From the Threshold

This project draws on Bruno Latour’s notion that nature is not a particular sphere of reality but the result of political division; it therefore seeks to trace how this operation of exclusion has been reconsidered in recent years. One of the central tools of the anthropocentric machine is the classification of creatures and entities into legal categories that reflect the differentiated recognition of their animacy, conscience, and sentience. Based on this difference, relations of kinship, responsibility, reciprocity, or violence and exploitation are established. The evolution of this system can be clearly traced through the legal status of slavery, female, and indigenous populations throughout Western history, but it finds its origin in the same concept of nature and the conceptual excision of the human. This is a mental trap that resembles an imposed collective delusion and operates as the most effective justification for excessive violence and exploitation.

In opposition to the above, in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, many projects within national constitutions that recognize nature as a legal subject with a right to life, autonomy from human existence, and the capacity to restore and self-regulate its processes and vital cycles have been developed. In this way, a counterweight arises to the idea of nature as an object of exploitation and consumption, whose foundation lies in the alienation of its capacity to feel and recognize itself as a living being.

This separability does not exist in the worldviews of indigenous peoples; contrary to the modern obsession with producing exploitable objects, these worldviews include the recognition of subjects in the world. For example, the notion of people extends not only to all living beings but also to those we can classify—from Western thought—as inanimate. 

In this context, drawing on artistic, spiritual, and research registers, the exhibition From the Threshold displays some of the fronts on which the battle to dismantle these structures is underpinned.