Over the years, many artists have crossed my path, and I have crossed theirs. I have nothing but respect for the ways they commit to a life in the arts. In a way, there is a splaying of aesthetics that results from multiple inputs, over-stimulation and a lack of physical material experience. Without the survival of cultural memory, aesthetics and art will not survive… The journey is eternal, and the voices of our era that resonate understand the place of music, of dance, and of life as a theatre… with the stage being Mother Earth. We are at this stage – all of us – part of the Earth. We share it with innumerable other species, other life forms (some of them disappearing as I speak), Languages and dialects, and diversity in general. Diversity is a disappearing phenomenon. The readability of creative work becomes less important than the source; ironically, diversity is disappearing, like nature, in a world that claims great diversity. Language, like art, presents a series of worldviews, and when a language is channelled and “wordified,” the worldview becomes cooked up…. How we long for a natural language, a rambling way of being that picks up what is around without constraint or “interpretation”. Too much information….
Like culture, nature is untouchable; it is the pariah, a distant phenomenon with which we seldom engage. Images of nature and representations of culture are superseding authentic living culture. Why this image preference? Images enable a disconnect between cause and effect, between social desires and global capital needs… scales that no longer have a dimensionality that accords with the ecosystems we humans are part of.
The theatre is in us, and it is perpetually changing… as if the change were a part of us. The body, with its miraculous systems of healing and adaptability, cannot endure external pollution or contamination, just as it needs water to survive. The Earth’s water systems are increasingly threatened by climate change… And they are depleting in many regions due to deforestation, cattle grazing, and glacier evaporation…
The ecosystem of culture is similar. How many artists “over-produce” with an insecurity about “how many” shows, catalogues, without reflecting on the stage they are performing within, this theatre, Mother Earth. We deplete our inner resources—imagination, introspection, healthy being. I know I have done this in my life. Harmony exists in establishing a connection between the self and others, culture and nature…
As migrations are increasingly occurring across many regions due to climate change, we must acknowledge that nature itself is sending us a message. Though we have the best communication tools and new technologies that can help, they also cause a physiological disconnect between ourselves and nature. We are ultimately perceptual beings, drawn to the visual and sensual aspects of screen-based and permanent cultural realities… Migration is the result of habitat destruction, resource abuse, and overpopulation. Aren’t we all part of a migration system? Between life and death, between countries over the centuries. What is unique is our ability to have compassion for others, a basic human sensibility…
Culture is the economy. Culture is ecology. Nature and human culture intertwine at all levels in our present age. To be future-oriented, design, production, development, and virtually all levels of human activity must engage in a dialogue not only on resource use but also on the management and selection of which resources to use. Like artists, economists can envision how to utilise the world’s natural capital creatively, with sustainability a central tenet for orchestrated future growth.
Nature is a life-giving force that we often deny because it defies the production-consumption model, which is just one historical construct among many. Nature procreates effortlessly and has inherent resilience. In developing a nature-specific approach rooted in experience in a given place and time, with nature as the essential material and ingredient of the process, artists have, over time, emphasised the holistic, made it bio-regional, and emphasised mutualist exchange. Art’s relation to nature is not just a dialogue but a new paradigm as we re-evaluate our culture’s distance to the sources of our economy – all nature, all part of an ongoing, ever-revolving system of ecology, always being born, always dying, and change as the constant.
Physics and the endless changes that occur are independent of our thoughts and ideologies. Our place in nature’s cosmology involves an understanding of where we belong. The Earth is our home. These places become non-places, and we disregard them, considering them of no value. Intrinsic connectedness to the land, and the place our bodies live in, are a part of, is definitely… Home is often associated with a place of defence, of refuge from an imagined opposing place… Homeland also has a nostalgic association, evoking a place distinct from other lands…
Etat de Amazonas, Bresil 2019
Something to protect one from the other… We are all in it together, this home, our mother earth…
Cultural identity and the very essence of the creative process are involved in a dramatic relocation of the human presence. Often associated with colonial prototypes of ownership, mixed-up metaphors of being, while the experience of the land and ecosystems these identities are a part of are non-existent… Rephrasing exploitation demands a rephrasing of identity—a depopulation of meanings usually associated with resource sharing, as well as the complementary human and non-human sharing of resources and existence. As overpopulation exerts its effects and climate change accelerates migration, we are faced with a redefinition of values, away from ownership… the temporal being is more exemplary. The flexibility of identity and resource use brings with it a sense of joy… Inter-cultural models of exchange can be conflicted by the domination of points of reference by corporate and clichéd identifiers that have nothing to do with cultural identity or geo-specific values…
In a remarkable example of what a small group of humans can do to heal the Earth, Brazilian photographer and humanist Sebastião Salgado, along with his wife Lélia, began a project in the 1990s to revive a desert area (once a forest, then a cattle-grazing grassland) to its former glory. With careful husbandry, replanting, the Instituto Terra, as this 1750-acre former farm in the Rio Doce valley in Minas Gerais state is now known, is a federally recognised nature preserve that grows tree seedlings, educates ecologists, and has become a regenerated forest. The Atlantic Forest, this region is part of, was once second in biodiversity only to the Amazon… but is now severely diminished, down to only 10 per cent of its original size. The slash-and-burn culture of the past in Brazil removed forest cover, and what became cattle-grazing grassland eventually became just dry, cracked Earth—a desert. – A miracle has taken place – the Earth and the desert have been regenerated. The artist/actor is involved in reactivating the human imagination, and this process involves understanding the NATURAL CAPITAL of the world across all its geopolitical regions. Salgado and Lélia, of the Instituto Terra, are an example of what we can achieve and how we can re-envision a better future through direct action, transforming the Earth for the better.
We can see the Earth as a body. We can treat the Earth as a body. We could see our bodies as the land. We could treat our bodies as the land. We can respect the land as if it were our own bodies. Permaculture, the permanence of resources is a value, and the caring and regulation of resource use, as well as the regeneration of renewable resources, are the true economics of the future! The choreography unfolds in real time, a relationship between body and land. Intercultural and interspecific exchange is the key to planetary survival.
Nature is a primordial memory door.
The Amazônia exhibition by Sebastião Salgado, now on view at Avenue du Port, 86C-1000 in Brussels, Belgium, follows on from Salgado’s earlier Genesis, Workers, and Migration projects. Curated by Salgado’s wife Lélia Wanick Salgado, Amazônia captures the immense natural wealth of the Amazon rainforest region and the indigenous peoples who have lived there since time immemorial. An original soundtrack explicitly created for the expo by Jean-Michel Jarre accompanies the show. The sheer beauty and diverse extremes of nature are there for all to see. The images speak for themselves.