The pen moves across the earth

The pen moves across the earth: it no longer knows what will happen, and the hand that holds it has disappeared.

The Earth is mute but she makes noise, and to attune ourselves to these atmospheric qualities means to sense out and give name to the movements of particles, cells, sand, aerosols, molecules, dust, ash, and pollen; the same with fluids, drops, currents, streams, drift, turbulence, evaporation, volatilization, thermodynamics, breath, and odour; likewise even for fire, flames, plasma, light, fields, forces, beams, energy, gravity, reflection, inference, magnetism, and transmissions. These particulars act and interact. Their morphological qualities—the forms they take on as they undergo relational movements of transference—settle into temporary states, only to resituate themselves.

This exhibition explores the means by which knowledge of the elemental forces and geopolitical processes impacting upon us in the 21st century can be generated in the presence and absence of evidence. Combining raw minerals and high-tech elements, each work in the exhibition makes visible the forces of composition and decomposition that are rumbling just below or flowing across the surface of the Earth. Whether the circulation of the winds and seawaters, or the cycling of substances through the spheres – oxygen, carbon, water, and nitrogen – or the emergence and decay of life, what is revealed is that matter matters. Matter and matters intertwine.

Michel Serres, in a way resounding Rachel Carson’s famous dictum that in every grain of sand is a story of Earth, writes in his Atlas: “Indeed, it is worth telling the (his)tory of a small, local, singular element, that of an atom, a grain of sand, a thin layer of fluid somewhere in the middle of this violent zone where various flows intermingle.” The world is an atlas that we must constantly draw and redraw, knowing that our map is the territory. What is the texture of this map? The Anthropocene insists on the texture of the world as a fabric, as a flowing surface, an amorphous expanse of mud, whose differentiation is expressed by varying qualities, not in the form of clear-cut entities, artificial order, or cause-and-effect sequences. The world just is, and it is a mess.

As you erase me now, I will erase you tomorrow, wherever you may be.

Introduced in recent years, the term Anthropocene is used to describe the current geological epoch in which our earth finds itself, defining the human being as the most important factor influencing the planet's biological, geological, and atmospheric processes. The Anthropocene exceeds the geological field; it is synonymous with a dizzying set of ethical, political, and scientific questions. It means a point of no return and a radical questioning of our representations of the world, including the boundary between nature and culture. As Etienne Turpin and Heather Davis declare in their introduction to Art in the Anthropocene, “the way we have come to understand the Anthropocene has frequently been framed through modes of the visual, that is through data visualization, satellite imagery, climate models, and other legacies of the ‘whole earth.’ Art provides a polyarchic site of experimentation for ‘living in a damaged world,’ as Anna Tsing has called it, and a non-moral form of address that offers a range of discursive, visual, and sensual strategies that are not confined by the regimes of scientific objectivity, political moralism, or psychological depression.”

The works in this exhibition exemplify the diversity of highly dynamic changes characteristic of the Anthropocene: climate change, soil erosion, the “Great Acceleration,” resource extraction, urbanization, the digitalization of all areas of life, drastic species loss, the pressure of the sun… but they do so by harnessing the power of art, including a tendency toward metaphor and sensuous-aesthetic play, a resistance to received ideas, and a willingness to colonize new areas of knowledge. They persuade us to think differently about our relationship to the Earth. In the end, what this exhibition points to is the hand we have in moving the Earth.

We are disturbing the earth and making it quake.

Christine Shaw