changed and there was no final catastrophe as such. Nevertheless, he focuses on the catastrophes humankind is contributing to bringing about, which are ultimately more devastating than the natural ones. Therefore Baudrillard believes the illusions about a final end to be tinted with peace, relief, and hope. Still he considers humankind will never get closer to this point, if we take into account that the history does not develop in a linear space. For this reason, the end will always be un-localized.

• 2 - Expounded by the French mathematician Rene Thom in the 1960s, catastrophe theory is a special branch of dynamical systems. It studies and classifies phenomena characterized by sudden shifts in behaviour arising from small changes in many circumstances

A peaceful glacier is modifying its surface breaking up into icebergs. Air and water are penetrating by an excruciating noise. Meanwhile massive ice shelves are falling into the sea.

The big mass diminishes size little by little in their journey to nowhere. Finally, silence and emptiness appears in the horizon.

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