Exhibition Becoming Earth (2024, MUAC-UNAM): An Analysis about the Knowledge of the Territory and its Relationship with Nature

Exhibition review Intervención ISSN 2448-5934 ENERO-JUNIO 2025 JANUARY-JUNE 2025 OJS Índice / Contents Exhibition Becoming Earth (2024, muac-unam): An Analysis about the Knowledge of the Territory and its Relationship with Nature Ir a la versión en español DOI: 10.30763/Intervencion.314.v1n31.93.2025 • YEAR 16, NO. 31: 265-275 Submitted: 28.06.2024 • Accepted: 24.02.2025 • Published: 01.07.2025 Karina Bermejo Pino Escuela Nacional de Conservación, Restauración y Museografía (encrym), Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (inah), México | orcid: www.orcid.org/0009-0000-8586-4315 Traducido por/Translated by Fernanda Andablo ABSTRACT This text analyzes the exhibition Becoming Earth by artist Ursula Biemann, presented in 2024 at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (University Museum of Contemporary Art of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, muac-unam). The exhibition is framed within a type of artistic practice developed from an ethnographic and ecological perspective. Extractivism serves as the catalyst topic in Biemann’s work, which bears witness to —or more accurately, responds to— the destructive impact it leaves across various geographies. Her projects seek to shed light on and engage in dialogue with ways of life and thought practiced in the southern regions, fostering a polyphony of voices from communities near the Amazon rainforest. Through the convergence of digital media, documentary resources, and a poetics of language, her work weaves a network of relational ties to the territory, ties that are, in essence, the people themselves. KEYWORDS museum exhibition, ecology, environmental crisis, narrative Exhibition Becoming Earth (2024, muac - unam ): An Analysis about the Knowledge of the Territory and its Relationship with Nature CONVOCATORIA 2025 CALL FOR PAPERS 2025 265 Exhibition review Intervención ISSN 2448-5934 ENERO-JUNIO 2025 JANUARY-JUNE 2025 OJS Índice / Contents INTRODUCTION n an era marked by a global ecological crisis —visible and tangible in its devastation— we are faced with the urgent need not only to speak about and expose the world’s deterioration and loss, but also to make visible and engage with other ways of living it. Throughout art history, we see a persistent pursuit of nature, approached from contemplative, inquisitive, analytical, and connective perspectives. However, since the late 20th century, artistic practices have undergone a necessary shift, shaped by postcolonial, ecological, ethnographic, and cultural theories, such as Walter Mignolo’s work on subaltern knowledge (2000), or the concept of perspectivism in anthropology (Viveiros de Castro, 2013). These approaches have brought visibility to a spectrum of imaginaries and ways of life that lie outside the boundaries of Western thought. Although people living in the realities of the Global South or under conditions of inequality often lack access to visibility within the art world and its exhibition and representation spaces, we nonetheless find a wide myriad of inquiries and approaches that are articulated through artistic productions grounded in these realities and their inhabitants. In contemporary artistic practices today, a significant number of artists —such as Carolina Caycedo, Fernando García-Dory, Marjetica Potrc, and Paula Tavares, among others— employ strategies of nomadism and draw on investigative, ethnographic, exploratory, and documentary tools to construct bodies of research that support artistic projects and artworks addressing contexts and issues largely absent from mainstream media narratives. Moreover, these works often seem to belong to worlds completely detached from the everyday rhythms and dynamics of urban life. It is within this context that we encounter the work of Swiss artist Ursula Biemann, who has traveled to places that bear witness to some of the many overwhelming forms of environmental degradation occurring across the planet. Through visual recording tools —such as aerial videography of vast Amazonian landscapes— Biemann offers a detailed documentation of the transformations taking place deep within these territories, inhabited by deeply rooted communities, and who are sounding the alarm on the critical times we are living through. I Exhibition Becoming Earth (2024, muac - unam ): An Analysis about the Knowledge of the Territory and its Relationship with Nature CONVOCATORIA 2025 CALL FOR PAPERS 2025 266 Exhibition review Intervención ISSN 2448-5934 ENERO-JUNIO 2025 JANUARY-JUNE 2025 OJS Índice / Contents DIALOGUE WITH THE PLANET AND ITS INHABITANTS The temporary exhibition Becoming Earth (2024) was presented from April 20 to October 13, 2024, in Rooms 7 and 8 of the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (University Museum of Contemporary Art, muac) at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (National Autonomous University of Mexico, unam). The exhibition featured five video installation pieces, each organized around a thematic axis: the rights of the rainforest, research on the hydrosphere and its repercussions on ecosystems, listening (the Earth’s agents/sensors), epistemological boundaries, and, finally, the politics of knowledge. This series of installations carries a documentary character, presenting large-format video works that include community narratives, as well as animations, photographs, objects, and documents. A voiceover weaves a poetic text that raises questions and reflections about the types of relationships and knowledge human beings have sustained with the world and all that inhabits it. A diversity of voices is foregrounded, recounting stories and cosmogonies alongside representatives from Amazonian communities in Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia, highlighting various issues of today’s environmental crisis. The work offers an exploratory vision of these territories from an ethnographic and ecological perspective. While it may be subject to critique that a Western artistic gaze —originating from a country as economically powerful as Switzerland— engages with and represents cultures from peripheral and resistant geographies, it is also true that since the second decade of the 21st century, these issues and contexts have gained visibility and, in some cases, greater relevance, due to the biodiversity and knowledge they encompass. The curatorial approach invites the public to rethink how contemporary societies relate to the world and its ecosystems, as well as how we perceive their loss and transformation. This is explored through the lens of the Inga communities of the Amazon, who engage with the intelligence of nature. This reveals a way of knowing that surpasses the structure of Western, rational, and dichotomous thinking, proposing instead a horizontal and plural knowledge system. Biemann’s work not only offers a broad portrayal of the Amazon rainforest —its features, qualities, beings, and dynamics— but, through (...truncated)