Ursula Biemann has been challenging, and excavating, how knowledge is produced for thirty years now, but in the past decade she has turned her attention to the environment. Her fieldwork has repeatedly brought her to Latin America. While some of the projects included in Biemann’s exhibition Devenir Tierra (Becoming Earth), curated by Virginia Roy Luzarraga at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico City, have been previously exhibited in Latin America, this is the largest and most diverse array of works by the Swiss artist to be shown in the region. It is precisely this diversity—represented through the many locations Biemann has conducted her research and the shifting roles she adopts as an artist (observer, student, mediator, creator)—that makes Devenir Tierra so compelling to examine. The exhibition offered an opportunity to untangle the complex ideas introduced by Biemann’s work and to assess the way the contemporary exhibition context shapes, and hinders, the potentials of this kind of work.
The curatorial statements for Devenir Tierra situate Biemann’s work in the context of ecological damage and resource extraction, and suggest that Biemann expands our understanding of these contexts by presenting Indigenous epistemologies from the northeast Amazon. The exhibition, through Biemann’s artwork and Roy Luzarraga’s curatorial framing, did indeed address environmental destruction and extraction in an expansive way, weaving together performance and documentary imagery. At the same time, it relied on the linguistic and display conventions of contemporary art and anthropological exhibitions. This approach curtails the emergence of what the Chilean American scholar Macarena Gómez-Barris calls “a proliferation of epistemic possibilities,” arguing that it is precisely this proliferation that enables decolonial thought from the Global South to expand beyond the “singularity and the reduction imposed by the European gaze.” A practice like Biemann’s, which acknowledges the politics of extraction and presents alternative forms of thought, should push beyond conventional exhibition strategies and resist logics that absorb difference into a discursive repertoire. A practice that truly embraces resisting epistemologies must privilege a simultaneity of voices and knowledge forms.
Ursula Biemann, Devenir Tierra (installation view), 2024. Courtesy MUAC. Photo credit: Oliver Santana.
Devenir Tierra presented five different bodies of work that Biemann created over the past twelve years. Each, in its own way, addresses resource extraction and its ecological consequences. The majority of these works take the form of large-format video installations that combine documentary footage with fiction and are accompanied by contextual elements synonymous with art-museum presentations. For instance, images documenting Biemann’s process were displayed along with the tools and outfits used in the videos. Rooms were darkened to optimize video presentation, and the sound from each installation filtered into the next, exacerbating an already intense ambient effect. The exhibition spread across two of MUAC’s vast galleries, and the small lobby that connects them was converted into a reading room in which to explore relevant publications by Biemann and Roy Luzarraga—another familiar exhibition convention.
While Biemann shifts her own position from one project to the next, transitioning from observer to learner to creator, she exerts extraordinary narrative and authorial control over the works. As a result, she establishes her voice and the aesthetic dimensions over the researched material. Her writings on the philosophy of her practice are key to understanding these recent projects. On Becoming Earth, the website where Biemann tracks her ecological explorations, she writes about how, amid the gender politics of the 1990s, she “became disenchanted by the deconstructive approach in art as a discourse that didn’t (or couldn’t) politicize gender relations.” In other words, critiques of cultural hegemony offered neither a full picture of lived experience nor any alternative model. Biemann began to understand that “the objective of image and meaning making, as I practice them, is not to influence or critique the opinion of others; rather, it is in and of itself an act of generating reality.” As her thinking evolved, her work shifted. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, she had made political, discursive video essays that traced power, social, and capital relations, as well as migration and technology’s disembodying effect on desire (such as in Contained Mobility [2004] or Writing Desire [2000]). She began to pursue more generative and poetic qualities and, in speaking about her work, to express growing awareness of the artist’s positioning as a European cultural producer: the role of an (influential) artist is, precisely, to generate realities that nurture our engagement with the present. These new realities grow out of the relationships between intention and practice. Yet, as with quantum physics’ observer effect, as soon as these different realities come to exist, the artist’s or curator’s representation of them immediately and inherently modifies them. Similarly, the museum presentation of Devenir Tierra, characterized by traditional art and exhibition discourse, complicated our understanding of the possible realities that Biemann’s work generates.
