SNBA - Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes

Rua Barata Salgueiro 36, 1250-044 Lisboa

12 . 09 . 2024 → 12 . 10 . 2024

monday - friday → 12:00 pm – 07:00 pm

saturday → 02:00 pm – 07:00 pm

Artist

Zed Nelson

Charles Darwin reduced humans to just another species – a twig on the grand tree of life. But now, the paradigm has shifted: humankind is no longer just another species. We are the first to knowingly reshape the living earth’s biology and chemistry. We have become the masters of our planet and integral to the destiny of life on Earth.

Surrounding ourselves with simulated recreations of nature paradoxically constitutes an unwitting monument to the very thing that we have lost.

Just 3% of the world’s land remains ecologically intact with healthy populations of all its original animals and undisturbed habitat. In 1989, the writer Bill McKibben (in his book The End of Nature), foresaw a moment when our environment would exceed the capabilities of our environmental language. The remade Earth, McKibben further argued, would set record after record—hottest, coldest, deadliest— before people realized the need for new ways of keeping score. But inertia is an intellectual proposition as well as a physical one; for a long time, he suggested, confronted with evidence of a changing world, humans would refuse to change their mind.

Medea, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, said, “I can see - and I approve the better course, and yet I choose the worse.”

Today, social media and the internet’s ceaseless flow of information and visual stimulation have birthed a state of unreality, where we are no longer looking for truth, but only a kind of amazement.

Our future as a species depends on urgent new assessments of humanity’s relationship to the natural world - requiring intentional acts of culture, with paradigm shifts in priorities and empathies.