La Cave

Revelations from a nearby land Artists: Maria Balea, George Crîngașu 12-20.12.2024; 13-17.01.2025 Curator: Edith Lázár Exhibition opening: 12 December, 6.30 PM Chapter 3 of Disappearances in Landscapes "Tomorrow he might grow an eye, for the pleasant sensation. Or maybe not - and he'd use the sonar to leave the surface crust behind, to dive beneath and dig deep, to listen to the myriad fungal connections that carry his information to the world." - Jeff VanderMeer, Always Home * We often move among urban interpretations of nature that tend to reduce nature to a harmonious refuge, the domesticated, calm environment in close proximity to human habitats. In a text on landscape architecture, Karrie Jacobs observes that environmental designs (often with artificial materials) are designed not only to restore areas methodically destroyed by past generations but more importantly to temper the effects of undesigned nature.** The history of man-made natural settings is deeply linked to technological progress - first as domestication, but also in reverse, nature becoming the inspiration for the operating systems of the technological devices we use so organically and intuitively in our everyday lives. But who and what survives when the technological world turns to nature, and what then happens to nature? When does a landscape materialize? What is the experience of it when it is both a memory and a feeling and a living thing? And what kind of geological layers does it hide? - excerpt from the curatorial text In their artistic practices, Maria Balea and George Crîngașu propose techno-organic imaginaries and speculations about the possible transformations that the relationship between nature and technology can shape and that no longer have as a reference point only the human scale. The exhibition is part of the Disappearances in Landscapes series that explores transformative experiences and ways of narrativizing the complexity of the world beyond human centrality, a series inspired by the collective reading of Elvia Wilk's collection of essays, Death by Landscape.