Ursula Biemann, Acoustic Ocean (Océano acústico) (still), 2018. Courtesy MUAC.
Biemann always reveals her authorial presence in her work but she is not consistently transparent about her artistic operations from one work to the next. Acoustic Ocean (2018) uses a fictional character (played by Sofia Jannok, a Swedish Sámi artist) to explore the marine soundscape with the help of different devices, such as hydrophones and directional microphones. The videos, shot in the Lofoten Islands in the arctic region of Norway, are presented on two channels alongside a series of objects that contextualize Jannok’s exploration: the neoprene suit worn in the video, as well as different boxes and cases used to transport technical equipment.
Jannok, a well-known singer, wears a neoprene outfit complete with a piece of animal fur she added herself, and this, as Biemann mentions in her video introduction for Devenir Tierra, symbolizes an integration of Indigenous and Western scientific ways of perceiving the world. The soundtrack for the video is a montage of oceanic sounds from scientific research from the 1970s, as the current sonic pollution in the ocean would obscure distinct animal sounds. The narration, provided through overlaid text, begins with factual information about sonic ocean research but then moves into fiction, describing the faux scientific research of Jannok’s character. Because this fictionalized narration overlaps with real, albeit vintage, oceanic sounds and footage of actual submarine environments, the distinctions between fabrication and documentation become blurry, evoking desire and nostalgia but leaving audiences wondering what the contemporary oceanic environment really sounds like.
Even if distinctions do blur in Acoustic Ocean, the general conceit—science fiction enhanced by documentation—is readily apparent. In other works, it is more difficult to discern researched knowledge from fictional elements. Forest Law (2014) is a two-channel video that explores the notion of nature’s rights and was inspired by a legal battle against companies and governments engaging in extractive practices in the Amazon. Filmed in Ecuador in collaboration with the Brazilian architect Paulo Tavares, this work combines interviews with performance. Indigenous representatives from the Shuar and Sarayaku people explain on camera how elements of their cosmologies contextualize their communities’ and the forests’ resistance of aggressive resource extraction; then a fictional “chemist” is seen gathering soil samples from the rainforest. The footage plays on two screens of different sizes, often showing different perspectives of the same action. The mise en scene of the interviews—with well-lit characters in scenic locations, shown carrying ceremonial objects—rapidly informs us of the artist’s desire for the image to produce a certain audiovisual effect.
Ursula Biemann, Devenir Tierra (installation view), 2024. Courtesy MUAC. Photo credit: Oliver Santana.
Ursula Biemann, Forest Law (Selva jurídica), 2014. Courtesy MUAC.
In Forest Law, the dual-screen installation was presented alongside a small desk displaying books, videos, and documents related to the case of the Kichwa Indigenous People of Sarayaku v. Ecuador, in which the community successfully fought the oil-exploitation project called Bloque 23, arguing that the project violated the rights of the forest. This display relied on museological conventions to present anthropological or scientific evidence. The presentation of annotated maps, books, historical images, and archival footage not only provided context for the videos but bestowed them with added authority, and since the low lighting in the room favored the videos, the documentation felt as though it served a rhetorical purpose. Even though the videos work with imperfect synchronicity to highlight cosmological, pragmatic, and legal viewpoints, the installation ended up amplifying Biemann’s aesthetic project rather than inviting viewers’ focused attention on the messages conveyed by the interviewees.
This approach seems to repeatedly miss what the anthropologist Eduardo Kohn calls “ethnographic listening,” an active form of listening in which the practice itself transforms the ethnographer’s methods. If the artist and curator had embraced the openness Kohn proposes, could they have presented forest cosmologies in a way that truly embraces a potential for transformation?
