Visita Interiora, Exhibition view
Rising Anxiety, Watercolor in Hahnemühle paper, 2019
Rising Anxiety, Watercolor in Hahnemühle paper, 2019
Regina de Miguel, Fundación, 2019, colour photograph, 26 x 40 cm
Exhibition view
Exhibition view
Rising Anxiety
Regina de Miguel
Madrid
12.09.1908.11.19
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Maisterravalbuena is pleased to open the new season with the fourth individual exhibition of the Spanish artist Regina de Miguel, entitled RISING ANXIETY.
There is no scientific reason to think that we, even with space travel, are going to survive as a species for ever, certainly not by biting off the hand that feeds us, which is exactly what we are doing.
Lynn Margulis.
Rising Anxiety is midway between the inner turbulence of the alienated modern subjectivity and the distress of an also unbalanced atmosphere. It is conceived as a hybrid found in classic subjects such as geography, science and fiction: islands and beasts, both traditionally linked to expeditions and discoveries, and considered as favourable fields for utopian fables. Both combine here to narrate a kind of collapse already described as Climate Anxiety.
Visita Interiora consists in the setup of diverse elements: mirrors and obsidian spheres that contain statistical graphs on the multiple forms of violence against women taking place in the State of Guanajuato, Mexico. Those graphs, when displayed, recall the recording of earthquakes the same way seismic activity is represented. Strongly connected with tellurian, mythological and historical traditions, obsidian is the result of a relentless geological action, resulting from the quick cooling and solidificationof lava.
Fundación brings back memories of the events that occurred in Minas de Río Tinto in 1888, the socalled Year of the Shootings. The first ecologist demonstration in History took place back then, and it ended up in a slaughter in that town in Huelva. Río Tinto is currently a laboratory for the understanding of the cosmic space, as it has become one of the so-called Mars analogous in our planet, together with Atacama and Deception Island (which serve as scenarios for some of the artist’s works). Río Tinto is also the oldest mines in history, with one of the most explored landscapes, since Tartessos and Iberians walked those lands more than 5,000 years ago. It is a scenario of millenary ecophagy.
Therefore, images show tellurian landscapes, which traditionally represent planet exploration, where a mysterious figure seems to emerge from the depths with a chant reminding us that, rather than the outer space, geology and the underground are the contemporary final frontier. Cradle of gold, petrol and bones, it shall also be the place from which new alliances could arise.
