EXHIBITION
Such Sweet Thunder
Artist: Adam Vackar
Curated by: Domenico de Chirico
Gandy Gallery / Remote exhibitino during the Covid pandemic at Adam Vackar’s studio
Date: June 4 – September 11, 2020
Presented at Artissima Art Fair, Italy
Exhibition title: SUCH SWEET THUNDER
Curated by: Domenico de Chirico
Venue: Gandy gallery www.gandy-gallery.com
Date: June 4 – September 11, 2020
When looking at this new body of works by Adam Vačkář what immediately catches the eye is the vitality that is intrinsic to something that should actually taste stale, seem left over. We are not standing in front of rubble; we are standing not in front of the remains of something. What is being praised is the act of becoming, transformation stimulated by the rhythm of time. The works presented here are the result of arduous research indefatigably carried out by Vačkář, a zig-zagging path of mostly random exploration in which these objects, carefully laid in swamps, lakes and remote forests have revealed themselves to him in all their eternal metamorphic power, subsequently perfected by the use of bronze and aluminium, by a special material finish, without the aid of paint. The refined transformation perfected by the artist clearly resembles the act of sostare (pausing), an Italian verb deriving from the Latin substare, with the sense of ‘staying underneath’. This being underneath is the depositing of layers of material life which, encountering each other, sing the praises of time’s becoming and make the present appear as a scar issuing from past and future, an indefinable murmur of change. Here, then, is where the artist’s strength lies – in uniting this delicate and irreversible natural process of the transformation of spontaneous elements into the alienation brought about by the mammoth industrial development and into its path, which is diametrically opposed to the normal becoming of things, thus obtaining a hybrid mixture in which the artificial becomes part of the biorhythmic process of becoming natural and vice versa. This is how these figures assume demonic forms, almost to whisper the echoes of the magical places from which they come, but from which they have now distanced themselves, becoming more complex entities, perpetually suspended in a moment in which the era of consumerism has stopped for ever and in which this substratum is wrapped in a symbolic spirituality turned towards remembering and reiterated as a warning to the future.
Domenico de Chirico
Current European law mandates the complete eradication of Giant Hogweed. The goal is to eliminate this plant from most areas of the European Union by 2030 and to have none by 2050. While some botanists criticize this as a genocidal scenario, others would participate in this purge. Questions arise about why the Hogweed cannot remain in certain areas considering its benefits to insects or wildlife. If wildlife were allowed to graze on the plant, this could naturally control its spread. Some locals who have coexisted with the plant for nearly 50 years believe in a long-term, sustainable relationship without attempting total eradication. However, this perspective isn't acknowledged by legislative bodies, which decide the plant's fate. In the Czech Republic, the labor involved in the eradication of Giant Hogweed tells a story of discrimination and exploitation. Companies and private landlords delegate the work to socially disadvantaged individuals, exposing them to further vulnerability. In fact, the many agencies involved in the eradication project are required by the government to employ people from job centers, often from the Romani community. The commonly-held bias that these employees lack knowledge of the landscape and are unable to navigate maps or recognize rare plants which may be inadvertently destroyed has partly fueled the ethnic conflict in the border regions.
Plant-human narratives
Giant Hogweed has absorbed varied socio-political perspectives through the centuries.
In the 1990s, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, an interesting phenomenon emerged in Czechoslovakia: the bloated military, a leftover from the Communist era, found a new purpose in suppressing a novel, non-ideological and virtually defenseless enemy. Army transporters were deployed to destroy the immense and numerous fields of Giant Hogweed that were spreading widely, reaching into the cities. In 1991, news outlets reported many incidents of children getting burns by playing with the plant. The plant’s name in Czech, Bolševník, was often changed by countrymen to Bolshevik, bearing the unpleasant metaphor of a painful past, spreading as fast as the detested former Communist regime. Another, very different and older narrative about Giant Hogweed exists in the Sudetenland, an area of former Czechoslovakia with a history of displacement and conflict. For centuries, the German-speaking nations tried to colonize the territory by sending in German settlers and displacing the Czech population. In this region, in the 19th century, Prince Klemens von Metternich, an Austrian noble, driven by a quest for beautification of the area, sowed the seeds of this ornamental exotic plant. Giant Hogweed’s menacing spread from that region across the whole Czech countryside, seemed to some like a phantasmagorical echo of those displaced populations. Nowadays, many people living in the Sudetenland see in Giant Hogweed an environmental symbol of the complex and often painful human history of the region, a ghostly and growing reminder of that tumultuous past.
The Heracles of Hogweed installation by Adam Vackar will be on display at the PS122 gallery through June 23 as part of the exhibition Aliens: Colonial Narratives Through Plant Migration and Bio-Art, featuring artworks by Supermrin and Adam Vackar, curated by Isabella Indolfi.