On the bottom among the many animals is a analysis primarily based creative venture exploring the potential of a “visible ecocriticism.”
Over its course, Marina Caneve explores the ambiguities inherent within the dominating function performed by human beings over nature and the tensions that emerge from their relationship with different animals.
The artist takes her cue from an analytical research of the Natura 2000 venture, the community of ecological corridors constructed to protect biodiversity promoted by the European Union. Caneve creates a visible hyperlink between the infrastructures connecting the wild animals, the movies generated by the monitoring programs and the character reserve landscapes. She questions key themes resembling migration and freedom of motion, non-human animal rights, ecosystem conservation and finally the potential of rethinking human beings’ function on this planet.
« [. . .] For those who hadn’t been mendacity on the bottom among the many animals, you wouldn’t have been capable of search for on the starry sky and also you wouldn’t have run away. You may not even have survived the agony of getting up ». The title is a quote from Kafka’s Letters to Felice. This brief sentence embodies the 2 actions that run via and decide Marina Caneve’s work: the necessity to change perspective ‘to search for on the starry sky’ and the necessity to get nearer to the earth, in its symbolic worth of being at one with nature, in addition to in its questioning of humanity’s dominant place over different species.
Though formally rooted in a practice that could possibly be related to documentary pictures, Marina Caneve’s observe differs from it as for her, pictures will not be merely a way of documentation, however a analysis device to analysis complicated topics, permitting her to disclose the incongruities of our occasions.
The exhibition at CAP – Centre d’artwork presents a brand new model of the venture, that includes new prints from On the bottom among the many animals and a collection of the images exhibited on the FMAV/AGO Basis in Modena in June 2024.
Marina Caneve presents the outcomes of a venture she has been engaged on for a number of years, primarily based on the European Natura 2000 program. Established thirty-five years in the past, this program promotes the preservation of biodiversity and the safety of a sure variety of habitats and species within the member nations of the European Union, and relies on the development of wildlife crossing gadgets.
The instinct to work on these areas permits us to query the place of untamed species in an setting the place human motion transforms and fragments—exploits and ravages—ecosystems.
The exhibition opens with a collection of black and white photos of wildlife crossing gadgets (bridges and pathways) constructed throughout Europe. Travelling throughout numerous components of the continent, the artist has surveyed the locations the place these infrastructures are constructed, usually positioned near nationwide borders, revealing ambiguities and contradictions.
As a part of a imaginative and prescient of a “Europe with out borders”, these bridges embody the symbolic hyperlink between nations working collectively for the setting, and divulge to what extent the pure setting is a political area the place ecological pondering is current – or absent – from the general public debate of every nation. The wildlife bridges additionally reveal the issues in utopian pondering, the place the precept of freedom of motion between nations clashes with their precept of sovereignty.
For the video set up introduced within the exhibition, Caneve makes use of thermal cameras recordings collected by scientists close to the crossing gadgets. Initially meant for border surveillance, this army tools continues to be used at the moment to watch irregular entry into nations.
Because the story unfolds, we additionally come throughout photos that initially look would possibly recall a complete custom of panorama pictures. Nonetheless, what Caneve chooses to indicate us are the remnants of a pure setting the place animals seem furtive and the place human exercise is mirrored via the presence of buildings, objects and supplies, designed to manage, set up and monitor.
at CAP — Centre d’artwork de Saint-Fons, Lyon
till February 22, 2025
