The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao becomes an ecopolitical battleground

BilbaoThe crises museums are experiencing are multifaceted, including those of governance, funding, audiences, and social legitimacy—the latter exacerbated by the fact that the processes of decolonizing institutions and making them more pluralistic remain unfinished. Conditions for preserving works of art within a false sense of historical stability are becoming increasingly difficult. The situation can be even more disruptive: what if, instead of inert artifacts, the works are alive and require care? What if they are made with natural materials or are living organisms? The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao raises all these questions with a new exhibition, the ambitious Earth Arts

"It's about documenting the transformations that have taken place in artistic practices over the last six decades, which are very clear: at a certain point, artists abandon the concept of posterity and, in many cases, begin to use materials that will decompose, that will return to their ecosystem," explains the exhibition's curator. "One of the project's foundations is that this story is inseparable from climate change and the progressive environmental crisis in the world. From the growing state of anxiety and madness we are experiencing due to the irreversible alteration of the living conditions of all beings on this planet, which is itself a being," Cirauqui points out. In fact, during the press visit, the American artist Claire Pentecost almost burst into tears in front of her work. Proposal for a new American agricultureThe piece consisted of the remains of an American cotton flag that he had kept in a compost bin for months as a gesture to mitigate the excesses of American extractive policies. Pentecost wanted to hang the flag upside down to denounce the situation in his country, but this wasn't possible for conservation reasons. "The United States hasn't been doing well in recent years," the artist lamented.

The most important transformation Cirauqui refers to is that of the materials, as can be seen in the hundred or so works by nearly fifty artists and collectives included in the exhibition. "It is in the material that the works express their strongest relationship with time. And that is why it presented a challenge for this context, which has traditionally been associated with conservation in the most fundamentalist sense, the museum context in which, as a general rule, the aim is to completely eliminate the organic future of materials," he explains.

One of the great strengths of the exhibition, which is supported by Iberdrola, is the intergenerational dialogue between a string of established artists, including Giovanni Anselmo, José Beuys, Hans Haacke, Agustín Ibarroja, Richard Long, and Ana Mendieta, and younger generations such as the Catalan artists Daniel Steegman Mangrané, David Bestué (who is exhibiting a sculpture made with silt from the Bilbao estuary), and Patrícia Dauder, represented by black and white photographs documenting her determination to leave the studio and experiment with earth on an abandoned plot of land in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat. Also featured are Jorge Satorre, with a drawing filled with concrete and buried for months, Asunción Molinos Gordo, and the ceramist Mar de Dios, who spent months experimenting to stabilize a local clay in order to create a series of ceramic pieces.

Also noteworthy is the presence of Brazilian architect Paulo Tavares, known for his advocacy of political agency in the Amazon rainforest. His work reflects the political nature of some of the exhibited pieces and denounces the persecution and threats from large corporations, which can even resort to murder. The reproductions of swallows' nests from Molinos Gordo, evocative of a more just social order, also carry a political tone. Among the most striking works is Delcy Morelos's gigantic earth and mud installation entitled Witch, and the Asad Raza forest, whose twenty or so trees will be replanted when the exhibition ends on May 3.

In keeping with the works on display, the curator and museum teams have implemented various measures to be more sustainable. "Air freight and physical mailings have been eliminated whenever possible. The display cases, pedestals, and curtains are prototypes produced locally, and non-recyclable plastic has been removed from the exhibition and mediation materials. The museum is usually a space where strong individualities are expressed, where the opportunity to see how interesting interdependence and cooperation are is fostered," explains Cirauqui.

"This collective way of working is expressed in the reappearance of an ancestrality that has never been absent and that, in fact, is the ancestrality of the present itself. Many works are of community origin, from Indigenous peoples or from communities that have long maintained practices similar to our own," explains Claudia Alarcón and the La Unión Textiles Semillas movement. Ancestry can also be from another planet: the string of ten ceramic pieces by Óscar Santillán Spaceship (Venus) It is made with a clay whose composition is exactly that of the planet Venus.