Curated by, Herman Bashiron Mendoliccho

at Gallery Espai Souvenir, Barcelona

The project Tierra brings together three artists, recent stories from two specific territories, and the echo of a universal scream.

This last one is the too often unheard scream of the planet earth, who is claiming its fragility, who is revealing its limits and boundaries and who is facing the betrayal of one of its oldest inhabitants: the human being.

The symbiosis, the alliance and the complicity between people and land are suffering nowadays one of its deepest fractures. The ecological impact of the human activities has reached an alarming level and the greed in which we are blindly confined is leading us to a point of no return.

The artists bring to Espai Souvenir concrete elements that tell us the story of two different territories where the human intervention is directly threatening the natural ecosystem. Thomas KeisandIvana Pinna bring traces of their walking performanceFragile, held in the summer of 2021 in the rural environment of Nurri, in Sardinia, during the “HUB Sardinia – Caminu a Su Connottu”. The performance drew attention to an important issue that affects some rural areas of Sardinia, which have been deemed suitable for the construction of a radioactive waste repository. In 2011, 97,13% of the population of Sardinia had expressed its opposition, in a referendum, to the installation of any nuclear power plants or sites for the storage of radioactive waste in the island. Nevertheless, last January 5, 2021, it was published the CNAPI (National Map of Potentially Suitable Areas for the construction of a radioactive waste deposit in Italy), that identifies 67 eligible areas, including 22 rural municipalities in Sardinia.

In the same period, the natural protect area of the Delta del Llobregat in Catalonia has been threatened by the airport extension project and there has been a great mobilization by the local community against it.

For the exhibition project, the artists have engaged in conversation with Cal Met Natrus, part of the Parc Agrari del Baix Llobregat, adjacent the El Prat airport landing strip, situated in the natural protected area and they asked for collecting land from this territory. Cal Met Natrus was also indirectly menaced by a past extension of the airport a decade ago.

The land of El Prat and Nurri therefore come together in this exhibition, telling their own singular stories, but at the same time representing the current universal struggle of the natural ecosystems.

In this fragile landscape, the artist Enya Idda situates her clay sculptures, The People of the Earth –made with the clay of Nurri and with the clay of the Delta del Llobregat– who silently observe and protect, like ancient guardians, the territory.

The sacrality of the natural ecosystem, the centrality of the land as life giver, and the restoration of the old alliance, based on respect, care and mutual learning, between land and humans, are highlighted in the exhibition through the objects, images and creative details disseminated in the gallery space.