“RENDEZVOUS: ESTA TIERRA ES MI TIERRA”

The moment of our appointment arrived. We are where we had feared and predicted. Through a video installation, Davis Birks offers us the possibility to activate a conversation in which we can review the past, the present and the future. It is a reflection on the environment and our impact on it. That would be a first reading.

It is observed how an organic arrangement (that of a river) is replaced by one of geometric and artificial order. This happens as the audience comes into contact with the piece. The curves and the apparent disorder in which the small stones of a river are placed and the capricious shapes with which the water flows will be replaced by a Tartan pattern. The artist chose to use this particular pattern as a reference and homage to his Scottish ancestry. The crisscrossing lines could be the axes of a GPS grid, or the interwoven linear trace of the urbanizations in which we live and that is “natural” to us. This could be a second reading.

Birks confronts us with Nature observed through a surveillance camera lens. That is why he chose black and white for the video. Nature distant and supervised, we are supervised. We = Nature. We have almost forgotten the latter. The conquest of natural territory has caused not only an impact on the environment; it has also had consequences on its original inhabitants and has led among other things, to their displacement. This could be a third reading.

These sensitive themes, or others, emerge from a narrative, apparently simple, that unfolds many layers of interpretation. What would your reading be?

ARTIST : ALEJANDRO ORDOÑEZ AND RAUBTIER & UNICUS