Romina Orazi is a gardener – artist. Beyond her training and direct work with plants, her relationship with nature transcends the limits of traditional gardens. Her artistic practice corresponds to what the French landscape artist Gilles Clément calls planetary gardening, that is, thinking of the Earth as a garden. In the face of threats to non-human life forms, planetary gardening is proposed as a work of attention and care, where observation, closeness, knowledge, understanding and affection play a key role. The garden unfolds as a space of transformation that does not follow the guidelines of environmental liberalism, the market economy and the incessant search for wealth. There, possibilities, recombinations and signs of hope emerge.
Romina’s work has long been related to nature from a political and ecofeminist perspective. She has created shelters, mobile structures and gardens, and has generated conditions of possibility for life to happen. In Partículas del fuego, however, violence, destruction and mourning burst in with forcefulness. The works that make up this exhibition open the door to horror and exhibit the wounds of the Earth to be imprinted on our retinas in a back and forth between speculative pasts, disrupted times and disasters in permanent present.
In this exhibition, Romina resorts to the landscape genre to intervene it through different strategies that escape the formula of the imperial and anthropocentric eye of an objectified world. In Inundaciones -1861, 1892 and 1894- and Cascada del Iguazú she disputes the narratives of four fundamental paintings in the history of Argentine art and infiltrates them with a landscape irreversibly transformed by the climatic crisis. The works are El rodeo (1861) by Prilidiano Pueyrredón, La cascada del Iguazú (1892) by Augusto Ballerini, La vuelta del malón (1892) by Ángel Della Valle and Sin pan y sin trabajo (1894) by Ernesto de la Cárcova, all of them part of the collection of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes since its origins; artistic canon of the nation. From the construction of an Argentine rural identity to sublime nature, and from the conquest and razing of native peoples to social criticism in an industrial world, Romina copies the nineteenth-century paintings that symbolically underpinned the paths of progress and infuses them with the environmental devastation of the present with a sinister tinge. She takes the sensation of global threat to the very germ of the modern imaginary of Argentine art.
In those landscapes, the emerging capitalist struggle for land took place, hierarchies were ordered and an agricultural-livestock production model was drawn at the cost of the exploitation of the territory as well as of human and non-human lives. These flooded fields are still being exploited today. From large agro-export large estates to sowing pools, monocultures and flood irrigation models that end up making the land sterile, the concentration of agrarian capital always finds a way to go on. Until the planet can take no more.
In counterpoint to the historical reenactments are the paintings Incendios (Fires) and q = mcΔT (q = mcΔT). In a play of scales ranging from monumental to small format, the representations of seemingly delocalized, ubiquitous fires multiply, resonating with the unstoppable barrage of digital images of disasters resulting from the climatic emergency. Once again, the modern function of the landscape genre is disrupted as there are no fixed coordinates or defined territory of conquest. What rises up is destruction, one and all the fires that rebel and expand. The transmutation of fire becomes dignified rage and it becomes impossible to look away. The ashes will be accompanied by the residual heat after the extinction of the flames. Perhaps some pyrophyte seeds will germinate.
Remains of the voracity of the fire, some burnt trunks become pictorial objects that open like portals to deep times. As if it were a dendrological study, each cut reveals an image of the Paleozoic era. These imaginary prehistoric landscapes, crossed by the scientistic fantasies of the 19th century, refer to the origins of life, and between their knots and joints, they insinuate a process of regeneration. From death to life, the Devonian series points to cyclicity and transformation. A return to humus and compost, which also takes shape in the clay sculptures of Sediments: the humility of waiting for the recomposition of matter.
The agency of the Earth vibrates in the Epiphytes series. The forms of mythological beings, humans and animals are related to an exuberant flora, intermingled and confused in an animistic impulse. And it is in this same harmony that the active collaboration with the tree that lives at the entrance of the gallery takes place through a sound piece. This work, made with the artist Gerardo Sirolli, and with the collaboration of Valentín Kohen Lumer and Valeria Roberta González, crosses the outside with the inside, agrees on a barely audible complicity and repeats the phrase “I can’t breathe” as a plea for multi-species justice. In the chinks, both visual and sensorial, emerges the power of vulnerability to preserve the conditions of regeneration in the great planetary garden.
Tania Puente
Buenos Aires, February 2024
