Nomad Station
Estación Nómada by Nuria Rodríguez
The “Nomadic Station” expedition proposes a reflection on two ideas: the act of looking in constant motion and the mechanisms invented to classify and compile the world. When one goes out to meet things, without the desire to dominate, subdue or control them, but with the intention of approaching them in order to listen, learn, understand, it does not seem entirely necessary to establish a hermetic or closed system of appropriation, but rather it would be more appropriate to promote an “ars combinatoria” between what is found and what is kept to provoke a disruptive look, a fluctuating look that reflects on our ways of “inhabiting” the natural environment.
This project curated by Isabel Tejeda shows paintings, audiovisuals and collected rocks. Each of the rooms distributes the guiding thread of the exhibition proposal based on the following questions: Who has been able to look at and observe the world? What does it mean to think and paint from a Nomadic Station? Is it a real or imagined place that sustains the uncertainty of who observes? Why is it necessary to create patterns to classify and domesticate “the natural”?
Stories of female explorers, who also wrote travel diaries or field notebooks, are less common, but some still challenged the conventions of the time by financing their own trips and dressing as men to join scientific expeditions. This was the case of Jeanne Baret, lover of the naturalist Philibert Commerson, who "disguised" herself on board the ship Étoile captained by the Count of Bougainville, becoming the first woman to circumnavigate the world.
An audiovisual collage shows the expeditions of explorers and adventurers to Antarctica that were filmed at the beginning of the 20th century. In contrast to this record of the action, works are shown that refer to the work of naturalists such as Anna Atkins, Marian Sybilla Merian and the geologist Florence Bascom, as well as the literary approaches to nature carried out by women such as Emily Dickinson, Clarice Lispector or María Zambrano.
For our species, observing nature has meant not only developing the ability to name and record its forms, but also imposing boundaries, drawing lines between the organic and the inorganic, the natural and the artificial. Over the centuries, we have produced discourses that distance us from what we perceive, as if we were alien to the very nature we seek to unravel. Count Buffon, director of the first Natural History Museum, put it this way: “The discourse of nature is nothing more than nature transformed into discourse.” This is how taxonomies and nomenclatures, archives and their classifications, compilations and drawn boundaries emerged.
Why collect all the rocks, all the plants, over and over again?
This project curated by Isabel Tejeda shows paintings, audiovisuals and collected rocks. Each of the rooms distributes the guiding thread of the exhibition proposal based on the following questions: Who has been able to look at and observe the world? What does it mean to think and paint from a Nomadic Station? Is it a real or imagined place that sustains the uncertainty of who observes? Why is it necessary to create patterns to classify and domesticate “the natural”?
Stories of female explorers, who also wrote travel diaries or field notebooks, are less common, but some still challenged the conventions of the time by financing their own trips and dressing as men to join scientific expeditions. This was the case of Jeanne Baret, lover of the naturalist Philibert Commerson, who "disguised" herself on board the ship Étoile captained by the Count of Bougainville, becoming the first woman to circumnavigate the world.
An audiovisual collage shows the expeditions of explorers and adventurers to Antarctica that were filmed at the beginning of the 20th century. In contrast to this record of the action, works are shown that refer to the work of naturalists such as Anna Atkins, Marian Sybilla Merian and the geologist Florence Bascom, as well as the literary approaches to nature carried out by women such as Emily Dickinson, Clarice Lispector or María Zambrano.
For our species, observing nature has meant not only developing the ability to name and record its forms, but also imposing boundaries, drawing lines between the organic and the inorganic, the natural and the artificial. Over the centuries, we have produced discourses that distance us from what we perceive, as if we were alien to the very nature we seek to unravel. Count Buffon, director of the first Natural History Museum, put it this way: “The discourse of nature is nothing more than nature transformed into discourse.” This is how taxonomies and nomenclatures, archives and their classifications, compilations and drawn boundaries emerged.
Why collect all the rocks, all the plants, over and over again?
