"Anicá" is a sample from the artist Manuel Lozano that seeks this radical transformation. One that reincorporates the power of the body and brings to the forefront sensitivity, affection, the corporeal, and aesthetics. "Anicá" functions as an affective field, without which, following Toro and Giraldo, we could not understand these times of grave danger, nor the deep problems of meaning in contemporary living.
The exhibition "Anicá" takes its name from the Pericú language, a language that was spoken by the ancient inhabitants of La Paz, Baja California Sur. "Anicá" means "Pericú settlement", in this way, the title of the exhibition itself serves to inhabit, rename, and occupy the territory of La Paz.
However, far from doing so in a colonial or hierarchical sense, "Anicá" makes visible the connections with the past, the present, the body, and sensitivity, blurring the binaries established by modernity.
"I close my eyes, I transport myself.... I know I am standing on a core or ground that I see as an entity... as if it were the echo or a part of the body of a giant..."
-Manuel Lozano, 2022
ANICÁ
Baja California Sur, México.
Marzo 2023
LOCACIÓN
So far, the modern discourse of "progress and advancement" has understood the human being as the center of the world and the possessor of everything that exists around, even conceiving "nature" as an inert, decorative object available to be manipulated by science and technique.
"Anicá" is a sample that highlights this voracious development of current technology while problematizing the notion of reality and fiction in interpersonal relationships. In this new panorama, the artist Manuel Lozano asks himself: What consequences will we face by taking this path? His work seeks to carry out a speculative exercise, not of future prediction, but of imagining what the world would look like according to current trends.
In his work, the artist allows us to understand the future not as a destination, but rather as possibility, potential, and as an unexpected encounter with otherness: the human, the non-human, and the natural and digital landscape. Time can catch us by surprise and take us away from the world we thought we understood and remind us that our existence is not possible without others.
Lozano invites us to take a pause from the automation of our lives to connect with our environment, the silence, and to re-encounter what truly allows us to keep living. For, as emphasized by the American writer Ursula K. Le Guin, the future will always make us others, different from ourselves: What future are we willing to face?
Metamorfosis Digital
Where will physical reality remain or what will separate it from virtual reality?
Or do we have to let ourselves go and not create resistance?
Is being more aware the answer?
Or is it that we are not from here and therefore seek more towards the stars?.... we want to leave... and is that why we do not care about destroying this planet?
-Manuel Lozano
Thus we think that territory is made of colors and brightness. Those colors are the ideological adventures of material history (Siracusano,2005:18) embodied in the crafted pieces. This transit that you are about to undertake becomes your own territorialization, your own presence, and your own act of being.
Each space and form seek to engage in dialogue in a formal and material language with you being with the environment. Thus you become landscape and no longer merely observing. In a subtle way, what is sought here is to re-territorialize the body, to feel it again, to return to presence.
Understanding the "present" in a broader way: as an ethical and political practice, a form of mutual recognition. Recognition of the life that surrounds us and recognition that we depend on other bodies (body-ocean; body-desert; body-jungle; body-forest) to continue existing. Safe travels
Currently, we are immersed in the virtual world. Technology is used excessively as a means of escape and evasion from emotions and discomforts that arise in everyday life. Being present in each moment has become an increasingly difficult challenge in contemporaneity.
However, what does this presence imply? & Where can the relationship between our body and space, nature, and the desert lead us? We think of this installation as an exploration, where the answers can lead us to encounter ourselves within the territory. We believe that returning to this body is an act of territorialization, an act of presence that will lead us to encounter a territory in the landscape.
