Verde Oscuro de Cristina Llambí

Curator: Catalina Bunge
Artist: Cristina Llambí
Venue: Centro Cultural Ciudad de la Costa (CCCC)
Date: 10 al 31 de octubre 2024

Verde Oscuro by Cristina Llambí

In light of the digitization of our world, Byung-Chul Han states that “[...] it is necessary to return the world its romanticism, to rediscover the earth and its poetics, to restore the dignity of the mysterious, the beautiful, the sublime.” Why look at the earth? What does it have to offer us today? Cristina Llambí invites us to contemplate nature and its resilience in the face of adversity. To delve into its mystery and strength to resist the violence and oppression we impose upon it. To find in it the solution to our own exhaustion.

The triple planetary crisis—climate change, loss of biodiversity, and pollution—threatens the continuation of our life on earth as we have known it. It confronts us with a critical questioning of our actions, forms, and knowledge. We need new ways of thinking and relating to the environment and the living beings that inhabit it.

In *Verde Oscuro*, Llambí creates a fictional scenario based on symbiotic constructions with the “biosphere,” denouncing harmful ways of relating to it while proposing other forms of life. Her sculptural works—objects—are assemblages of one material with another; a trunk, some branches, threads, paint, fibers. “Natural” materials and ordinary (and sometimes precarious) materials found in her surroundings. Compositions that seek to formulate new possibilities of being and existing in a world marked by an irreversible environmental crisis. The paintings, for their part, exhibit a plastic fusion between painting and embroidery, generating multiple layers and interpretations of the vegetal tapestry that composes our environment. The Petri dishes contain reproductions of cyanobacteria created on textile support (embroidered with thread), functioning as a symbol to question our impact on the ecosystem and its response to us.

*Verde Oscuro* focuses on the planetary crisis and investigates the various survival mechanisms of the “biosphere” to “weave necessary connections, in a sensitive manner,” as the artist explains. To shift away from the center to integrate with “nature” and understand that we are one with it; to care for it as we do with our children and elders, to dismantle anthropocentrism as a framework that articulates us, is the proposal of many philosophers, anthropologists, and ecologists, and also of Llambí.

Catalina Bunge