Urbanization processes, understood as the grouping of people in constructed environments, bring about a series of tensions between the arrangement of the environment and our expectations of habitation. This is because occupying a space also involves (re)producing it both materially and symbolically.
From this premise, we can observe the design of cities not only as the result of the characteristics and limitations of the environment but also as a symptom of the desires and norms that organize us socially. At first glance, one of the most evident attributes of this process is how, from a Western rationality, the elements originally found in the environment are subordinate entities to human order. Thus, any space with specific flora and fauna is simply a natural state that must be domesticated through artificial means.
Furthermore, this paradigm is sustained by another fundamental to our modern order: the white, Western man seems to have the only human body that matters. In this exhibition, artist Ximena Alarcón takes this hierarchical system between the natural and the constructed as her starting point, inviting us to reflect intimately on the fate of plant bodies. This system places plants as entities within the realm of the dispensable. Here, all non-human bodies are at the disposal, without agency, of human fantasies of spatial ornamentation; where they are used and discarded with extreme ease in a constant and normalized operation that nullifies any possibility of empathy with other living bodies.
Ximena Alarcón proposes an installation that metaphorically addresses the discarded body of plants in a symbolic intersection with the languages of forensic documentation and other imaginaries of death. Through a series of plants found during her movements around the city, the artist assumes a role of collecting and rescuing these bodies to give them, finally, a possibility of recovery or a space for recognition. In this way, she invites us to think beyond the dominant human body and to examine the elements arranged in space to experience new affective possibilities and empathetic connections with the other forms of life with which we share the world.
Carlos Zevallos Trigoso
