VITRINE
EXHIBITION SERIES
NOV 21, 2024
–
DEC 21, 2024
Gerardo Nolasco-Rózsás
Once Upon a Time
Once Upon a Time is a multimedia project by interdisciplinary artist Gerardo Nolasco-Rózsás. The exhibition features a selection of artworks from the expansive body of work that includes a range of physical and virtual elements. Using 3D animation, sound, sculpture, and extended reality technologies, Nolasco-Rózsás interrogates relationships between social, political, and ecological systems.
“…I approach the territory as a living archive, by analysing its symbiosis with organic and inorganic agents and their environments in historical, contemporary, and speculative contexts. I aim to investigate instances in which these symbiotic systems have been used and abused throughout history and discuss the ramifications of these in political imaginaries…”
— Gerardo Nolasco-Rózsás
Gerardo Nolasco-Rózsás is a multidisciplinary artist based in Germany. He uses a variety of media in his artistic practice, from traditional to new media to intertwine the analog and the digital. He has exhibited at a number of art institutions and galleries in Mexico and abroad including Centro Cultural de Arte Contemporáneo and the Rufino Tamayo Museum in Mexico City, MACO in Oaxaca, Mexico, Kunsthalle Budapest in Hungary, Kunsthalle Basel in Switzerland, OFF-Biennale Budapest, ZKM in Karlsruhe Germany, Art Science Exhibits at Humboldt-Universität in Berlin, and in Palazzo Albrizzi, a parallel exhibition to the 58th Venice Biennale in Venice. Gerardo studied at San Carlos Academy in Mexico City.
Artist’s Statement About the Work
Once Upon a Time is a long-term project divided in fables. It engages with the possibilities of art to imagine possible futures. Throughout the research I approach the territory as a living archive, by analysing its symbiosis with organic and inorganic agents and their environments in historical, contemporary, and speculative contexts. I aim to investigate instances in which these symbiotic systems have been used and abused throughout history and discuss the ramifications of these in political imaginaries.
Territories transform through time and space; they are dynamic systems that establish the relationships between the organic and inorganic agents coexisting within them. The Mayans use the concept lu ́um to refer not only to territorial space and the natural elements of its landscape — what the Global North calls nature, but also to its social, artistic, religious, political institutions and so on — what the Global North calls culture. In the lu ́um, nature is intertwined with culture, the space is not natural or cultural, but natural and cultural.
In the Popol Vuh, one of the sacred books of the Mayans, humans exist in the same plane as rocks, plants, and animals. This is a different perspective to the anthropocentric thought, where we are the centre and the measure of everything; humans are above nature and can therefore possess it. For the Mayans, we are a part of a whole. The human population coexists with the vegetable, animal, mineral, and meteoric populations in a biological, historical, and cultural exchange — conceived as a symbiosis between agents coexisting in the same territory.
The aim of Once Upon a Time is to explore the Mayan concept of lu’um in order to understand, think and imagine from another perspective the entanglements of our specie with the different agents whom we share the same time and space.