​ ELENA BAJO

The Land is a Mirror of the Stars investigates, through both real propositions and imaginary speculations, the articulation of negative spaces left/inherited by post-Fordist capitalism’s social forms and now executed by neoliberal strategies. Mixed historical and literary texts, ethereal participatory elements and indigenous cosmologies. It proposes an extended exploration on global environmental, social and political issues as the base to address local, ancient knowledge, mythology, ethnobotany and cosmology. Using the words of honduran activist Berta Cáceres the video points at the consecuences of the destuction of the natural hábitats in the Amazonian Forest when describing the cycle that goes from the star constelations to the yearly harvest.

The Land is a Mirror of the Stars investigates, through both real propositions and imaginary speculations, the articulation of negative spaces left/inherited by post-Fordist capitalism’s social forms and now executed by neoliberal strategies. Mixed historical and literary texts, ethereal participatory elements and indigenous cosmologies. It proposes an extended exploration on global environmental, social and political issues as the base to address local, ancient knowledge, mythology, ethnobotany and cosmology. Using the words of honduran activist Berta Cáceres the video points at the consecuences of the destruction of the natural hábitats in the Amazonian Forest when describing the cycle that goes from the star constellations to the yearly harvest. The video footage is an uncut, only shot, taken from a boat in the Tapajos river, going around the Isle of Innocence, in Fordlandia, in the Amazonian forest, Brazil.

Video, one channel, color and bw, sound, 2018. 7min 47secs. The owl of Minerva only flies at Dusk (Urania’s Mirror) is an interdisciplinary project that investigates environmental, social and political impact that economies of exploitation, in specific the transnational corporations doing business with eolic energy, "green grabbing", have on the land and communities of the Zapotec in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Oaxaca State, Mexico. This research reflects on the exhausted conditions of the present in which local natural resources, human and animal rights are ´owned´ by multinational corporations, neoliberal governments and organized crime. Considering the ancient and contemporary cosmology of the Zapotec in Oaxaca ( “The People of the Clouds”) and their strategies and commitment to resist the threats to their territory, Urania’s Mirror presents an installation of sculptural objects and a moving-image video with original footage and animation , as an analogy of how cosmological knowledge relates to nature, where natural goods (and common goods), earth, air, fire, animals, plants, are extensions of People themselves and any damage to these elements is a direct damage to People´s lives and a crime to their community. includes a dystopic narrative, in which a divergent group of femme radicale drone blowers, from the PIA,(Peripheral Intelligence Agency) in their role of new cosmic shamans, use their power to take over some parts of the system, and deliver "blows" of powdered customized hallucinogenic drugs, generated through data, code, and algorithms reversal hacking, to get users into altered states of mind that allow them to unclutter and "dissentangle the future" as per Franco "Bifo" Berardi, explains the transition from Resistance into Disentanglement and points at "...the spell of semiocapitalism (financial abstraction, specters of the mediascape) captures the social body and delivers it over to the economic code, where experience is subjected to the power of simulation and standardization.But I also wish to search for and to imagine possible lines of escape. These can only be found in those places of the unconscious where the multilayered spell of semiocapital is ripped apart in order for a creative unconscious to resurface". A musical sound component synchronizes the body's vibration to that of the Earth's.