MIX MEDIA VIDEO
2.36”

Complete video:

 

The video weaves a large compendium of domesticated symbols about the Latin American culture within processes of consumption and ritualization in Nature. The video’s title makes reference to Greek Pliny the Elder’s work Naturalis Historia (77 AC). The 23-volumes-long work cover virtually every discipline related to nature and it is considered the first ancestor of the encyclopedias that became common during the XIX century. Pliny’s massive work reflects Rome’s imperial expansion, an attempt to create a centralized illusion of knowledge.

The video plays pretention of universality by joining symbols that seem unarticulated (an accusation made against Pliny’s Naturalis Historia as well). The video Naturalis Historia (momento temporis) joins human and non-human imagery into one fabric that favors the interrelation of all present actors at the same level through inter-species consumption. Also Naturalis Historia (momento temporis) takes a political stand towards the intellectual aliments produced by modernity such as encyclopedically organized knowledge, ethnographic film and modern museography. Naturalis Historia (momento temporis) captures then not only nature as subject but also reveals the domesticated image in its political value as aliment for the subordinated.

A ritualized consumption of such aliments is strangely celebrated and again, normalized turning Naturalis Historia in an act of joyful anthropofagia.

Screener of Plug In ICA’s Open Studio