SKRB: When Rivers weep …

In August 2024 as part of its war tactics Russia poisoned the Seim River, which flows into Ukraine. It was a reckless, perverse, and above all selfish act that is difficult to rationalise or understand. Polluting or poisoning a water source has not only immediate and dire effects, as the watercourse slowly seeps down the riverbed and leaves behind consequences that will be felt well into the future, and the impact on the environment is anything but localised. How this will return to Russia’s territory, only time will tell. Water is the most important natural resource and we should protect it from our own hatred and mutual carnage.

We continuously treat nature with contempt: we propel our technological progress by exploiting natural resources, our economy is driven by the logic of extractivism, we fill our plates with food that we produce with the excessive use of pesticides and herbicides. With our arrogant behaviour and expansionist mentality, we are introducing many alien species into delicate ecosystems, destroying natural habitats and biodiversity in the process. All this and all other thoughtless interventions are bound to devastate our home. When Rivers Weep ... is an exhibition that, through the works of four artists, questions our rapport with natural resources and the environment.

The sonorous experiential work Voluminous Movement of a Watery Earth by beepblip resonates throughout the gallery space. The soundscape in tandem with a subtle video projection creates a contemplative atmosphere. The work considers water in all its grandeur; it is an element that co-shapes the landscape and feeds biomes, while at the same time carries the potential of catastrophic proportions. The composition follows water from small riverbeds to sea waves crashing against the rocks, thus alluding to our helplessness before nature, accompanied by a message of hope for a better future.

Bitter by Martina Miño Perez is an experiential work that uses smell and taste as its language of communication. The hanging sculpture Mantis/Nepenthes, reminiscent of a carnivorous plant, contains a concoction of herbs, fruits and roots from the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest, under which oil reserves lie. Just as oil extraction leaves lasting consequences, the process of alcoholic extraction from plants is irreversible. The complexity of the bittersweet drink draws on the complexity of the Amazon, the privatisation of nature, and the encroachment on indigenous areas.

A similar tale of devastation and human exploitation can be found in Jatun Risba and Franco G. Livero’s Crows in Dead Olive Groves. In this video work, Jatun Risba, disguised as a crow, confronts the consequences of the mass demise of olive trees in Puglia, caused by the bacterium Xylella fastidiosa (first detected in the region in 2013). The grove was later also ravished by fire. The crow, as a symbol of death, does not necessarily represent the end, but rather symbolises change and the need to wake up and listen to the environment and its needs.

The works also remind us of our local, Slovene environment through tragic stories of devastation. We recently had a warning that the water In Logatec was non-potable and even unsuitable for human hygiene. Years ago, the Karst burned, and this was followed by floods in other areas of the country. Similar disasters, both abroad and at home, are only increasing in number and ferocity. The exhibited works and the exhibition as a whole do not offer solutions, but present a space for dialogue and reflection on the troublesome question: How to coexist with nature?

Jatun Risba
Jatun Risba is a migrant transmedia artist from Slovenia. Their work engages with ecofeminist and posthumanist discourses through performance art, conceptual art, relational art, and practices of abjection, détournement, and art intervention. Their practice cultivates interspecies reciprocity by altering and awakening sensory awareness through Vajrayana Buddhist practices and deviant uses of contemporary technologies. Their practice evolves along two main trajectories: Arts for Health and Art as Nourishment for the Bodymind.
https://jatunrisba.com/

Franco G. Livera
Franco G. Livera co-founded the art collective INTERZONE and contributed to its manifesto. The group engaged in militant artistic actions in Cologne, Copenhagen, New York… The project concluded in 1998, the videos are archived at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Turin. Livera then focused his research on the parallel realities of the subconscious. Since 2019 he began an intensive collaboration with Jatun Risba, developing works that explore illness and healing in their spiritual and physical dimensions.

Martina Miño Pérez
Martina Miño Pérez is an Ecuadorian artist and researcher whose practice focuses on the role of taste, smell and touch as essential tools of interpretation. She relates to the poetics of digestion as a metaphor for the assimilation of concepts while her material research explores its symbolic potential. Through the use of resin, iron, stone, wax, gelatine, etc., she produces transformative vessels, while employing experimental techniques of culinary science and Andean traditions of distillation.
https://martinaminoperez.com/

beepblip (Ida Hiršenfelder)
beepblip (Ida Hiršenfelder) is a sound artist and archivist making immersive psychogeographical spatial compositions with electronics, code, analogue synthesizers, and field recordings. Her work primarily explores sound ecology and spatialisation, addressing themes such as the agency of non-organic others, non-human animal languages, and listening to the inaudible. She has a Master of Sonology (Royal Conservatoire in The Hague) and is part of Jata C group, the Clockwork Voltage community and CENSE (Central European Network for Sonic Ecologies).
https://beepblip.org/