total climate part 1: the infinitesimal and the mobile
Group exhibition
Mercedes Azpilicueta, Gaëlle Choisne, Evan Ifekoya, Paul Maheke, Josèfa Ntjam, Daniela Ortiz
Nicoletti, London
2 June—30 July 2022
total climate is a three-part exhibition reflecting upon the relationship between colonial history and ecology, co-curated by Gaëlle Choisne, Camille Houzé, and Estelle Marois. Presenting the work of artists whose practices conjure the interwovenness of natural and historical processes, total climate exposes the way in which natural exploitation, cultural domination and territorial possession are often part of the same imperialist gesture.
In total climate part 1: the infinitesimal and the mobile, we investigate the nature and effects of this entanglement through a material approach of the environment. The exhibition examines how the most tenuous and volatile elements condition reality as we experience it—and, as a reverse implication, the ways in which historical mechanisms, affects and trauma are embedded in the very composition of the environment. Borrowed from American scholar Christina Sharpe, who defines racism not only as an ideology or a set of actions but as a ‘total climate’, the title of the project implies that colonisation contaminates even the particles and electrons that flow through the wind and sea, stratifying in rocks and soil while deeply penetrating the respiratory system. A number of artworks in the exhibition suggest that it is at a molecular level that such violence can be opposed, as with Frantz Fanon’s notion of ‘combat breathing’, which opposes the somatic penetration of colonial state violence. They draw our senses to the various qualities of matter—solid, liquid, sonic—while alluding to their affective, psychical and ritualistic dimensions. Other artworks establish parallels between molecular processes of division, coagulation, proliferation, and the micro-organisations that spread within disparate cells of society to infiltrate dominant political bodies. Some refer to state strategies monitoring the cellular composition of our bodies to tighten border control; others imagine symbiotic alliances between humans, animals and microbes. The artists in total climate attempt to devise concrete, everyday strategies of survival, for subjected bodies to regroup energies, affirm and expand.
