The exhibition comprises material produced during the artist’s art residency in the village of Armila, Panama, in 2022. It features sculptural pieces complemented by a series of photographs of the rainforest, captured in January this year during the artist’s Costa Rican art residency. The artist draws on Jaques Lacan’s idea of the “small object a” in their work, which symbolises the eternal unfulfillment of desire.
The exhibition comprises three parts: artistic photography, documentary and sculpture installation.
The first, digital part, is a raw and robust travel documentary. The Armila village is situated in a dense rainforest with lush vegetation. There’s animals and birds but the village also hides illegal and inhumane activities like drug-, animal- and human trafficking, and profiting off illegal migration. Since it is forbidden to record this flow of migrants, whose trek is enabled by the villagers, the photo and video material of the exhibition is comprised of uncontrolled footage, later filtered through the artist’s experiences, perceptions and interpretations.
The second part of the exhibition is the photo series “Real or not”, playing with truth distortions and visual illusions, emphasising the nature of desire and unfulfillment. It is complemented by a personal fairytale-like photo series “Monteverde”, that observes the construct of a dystopian primal nature, and illustrates the unfulfilled hopes and expectations of life in the jungle, existing as one with nature and the search for unshackled freedom. It also reflects the unobtainable mysticism along with the artist’s yearning for primal forests, belonging and one’s roots.
The final part of the exhibition, a sculpture installation, ponders on addictive relationships and parasitism which are abundant in the rainforest, both as biological forms and as human activity. In nature it’s about the biological existential struggle, where plants use one-another for their needs. They share and mediate without any negative connotations, and everything is in constant change: death also means new life, fire means cleansing and the absence of light or nutrients means adaptation. With humans though, it is questionable.
