MEMBRANES TOWARDS A RECONFIGURATION

During her stay at Lagos, Andrea Taro was able to exponentially reframe her emotional engagement and focus her artistic practice in ways she hadn’t before. In the artist’s own words, “I was able to unify the understanding of my research—and with that, my current position.”

Andrea arrived with a clear statement: her work engages with the structure of dichotomies that govern the world and how petro-sexual-racial social oppositions operate—systems that exclude, divide, hierarchize, and nullify the essential value of the principle of life. As a transposition of the dichotomy, referring to the Eurocentric idea of separation between nature and humanity, the work she presents today questions this division by affirming: “I am nature, so why does Western idiosyncrasy split me apart?”

In her early ceramic pieces, which she had been developing prior to the residency, this separation manifested through contrasts such as: macro vs. micro, good vs. bad, better vs. worse, real vs. artificial. These oppositions reflect the fragmentation and oppression imposed on the body; fragmented into ceramic forms, this became the starting point of her two-month process.

The first realization she had was that by naming dichotomies, she was still reinforcing separation. With a shift in thinking, she recognized the need to go beyond and began to visualize articulation—a principle for connecting one part to another. This led her to open herself to other materials: to research, experiment, remain flexible, and learn. She ventured into the unknown and embraced the joy of the process. The arrival of polymers happened naturally; resonating with the core concepts of her research—integration and nature—organic components asserted themselves in response to our current time.

This is how the video installation we see today came to be: a meeting and dialogue between digital electronic technology and biopolymers, plastics, plants, and earth. The combo of life today. And as a new principle for continuing to grow in this ongoing drift—this controlled chaos that is being an artist—the paths will continue, if the anchors are right, toward selective barriers, protection, communication, transport, and the recognition of signals, to reach harbors that may reflect and hold us within a harmonious reconfiguration of our relationships with the Earth and all its inhabitants.

olgaMargarita dávila
Chief curator