If you are able to navigate endless corridors, crowds in search of Picasso, and dust balls on the stairs, I recommend navigating your way this show, hidden away in a corner of the Royal Academy in London.
“Eco-Visionaries - confronting a planet in a state of emergency” (on until 23 Feb 2020).
But be prepared to do the work (according to a friend who works there, not many have made it).
You’ll find it bit makeshift.
Text is small or on propped up boards.
The context (if you can get close to read it on the tiny boards) is interesting, but written from a ‘global north’ perspective of environmental activism and connection to creative practices. This familiar, authoritative (imperial), linear voice - the same voice that created the mess we are in - pervades much of the show. Where are the real visionaries, those that are not of this legacy?
Once inside, you are confronted by an increasingly murky dusty earth (?) trapped inside a cube.
And sound bleeds between the first three (or four?) works.
It’s dark.
And it is really hard to hear.
Feeling uncertain, disappointed even, I decide to commit to the first film. “A Film, Reclaimed. 2015” by Ana Vaz and Tristan Bera. But it is hard to hear. I focus on the subtitles. The pixillating rhino sounds from the next room are enticing. The film includes a giraffe being shot. This seems to be the only bit that online reviews have noticed.
Others move on.
As the film builds, it describes the way I’ve started to think since the summer, the same voices. Uncertainty explicitly raised as the condition of our time. “We have moved from a society of risk to a society of uncertainty”.
I get the Haraway, Latour references. How we’ve gone from colonisation to anthropocene (or better Eurocene? Capitalcene?) to Cthulocene. Be embedded with all species. Make alliances rather than separation.
It reinforces where I am. I’m pleased it has made it into the gallery. Others look non-plussed. I wonder if there could be a space to discuss. Amongst all this uncertainty, we need a space to make sense of things together. Could art galleries not re-purpose themselves as spaces to work through the uncertain, the contested?
Instead, there are fish on the walls. A river in paper. Some architecture. More of Olafur Oliasson’s melting ice pictures. I’m tired.
But there are differnt voices, indigenous knowledge. The next room is brighter in terms of its lighting. And its visions: A film: “the Breast Milk of Volcanoes” ancient sacred lands being liquefied for Lithium for our batteries. The Dolphin Embassy by Ant Farm (made in the mid 70s!).
Organs for sensing plastics (more a solution perhaps, but how does that help, I wonder?).
All in all, it is very piecemeal. Technology looks lost: Other species pixellated: extinct white rhino (“The Substitute” by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg) huge, trapped in its own virtual box. It looks at us confused.
It doesn’t feel very visionary. Almost all in the show feels more like retro-fitting. Tweaking at the edges.
The exhibition ends with an ‘immersive’ experience, ‘Win >< Win” by Rimini Protokoll, involving jellyfish floating resilient - flourishing - in a tank of warming seas between two audiences.
We humans interact with each other (self consciously) through the jelly-fish tank, under instruction over our individual headphones. But still no community, no discussion. Not even in the queue, waiting for 20 minutes to get in, do we talk. People are on their phones (do they think of the white milk?). But it gives me a chance to think about the show, and the conflicting feelings I have about it.
At first I thought it might just be rather hastily put together. Low budget. With a superficial nod to ‘reuse materials’ to make the show…
But for me this exhibition embodies uncertainty. Claustrophobic, lack of glamour, put together experiments, suggestive rather than solving. It is so counter-cultural, so counter-gallery-culture, that perhaps it ask us what an exhibition will be in the future. What is the role of the gallery?
As I stood with 5 minutes to go in the queue, I saw a small girl, 5 years old?, spellbound, in her dad’s arms. Her arm in a fixed pointing position as they moved around. He puts her down and wanders off. She stands in her tights, staring upwards, mouth open, at the video of farmers brining soil to the centre of a city (Future Farmers). It was as though she was looking back from the future somehow, at these rather strange and insignificant attempts to completely change how we are in the world, before it was too late.
I left surprisingly fired up to ‘stay with the trouble’, question the status quo, and build more creative entanglements…
