Performance Art / August 22nd, 2020 / 7 hours

Galería NAC, Santiago de Chile / Curator: Thiago Verardi

Advances during the Anthropocene era and the current information revolution, together with the alteration of organic rhythms caused by the progress of the global city and consumerism, have destabilized the natural cycles that sustain the Earth as an organ. The planet is rapidly being exhausted to satisfy the insatiable and anxious modern mind of infinite growth, for a basic reason, the planet is finite.

The rhythms of human cycles have accelerated and become individualized, dissolving into the contemporary relative nebula. Everything external to the individual has become ungraspable; it is computational tools that are the only ones capable of addressing current complexity, and that also generate it. Every second, this digital organ learns and grows, expanding across the planet, both physically and virtually.

The naïve or blind efficiency constructed through the control of ecological cycles by the human artifact has generated a rupture between this artifact and its environment, a rupture that has been swept under the rug. Putrefied, it has exploded, been placed on the table, and questioned.

We are living through a transition.

This global artifact has become an immaterial planetary entity, comparable to the water cycle, the mycelial network, or the journey of clouds. The way to “understand” it challenges the rational, linear, and Cartesian method of the current model, calling instead for a holistic, multidimensional ecosystem, where the sensory dimension, still unknown, reveals itself as powerful. A planetary state of consciousness capable of feeling and perceiving this global artifact is the awareness required for the exercise of freedom today, both individually and collectively.

Earth Overshoot Day is a date that changes year after year, moving ever closer to the beginning of the year. This date represents the day when human demand for ecological resources and services exceeds what the Earth can regenerate in a year. There is no gold reserve backing this credit; its reserve is the future. There is no reserve of planets for current consumption, so what about the future?

A warning sign, or proof that we are regressing as humanity?