Slow Burn, 2023
Mixed Media, Variabel,
Installation view at Kunstverein Reutlingen.
Foto ©Frank Kleinbach and ©Ana Alenso
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Behind the dazzling and exuberant hyper-visuality of petrocultural espectacles, the extraction zones of the Global South often remain invisible, eliminated as they are from contemporary global energy imaginaries. (...)
Ana Alenso’s works situates petrocultural imaginaries not only in their productive dimension but also in their capacity to generate social and environmental waste that disproportionately affects the extractive zones. Focusing on the specific material context of the Venezuelan petrostate, she recovers debris from the abandoned landscape of extractivism and, like a DIY enthusiast, recomposes it into non-representational figures that denaturalize and interrupt its utilitarian function. The conjunction between material specificity and abstraction repositions extractivism and global capitalism as a waste-producing economy that is often absent from the productivism imaginary of petroculture.
In Slow Burn (2023), an installation that contains rearview mirrors, petrol pumps, tyres and other post-industrial elements, Alenso turns the detritus of the fossil culture into a series of mobiles that slowly rotate before our eyes. If the twentieth century was marked by accelerated combustions, this piece invites us to pause before other rhythms and speeds. The slow combustion to which the title alludes recalls the slow violence of the spills and chemical pollution which, although often unnoticed, are an intrinsic part of the structures of fossil accelerationism. On another level, the mobiles- with their denatured, suspended and slowed components- propose an openness to a temporality that invites us to pause and adjust our rhythm.
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By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and erupting into instant visibility. We need (...) to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales! See Ron Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, (Harvard University Press, 2011
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Slow Burn was part of the exhibition: Donde cruzan los humos espero una semilla
[Where the fumes mingle, I wait for a seed]
Casa Encendida. Madrid
Curated by Maria Anna Zazzarino
23.05 -- 15.09.2024
Participating artists:Adrián Balseca, Alba Lorente, Ana Alenso, Christian Lagata, Isabel Carralero, Monique Michelle Verdin, and Nemestudio
