Exhibition "FRACTURED SOIL"

FRACTURED SOIL It is an exhibition that takes a critical look at the environmental crisis on our planet. Creating a dense and at the same time poetic texture, the set of works in photographs and videos build a large installation wall, presenting powerful dialogues about one of the fundamental urgencies of our time: water.

The hidden face of Jaguari Dam. Cantareira System, is revealed almost dry. What was hidden beneath the waters for decades is exposed, showing fragments of the past. Oxides from the earth emerge, spreading across the ground in reddish tones, creating a poetics of the earth that bleeds and pulses underground.

Cracks in the ground show streams of water pointing to small spring veins, remnants of the dam in the middle of this eroded soil. Can be seen as real dialogues loaded with metaphors, the water veins form a duality with the fissures, proposing a reflection between the fertile and the arid, the fluid and the rigid; forms that resist in a single scene.

Break, break and leave. In FRACTURED SOIL the fracture appears as a violent act. Just like a bone, which breaks when it cannot withstand the impact, the ecosystem fragments due to social neglect in its preservation. Where there was previously fluidity, discontinuity is assumed, formed by cracks that fragment the exhausted soil. The records seen in this exhibition highlight memories of an act of calamity that warn of the future.

In the footage, tractors are recorded pulling out stumps and roots from the trees that inhabited the area before the dam existed, showing a great game of forces between nature and the machine. The noise of the diesel engine accelerating, the tension of the steel cables and the cracks of the breaking wood, expose the harsh reality, but also propose a reflection on the conflict between man's violence and nature's resistance.

The tree stumps found at the bottom of the dam show its history. After being cut, burned, mutilated and submerged for 40 years, they still resist when removed. Some roots slowly emerging from the dry earth, sprout like a surviving image in the continuous struggle to regain its space.

The records made by Sonia Guggisberg during the 2014 water crisis, when the dam reached 7% of its reserve, appear as a warning of an unresolved crisis.

Just as eroded soil can be soaked again by water, social amnesia is also encouraged into silence by remaining inert in its actions. The fleeting nature of memory, added to the accumulation of natural disasters that we experience daily, leads to the trivialization of catastrophes. Seen as something trivial, belonging to the rules of an extractive economic system, the false hope is created that such impasses will be resolved.