Statement from the curator
To date, art and cultural programming have tended to sit on two sides of the coin when it comes to thinking about our relationship with nature. On the one hand, there is a set of practices that foreground a notion of restoring a pristine idea of nature, pre-industrial ecologies, and often draw on indigenous cosmologies and decolonial practices. On the other hand, there is another set of practices that explore post industrial and technological hybridity, and post-natural states of being. Actually this binary is common in other sectors too, such as environmentalism.
For me, the idea of a pristine state of nature is romanticised and actually is often something that only a privileged few can access. Likewise, the idea that technology will solve climate change is an illusion while the frameworks that it is developed within are still extractive.
With the Synthetic Sacred, I am trying to build a bridge across these binaries. Looking at our planetary materiality, what I saw is that the hybrid states of being in emergent synthetic ecologies actually have a lot of similarities with the ways of describing states of being in pre-modern knowledge systems. For example, when chemical waste re-codes genetic structures of our bodies it is impossible to see ourselves as individual entities separate to and even superior to the rest of life. Instead, we are entangled in an ever unfolding web of intra-relations. A new kind of animism emerges that points to Indigenous knowledge and an understanding of the role of humans in nature - as givers of gratitude, stewards and cultivators.
This offers a framework for being and operating that shifts the compass for development away from the extraction and exploitation of life and towards restoration, kinship and flourishing. Without doing this, my fear is that we entrap life in scientific and technological innovations that continue the extraction.
Words by Lucy Sollitt
