Become one with nature. Not just being the outside spectator of a landscape like a painting canvas. This is the ambition of “Réclamation la terre”, an ecological rallying cry and the title of the new collective exhibition to be discovered at the Palais de Tokyo. Refusing a Eurocentric vision, fourteen artists from Australia, Chile, Canada and Peru deeply question the relationship between man and the living, through works made exclusively from natural or recycled materials.
At the entrance to a large room with white walls, stones, logs, cans and cans form an astonishing set of five musical instruments, made by the artist Megan Cope. A recording resounds in a mournful way, wraps around the visitor, reproducing the song of an endangered bird of Australia, the bridled stone curlew. Masterful and disturbing, the installation of Solange Pessoa, Cathedral, sits next to it. Long streaks of fabric hung from the ceiling and covered with hair hang down to the ground, symbolizing in space a sort of pagan cathedral, a work oscillating between religious beliefs and magic.
Megan Cope, Untitled (Death Song), Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, 2020, Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane. / Saul Steed
A coconut killing a politician
A mixture of sculptures, films and drawings, “Reclaiming the Earth” invites an immersive and powerful awareness of the fragility of our planet. In a dark room rise the dark shapes of car wrecks recovered from a dump, around which the viewer is invited to stroll. Faced with this industrial waste, the short film The Family and the Zombiefrom the Australian collective Karrabing, denounces Western overconsumption.
“Reclaiming the land” also means showing man in a relationship of reciprocity with nature. The naive art of Daniela Ortiz is a subtle illustration of this. His painting series The Rebellion of the Roots proposes a rewriting of history: the tropical plants of the botanical gardens revolt and take justice into their own hands, like the coconut that kills a politician.
Huma Bhabha, Receiver, 2019, bronze, 251 x 46 x 64 cm, Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94 (New York). / Huma Bhabha
Facing two imposing anthropomorphic totems of Huma Bhabha, originally from Pakistan, spread out on a white sheet, like a shroud, bronze sculptures of plants from the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates. This particular war memorial pays a sober tribute to this region of the world hit by many social, political and ecological troubles. And if the plants cannot speak, they express themselves in a language that is nevertheless perceptible within the Palais de Tokyo.
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