45 min.

Two waving trees sailing on an old wooden boat in the open sea, a couple of tortoises on a log curiously watching the Chinese reality, and the nocturnal wandering of a moon-man at the natural history museum. The programme is a small selection of contemporary art’s reflections on man’s relationship to nature - and not least how nature replies. The four artists use simple staging techniques to orchestrate absurd, political, poetical and often humoristic meetings between civilization and nature. Thiago Rocha-Pitta belongs to the young, talented South American innovators of the classical land-art tradition. Allora & Calzadilla, the Puerto Rican-based artistic duo, is represented with four works that capture the duet’s particular ability to formulate a political critique of concrete environmental issues, often in a humoristic, poetic and activist manner. And American Slater Bradley abandons nature as a landscape in order to enter “Dark Night of the Soul” in Kubrick’s “2001”, narrating a sublime story from a place where today’s relationship between man and nature, as we know it, no longer exists. In Bradley’s vision, nature is at the museum and mankind deported to eternal fiction.

Thiago Rocha-Pitta,
Brasil Heritage + Inland Shipwreck, 2007 + 2008

Allora & Calzadilla, Puerto Rico
Returning a Sound, 2004, 6 min.
Under Discussion, 2005, 6 min.

Amphibious (login'logout), 2005, 6 min.
Unrealizable Goals, 2007, 6 min.

Slater Bradley, UK
Dark Night of the Soul, 2006, 7 min.