Ursula Biemann, Forest Mind (Mente forestal), 2021 (installation view). Photo by the author.
Perhaps Biemann gets closest to transformation in two projects she created in collaboration with the Inga people: Devenir Universidad (2019–22) and Forest Mind (2021). The former is a series of videos, publications, and a web platform representing the collaboration between Biemann and political, cultural, and educational representatives of the Inga people from the southwest of Colombia. Biemann, her Inga colleagues, and other international collaborators developed the framework for an Indigenous university founded on Inga epistemological traditions. While Devenir Universidad engages in knowledge preservation by putting different epistemic traditions into dialogue, Forest Mind further develops the artist’s desire for the aesthetic image. Forest Mind emerges from the same dialogue Biemann engaged in with Inga people in the Amazon. It integrates audiovisual information on forest DNA, based on research performed in collaboration with scholars at the technology institute ETH Zurich, with the artist’s own interpretations of her encounters with the Inga people and the scientists. She uses these strategies to put intelligence in nature, as well as the complex interconnectedness between all the visible and invisible entities of the forest, into dialogue with Western scientists’ approach to the forest. By experimenting with imaging technologies that allow researchers to create DNA sequences by combining different entities (a sound file, an image, and a seed), Biemann produces what she understands to be more compelling than scientific images for presentation in the art space; that is, she creates an artistic, audiovisual rendition articulating the scientific process with the knowledge of the forest, which includes scientific narration, documentary footage, and a highly aestheticized video of the forest cropped in the shape of a tree.
A further poetic gesture, the embedding of DNA from experiments with Swiss scientists into one of the walls of the museum—thus performing a permanent connection between two worlds—was a peak moment that demonstrated the predilection in contemporary art toward forms and structures produced for, and within, the spatial conventions of the museum. This highlights the limits of artistic and curatorial gestures in Devenir Tierra: while the research took place as a collaboration between peoples, entities, materialities, and knowledge traditions, the final forms of many of the works—which are rooted in Western artistic conventions—still privilege the poetic gestures and aesthetic images produced for the institutional setting, undermining the transformative potential of the knowledge shared through these collaborations.
Ursula Biemann, Forest Mind (Mente forestal), 2021. Courtesy MUAC.
A notable absence in the exhibition, and particularly in Forest Mind, was a means of access to the systemic implications of current European research on species in the Amazon. Previous work by Biemann notably dealt with the “consequences of colonialism,” as Jose Cáceres Madrones, writing about the artist, put it. For Cáceres Madrones, works like Foreign Services (1995), Kültür (1996), or Just Watch (1997) address the cultural perception of Switzerland as a nonparticipant in the production of the colonies and, in contemporary times, neocolonial extraction. But in this recent exhibition, Biemann rehearsed the old trope of “an encounter of worlds,” obscuring connections between, for example, scientific research performed by Swiss organizations in the Amazon and the lucrative pharmaceutical businesses profiting from resource extraction in South America. Forest Mind, in particular, demonstrates a fascination with the scientific ability to capture DNA in new, exciting ways, essentially offering an unchallenged celebration of Western extractive technologies.
Perhaps unintentionally, or despite the strategic intention to circumvent colonial politics today, this exhibition—and the similar lineup of works by Biemann at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Nice in 2020—still relied on cultural discourses and practices that enable the extractive economies that undermine the integrity of biomes and peoples across the entire planet. However, while the impact of traditional art forms and dissemination structures (like the contemporary art exhibition) may have a limited transformative political potential, exhibitions like Devenir Tierra still help bring contemporary art discourse into the urgencies of the present.
Biemann’s obstinate strategies themselves provoke pressing questions. Can the epistemic cultures and social orders bringing destruction upon the Earth truly be the same forces that save it? What can the material and linguistic conventions of what we call “contemporary art” really do? A transformative practice—in art and also beyond—needs to embrace the fracture between representation and lived experience, in order to transcend its own limits and carry itself into the future.
