Verónica Gerber Bicecci
The Resistance
series a: pencil drawing and photographs of anonymous landscapes found in flea markets.
2020
This collection of animalcules (the term was invented by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek to refer to the small organisms or protozoa he observed through his microscope in 1674) and phylacteries (strips or small scrolls of paper that, in medieval art, made use of speech bubbles) to form a sort of manifestation-manifesto of microscopic organisms that speak to us using a variety of phrases, the majority taken from two books that are central to any understanding of the present environmental crisis: Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene, by Donna Haraway and The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruin, by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing.
Cultivate Multispecies Justice
Look Around Rather Than Ahead
Make Kin Not Babies
Progress Stopped Making Sense
Q&A between Miguel Monroy and Verónica Gerber Bicecci
MM: How do you think about your drawing practice?, I know that you traditionally use your drawings to make maps or diagrams of interpersonal relationships. In this case, how does your drawings work?
VGB: I think on the animalcules that Leeuwenhoek drawn as diagrams. He did a meticulous register of observation through his microscope and described with lines the anatomy of tiny and invisible beings that have never been seen before on occident. It is in that sense that I consider them as diagrams, and that's why I decided to redraw them. In fact, I found them searching in Google "diagrams of microorganisms".
MM: I know that among your interests is the question about the future. Do you have a pessimistic view about it?
VGB: I try not to. I agree with the people that state pessimism about the future is what the system (capitalism) wants from us to think: there is no future, so we have to take advantage and produce every minute of the time that we have left in our lives. But to resist to pessimism doesn’t mean to not be realistic: the problems we are facing are very concrete, real and present.
MM: Do you think that the current COVID-19 pandemic is, in some way, a manifestation of what your organisms are claiming in the current environmental crisis or how would you read this situation?
VGB: Yes, the bugs are in a demonstration with their banners. The funny thing is that I started this series by the end of last year and I finished it in January 2020, before COVID arrived to the continent of America. The protest of these little forms of life (that we barely consider) is a claim to the humans on the environmental crisis and, at the same time, the demand of an urgent change (as it normally happens in demonstrations).
Verónica Gerber Bicecci
is a visual artist who writes. She has published the books: Mudanza, La Compañía, Otro día… (poemas sintéticos), Empty Set (translated by Christina MacSweeney), which won the 3rd International Aura Estrada Literature prize and the Otra Mirada Cálamo prize, and Migrant Words (bilingual, translated with commentary by Christina MacSweeney). Her most recent projects in other media are: vocabulary b in muca Roma, Mexico City; The Dystopian Machine (www.lamaquinadistopica.xyz) in the Museo de Arte Abstracto Manuel Felguérez, Zacatecas; and In the Eye of Bambi, a curatorship short story (translated by Christina MacSweeney) with artworks selected from La Caixa Collection and presented in Whitechapel Gallery, London. She was an editor at the Mexican publishing cooperative Tumbona Ediciones. She presently teaches on the SOMA art program in Mexico City and is a beneficiary of FONCA's National System of Art Creators grant. To learn more visit: www.veronicagerberbicecci.net