PRISONER-SCAPE

[ILINCA BERNEA | Curator]

"Every social system is more or less against nature, and at every moment nature is at work to reclaim her rights", said Paul Valery. Consciousness itself makes us dual, produces secondary nature. We live captive in its power, subjected to the measures coined by its views. The evolution of ideas and especially of the means of modeling the environment have made the reality to be, in a greater extent, creation, invention, manipulation and interpretation than nature. In addition to the one that the ancients advised people to discover, a semi-artificial was developed: a step nature. Our environments are greenhouses now, reservations, some favorable, others unfavorable to raw living, climates more or less alienating to the primordial condition of man, animal or vegetal elements. The human-designed environment becomes a prisoner-scape, counter-nature. The city, with its many dimensions, produces captivity, sick addictions, helplessness. An entire industry of anguish and alienation is rife with metropolitan living. Basically, man has produced a trap-medium, became a prisoner of his own creation and lives in the internal organs of a monster. The project "step-nature" proposes a meditation on the alienation, rupture and fracture between the nature, intuitively ascribed to the human and biological being, and the step-one, which is the by-product of consciousness and of adaptation to an artificial environment, one that is made-up, manufactured through the means of reasoning.