We live an explosion of movements that try to raise awareness about the need to fight against climate change and the abusive use of plastics so damaging to the environment; we often tend to identify these initiatives with the activity of NGOs and other groups with campaigns seeking for a great impact on media. However, artists are also very aware of this problem and often include this theme in their works.

Mandy Barker, 500-plastic-piece composition picked up in a beach, 2018

A way to denounce extreme capitalism and overexploitation is by creating works with reused pieces or using the plastic itself as the main raw material, as well as creating pieces in idyllic landscapes, with the aim of emphasising the ephemeral survival of those places. The proposals are diverse: a multitude of techniques, disciplines and finishes; but the purpose is the same because undoubtedly the human being has a responsibility to the planet. On many occasions, artists associate with groups of activists to develop large-scale actions that boost the message and generate a global awareness.

Marcel van Es, drawing in Novo Sancti Petri beach, Cádiz, 2018

This is the case of Marcel van Es, a Dutch artist who for years cooperates with Greenpeace and Ecologistas en acción by creating drawings on the wet sand of the Bay of Cádiz. In April 2018 he carried out his third intervention at the Novo Sancti Petri beach in Cádiz, with a work over 25 meters in diameter that depicts a sea turtle surrounded by plastics. His vulnerable, short-lived drawings represent the fragility of nature and its impossibility to fight against the excessive abuse of natural resources and its capacity for regeneration.

Isabel Muñoz, “Water”, 2016

Other authors opt for proposals less linked to denounce movements and more focused on a personal discourse that highlights the problem within their own line of work. This is what happens with the project "Water" by Isabel Muñoz, who, true to her careful and exquisite photography, presents a series of images that underline the purity of the sea and the risk into which it is permanently put. With this underwater photography, the impact of the textures and the colours on the submerged bodies represents in an allegorical and elegant way the oppression and adherence of the plastics to the living beings in their marine environment, something against which they can not fight for themselves.

Maria Cristina Finucci, installation in the Island of Mozia, Sicily, 2016

Also, some artists devote their work almost wholly to deal with the problem of climate change and pollution by plastics. The project "The garbage patch state" has become the main leitmotif of Maria Cristina Finucci’s work. With a multidisciplinary proposal, which includes both performances, photography and installations, her production process is open to external contributions and international presence. It is an interactive and shared project that has already gone through Rome, New York, Madrid or Geneva. Because Maria does not conceive art if it does not fulfil a social function, and in this case, her educational mission is more than evident.

ABIERTO INFINITO. LO QUE EL CUERPO RECUERDA. CICLO DE PERFORMANCE X ART MADRID'26

Art Madrid, committed to creating a discursive platform for artists working within the field of performance and action art, presents Abierto Infinito: lo que el cuerpo recuerda, a proposal inspired by Erving Goffman’s ideas in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Amorrortu Editores, Buenos Aires, 1997).

The project unfolds within a theoretical framework that directly engages with these premises, conceiving social interaction as a stage of carefully modulated performances designed to influence others’ perceptions. Goffman argues that individuals deploy both verbal and involuntary expressions to guide the interpretation of their behavior, sustaining roles and façades that define the situation for those who observe.

The body — the first territory of all representation — precedes both word and learned gesture. Human experience, conscious and unconscious alike, is inscribed within it. Abierto Infinito: lo que el cuerpo recuerda departs from this premise: representation inhabits existence itself, and life, understood as a succession of representations, transforms the body into a space of constant negotiation over who we are. In this passage, boundaries blur; the individual opens toward the collective, and the ephemeral acquires symbolic dimension. By inhabiting this interstice, performance simultaneously reveals the fragility of identity and the strength that emerges from encounter with others.

PERFORMANCE: OSCURECER UN PAPEL. BY ROCÍO VALDIVIESO

March 5 | 7:00 PM. Galería de Cristal of the Palacio de Cibeles.

Nocturnality. Installation. Rocío Valdivieso..

Oscurecer un papel forms part of a series of actions in which the artist engages in reading through repetition, memorization, and a measured degree of improvisation. Within this framework, a non-linear mode of reading emerges from a written text that is transformed when spoken aloud, assuming a different form in the act of articulation. The texts stem from an ongoing investigation into materiality, space, the relationships between body and matter, writing, the sculptural, and a sustained interest in the exploration of voice and orality.

The material from which Oscurecer un papel is constructed consists of a collection of purchase receipts the artist has been accumulating over time. The printed text they contain, together with the action of bringing them into proximity with a heat source—thereby activating the thermal paper on which they are produced—generates meanings that revolve around the notions of consumption and wear.

Rocío Valdivieso. Latent Aura. Performance documentation.

ABOUT ROCÍO VALDIVIESO

Rocío Valdivieso is an artist, researcher, and cultural manager. She is currently a PhD candidate in Fine Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid. She holds an MA in Research in Artistic Practices from the University of Castilla–La Mancha (UCLM) and a BA in Fine Arts from the National University of Tucumán, Argentina. She was a Fundación Carolina fellow from 2022 to 2023. She currently co-directs Errática. Laboratory of Processes and Critique in Madrid, alongside Romina Casile.

She was part of the PEEPA 2023 Program at the Centro de Residencias Artísticas, Matadero Madrid. She completed the 2021/22 Artists Program at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires, and in 2020 participated in the Intensive Curatorial Program of Proyecto PAC at Galería Gachi Prieto, Buenos Aires. She received the Visual Arts Promotion Award at the 4th Visual Arts Week of the Ente Cultural de Tucumán. She was awarded an AUGM scholarship for an exchange residency at UNESP, São Paulo, Brazil. She also participated in the International Residency Program La Ira de Dios and in the Acéfala Galería Residency for Argentine artists.