FORT biennale_02: Reclaiming Collective

Micaela Piñero’s work stems from a desire to create a space of alliance and connection with the natural world. By asking viewers to enter the installation and lie on the floor, the artist invites them to an experience of slowness, listening and contemplation, beyond the frenetic rhythms of everyday life. Piñero thus offers a way out of a world where digital hyper-connectivity breeds disconnection between people and indifference towards the environment. Speaking in All Languages presents an iconographic imagery composed of natural forms, human silhouettes, words and messages that evoke concepts of care, awareness and solidarity: an invitation to be part of another world, one governed by sisterhood, balance and fertility.

In this work by Maria Walcher, the centuries-old transhumance routes, along which shepherds crossed borders so as to take their sheep to fertile pastures, intertwine with the migration routes towards Europe. Using the traditional “Blaudruck” method (an ancient “blue printing” technique of dyeing), the most common refugee routes from 2015 have been printed onto the cotton lining of a woollen blanket and combined with hand-embroidery that marks the paths taken by the sheep. The various lines form a constellation of stars that can serve both as a point of orientation and a symbol of hope.

Opening the Reclaiming Collective exhibition, the work of Dan Perjovschi is conceived as a threshold space: a passage to be traversed, within which lies a visual narrative composed of images, wordplay and epigrams. The artist compels the viewer’s gaze, inviting an exercise in awareness of the key critical issues of the present: from global conflicts to the climate crisis, from digital hyper-connectivity to human alienation. As the starting point for the imagery towards which Reclaiming Collective is moving, the installation foreshadows key concepts such as coexistence, empathy, social ecology and togetherness.

Austrian artist Rosmarie Lukasser’s research is an analysis of the impact that intense digital interconnection has on human behaviour, the body, and the perception of oneself,
of others and of the outside world. Her plaster sculptures, arranged on shelves like any other merchandise in a department store, are simulacra of beings now transfigured: figures immersed in digital hyperspace, seduced by the possibility of being part of a community which is at once synonymous with connection and isolation.
Two works on paper – one of which was created specifically for the biennial – depict the dense web of invisible connec tions that surround us, as well as the complex system of satellites orbiting the Earth, evoking humanity’s now inevitable dependence on these presences.