Through the artwork Adaptability Exercises, the artist attempts to condense and visualize the effect of time on nature, while highlighting the brutality and absurdity ofbhuman intervention upon it. It is a piece that is constantly in progress and continues to transform before the viewer's eyes throughout the exhibition. The organic elements that have been collected have been placed in a series of paradoxical glass containers that the artist has chosen specifically for them. From the colour and vitality of the plants, one can perceive the different stages of their life, characteristics that function as carriers of the parallel temporalities in which every one of them is found. The transparency of the material that surrounds them, combined with the suffocating
aspect of the shape, reflects the contradictory character of the aspiring conservation of the natural world that ultimately has the opposite outcome. The living organisms are confined in an artificial environment created for them by mankind, giving the false impression that they are safe and protected, when in reality, they are struggling for their lives.

 

But up to what point is the environment able to continue to adapt, in order to survive in the face of senseless human activity? Does nature have the capacity to reverse the destructive interventions of the past decades without leaving an irreversible imprint?
With humans seeking to dominate any other living being during the Anthropocene era by restricting or destroying them, the objects on display here could be time capsules coming from a dystopian future, enclosing rare specimens of flora as traces of an ecosystem that no longer exists.

 

Text by Elli Leventaki
Art historian & Curator

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