“A Nature” tackles the idea of a man-made nature and questions our relationship with our natural environment in a time where it is significantly taken over by all forms of human control: urban expansion, deforestation, biotechnical manipulation, excessive harvesting of natural resources, and so on. Man’s ambition to conquer and dominate knows no boundaries, always challenging and pushing the limits of the natural world further and further. “A Nature” is an artificial landscape made of encapsulated light beams. The produced effect invokes a bed of grass floating a few centimeters above the ground. This elevated landscape that bottles up nature refers to the ideas of genetic and species manipulation, thus inviting us to rethink and redefine our relationship with nature.
“A Nature” consists of a light experiment that encapsulates light in a tube. The installation takes place in the Parc Central del Poblenou, which is a human made recreation of a natural environment that follows the rules of an urban one by aligning the trees in a systematic and orderly manner. The concept behind the project is to emphasize the notion of an artificial nature by creating an artificial landscape inside an already artificial one. In our installation, nature is “bottled up” and elevated following a geometrical and repetitive order.
The installation A Nature, created together with the students of the Elisava Master's in Ephemeral Architecture and Temporary Spaces, has been the joint winner of the Llum BCN 2022 award. The multidisciplinary jury of Llum BCN has valued the artistic and technical quality and the relationship with the space of the two winning installations, and praised the high level of the works that "have configured a wonderful park of light sculptures". A Nature was the winner, in the words of the jury, for its "precision, subtlety, sobriety, and for the dialogue generated between artifice and nature".
How nature is manipulated at the genetic level to become something else. By manipulating light to make it visible only partially, we are able to highlight the experimental aspect of our control over the natural world. “A Nature” wants to emphasize the transformation of the landscape at the ecosystem level and the transformation of nature itself at the molecular level, by creating a metaphor of that control.
The concept of containing light inside a laboratory test tube makes allusion to the idea of biotechnological manipulation.
