If we consider entropy as a system’s tendency toward disorder and disorganization, syntropy, in contrast, is the tendency of organisms to stabilize by structuring and connecting increasingly complex systems, which can be observed in nature and social relations. This concept was used by the Swiss agro-ecologist Ernst Götsch in his “agro-forest farm” theories. In this sense, the Martiniquan philosopher Édouard Glissant points out that the future for our societies in the postcolonial communities—structured in rhizomes or archipelagos—is exemplified by the “Creole gardens” present in the Caribbean islands, where different African and Indigenous communities coexist, connecting their knowledge and cultures.

From this perspective, this exhibition brings together three diverse artists from the Parallel platform, aiming to map another possible construction of the world, accepting all the materials that are brought by the waters that enter into our cave, instead of just reading the images cast on the walls by the shadow projections (in a reference to Plato’s cave). With this focus and through different points of view and methods, their artworks deal with the foundations of Western culture, always evidencing the complexity resulting from the encounter between the human and natural elements in the photographic image.

Joshua Phillips explores the use of nature as a visual culture in the tradition of British decor and how these elements and symbologies blend into design elements to achieve everyday aesthetic pleasure. Using printing and copying mechanisms, Phillips stresses the idea of ​​pattern and the repetition of errors in order to create new natural and organic textures, subverting patterns and their mechanization artifacts. The contrast of the simplification and cleanliness of the patterns to the vibrancy and apparent chaos of the natural landscapes in his image studies and compositions marks precisely where life is, in opposition to the mechanical and Cartesian structures of our societies. Symmetric to this approach, Ramona Güntert creates dialogues between the different materialities of the world in order to merge textures, shapes, masses, and skins in synthetic-natural hybrids.

Her work follows no linear structure and obeys no hierarchy but presents a scenario full of symbolism and cosmologies, poetry, rhythms, and connections, creating a sort of an Warburgian atlas with a phenomenological view that leads the viewer to a sensorial reading of the world, erasing some boundaries and diluting masses in new beings. Through the texts of the British artist Joshua Leon, Güntert gives life to her hybrid bodies. Adding layers of identities and blurring borders, she creates images that “do not exist in the photograph, but in the viewers’ minds,” in the words of the artist.

Nature has this power to melt and fuse, and its confrontation with the Cartesian organization and the way we perceive territories is evident in Šarūnas Kvietkus’s photographs. In a series entitled Žemė, a Lithuanian word that simultaneously represents ground, soil, area, and territory, here the photographer superimposes images of British soils that have received Lithuanian immigrants with soils from their homeland. In his photographs, Kvietkus includes different elements that belong to both the territorial aspects of Lithuanian culture and those of immigration itself. In his completely analogue work, he shows contaminated borders, relations between inside and outside, as well as the poetics of the ground and nature, which mixes things up, creating new meshes, like Édouard Glissant’s “Creole gardens,” where African slaves used to cultivate plants for food and medicine from different parts of Africa in secret gardens for their subsistence.

As in Ernst Götsch’s syntropical agriculture, in which elements of each part are reused by the others, the three approaches to human-nature interfaces renegotiate the relation of the spectator to the presented images, in organic dialogues with no pre-established destination.The core of the exhibition is a shelf of references, substrates of the process developed by each artist as well as the curator. These are materials that can be seen as part of the essence of the exhibition and can increase the depth of the artworks presented, but do not necessarily belong to any one artist’s world, and are part of the constellation of references, symbols, histories, and materials that have always surrounded us.

Téo Pitella

Artists

RAMONA GÜNTERT

ŠARŪNAS KVIETKUS

JOSHUA PHILLIPS

Curator

TÉO PITELLA