An art exhibition that cries out for the environment

“Aesthetic activism” for the environment has arrived in Rome with an exhibition that, starting today, exhibits the works of 26 international artists, including from Spain, Brazil, Mexico, Cuba, Colombia and the Dominican Republic, who express a struggle aesthetics through “art’s own means,” Cuban curator Gerardo Mosquera explained to EFE.

«Hot Spot. Caring for a World on Fire” is the name of the exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome, in honor of the homonymous work by Mona Hatoum (“Hot Spot III”, 2009) also included in the exhibition and is composed of artistic works that aim to make people reflect and raise awareness about the complexity of the environmental catastrophe.

«I am very concerned about the problems that confront the planet» and «to try to give strength to this message, I wanted to present works that do not address these ecological problems in a documentary or direct way, but rather using more indirect means, more typical of the art, poetry, aesthetics or symbolism,” said Mosquera.

Furthermore, the critic and ideologist of the new Cuban art described the exhibition, which will remain open until February 26, as “stimulating,” since working with so many international artists has taught him to “escape and become involved with other aesthetics and positions,” something which has allowed him to “open up and progress as a human being.”

As soon as you enter the room, one of the first projects that can be seen is that of the Cuban Glenda León: an abandoned piano from whose strings flowers sprout and with which the author wants to convey “an idea of ​​optimism, of how something abandoned , broken, from something that does not have a use for which it was conceived, something with beauty emerges,” he explains to EFE.

The artist also exhibits two other interactive works, created with guitar strings, and when played they produce sounds that “speak of listening to nature and not seeing it as something apart, but something to which we belong.”

Another of the works that covers a large part of the space is that of the Brazilian Sandra Cinto, who in a seven-day effort made a drawing on the gallery wall with which she intends to “speak about the need for freedom, to promote a dream and good things.

It is a drawing that occupies one of the main walls made with pens in which the sky and the sea are represented, in a liquid and poetic cosmology, and where “the brutality of the world” is shown, explains Cinto.

For her part, Johanna Calle captures climate problems with a typewriter, creating a tree that “has to do with very fragile ecosystems,” specifically an Andean walnut tree from the Andes Mountains, “endemic species that suffer first when there is climate changes, even if they are slight,” the Colombian artist told EFE.

As for the Spanish author Cristina Lucas, through an audiovisual piece in video-performance format in which she is the protagonist herself, she aims to find a reaction to the patriarchal dimension with radical feminism.

“Cristina is sometimes pigeonholed as a feminist artist and it is true, but she goes further, she also has that dimension of complexity of poetry and at the same time of social concern,” explained Gerardo Mosquera.

Also participating in the exhibition are the Brazilians Alex Cerveny, Jonathas de Andrade and Ayrson Heráclito, the Dominican Raquel Paiewonsky and the Mexican Alejandro Prieto, along with other prominent authors such as Ida Applebroog (USA), Filippo de Pisis (Italy), Mona Hatoum (Lebanon ), Juree Kim (South Korea) and Ange Leccia (France), among others.

EFE

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