During 3 weeks in the COMMON GROUNDS artist residency, Angelica Teuta worked on a performance that was documented in a video available on her YouTube channel. The Colombian artist partnered with a collective for scientific dissemination through art to build a small plant oasis in Bodega Comfama, where the exhibition and residency occurred. With the collaboration of Julie Semoroz as a sound designer, ARQUITECTURA EMOCIONAL: CEGUERA VERDE could spread out Medellín’s physical borders and become a video manifesto. Angelica Teuta, one dog, 135 plants, and the Colectivo BioGrafos combined visual arts with community work in order to create a space of reconnection with nature and reflection on contemporary forms of living together.
CEGUERA VERDE is the human inability to see, perceive and recognize the plants around them, as the artist argues. In contemporary occidental civilization, we do not know the names or the particularities of animals and plants surrounding us, which is a symptom of the belief that human beings are sovereign in relation to other forms of life on Earth. Drawing from this idea, Angelica Teuta revisits the anthropological dilemma of the difference between nature and culture, aiming for an epistemological model that does not condone anthropocentrism. As ecocentrism is at the core of the artwork’s elaboration, the artist brings ancestral traditions and cosmogonies to disengage the colonial idea of the social contract and imagine an alternative for cities that considers this ancient and powerful knowledge.
Creado por Séverin Guelpa y Anja Wyden Guelpa en colaboración con el Instituto Edgelands, MATZA EDGELANDS MEDELLÍN es un proyecto celebrado en Colombia entre el 31.01 y el 17.02.2022. El proyecto, que reunió a artistas, expertos, ciudadanos y activistas para reflexionar sobre cuestiones contemporáneas, dinámicas urbanas y tensiones sociales en el corazón de Medellín, dio lugar a la residencia artística y exposición COMMON GROUND, que presentó obras de arte originales relacionadas con la seguridad, la vigilancia digital, la tecnología y la urbanización.