The research was started one year after the disaster during the FAAP International Residency Program 2017, with fieldwork at the affected site to collect the spilled material and incorporate it into my work.

The research was dedicated to materialize through the collected material, aspects of a possible memory hidden by the disaster. That inspired the concept “invented archeology”, which configures the reverse principle to that of an archaeological excavation, allowing the works to emerge from the experience with the material itself. It alludes to a poetics of the impossible, a contradiction that allows us to think “art as a solution to questions that cannot be clearly formulated before they are resolved”.

The disaster compressed in a few hours millions of years of geological forces, crushing usual notions of temporality and beyond any ecological paradigm argued by the Anthropocene, an anthropological perspective of a new human condition appeared: being born in an already contaminated world.

The proposed exhibition invites to reflect on what implies being in direct contact with industrial residues and contaminations affecting ecosystems and habitats, responsible for climate change and the main reason for the zoonotic transfer from animals to humans and of pandemics like the one we currently witness. At the same time, it seeks to highlight the urgency of broader perspectives in contemporary articulations between art, science, activism, and dynamic political participation.