Joaquín Jara and Anaïs Tondeur were participants at the Garden Cartographies that took place within Roots & Seeds XXI during 2021. Their responses to the workshops have materialised into two artistic productions, exhibited at the Roots & Seeds XXI closing event at Ars Electronica Festival 2022.
Anaïs Tondeur, Living Herbarium (2022)
Anchored in ecology thought, Anaïs Tondeur searches for a new form of political art. Crossing natural sciences and anthropology, myth making and new media processes, she creates speculative narratives and engages on investigations through which she experiments other conditions of being to the world.
Joaquín Jara, Return Movement (2022)
Joaquín Jara is an environmentalist sculptor whose practice dialogues with the processes of creation and disintegration of portraying through matter, intention, space and time. Recently, his work has been on show in Museum of Modern Art Chiloé (Chile), Galego Drama Center (Spain), NORPAS FESTIVAL (Finland), and Hamiffal (Palestine).
Working with photography, Anaïs Tondeur took part in Cartography of a Garden: Paris to develop a photographic protocol to sharpen our attention to plants and their environment, where photosensitive paper plates were placed under and behind plants, and later exposed to the sunlight.
Searching new modes of relationship with the Other, human or other-than-human, this photographic process enabled the capture of traces of the body of the plants without extracting them from their environment, using a non-intrusive approach and non-toxic to the soil.
Return Movement is a sculptural installation that stems from the Multidisciplinary Garden Cartographies taking place in Barcelona and Paris in 2021. Conceived as a pendulum, the piece uses notebooks that contain sensitive cartographies of the event and bear witness of our transformative relationship with the natural environment and the cycle of life in its purest form.
Just as forests harvest carbon to then turn into charcoal after a fire, the installation prompts one to come closer, browse the pages, and then generate an active move that crystalises on the ground, in a blunt testimony of our lack of empathy for the non-human world.