SED (Thirst)
M100 Cultural Center, Santiago, Chile, 2019
Curated by Dan Cameron

Images courtesy the artist

With approximately 60% of the human body consisting of water, and more than 70% of the earth’s surface covered by water, what does it say about us as a species that water is the means by which we humans are gradually making our planet an unfit place to live? Whether the symptom is rising sea levels, desertification, contamination, or drought, the blame for the endangerment of water as a vital resource falls directly on our reckless and irresponsible approach to its use and stewardship. Fresh drinking water might have seemed infinitely self-replenishing once upon a time, but the readily available scientific consensus for the past fifty years is that this is as fictitious as a fairy tale. The difficult but unavoidable truth is that our continued growth as a species is consuming far more of our resources than can ever be replaced, leading to the extinction of countless species, including, eventually, ourselves.

Thirst, the title of this exhibition of eleven recent works by Gianfranco Foschino, was chosen based on the artist’s long-held conviction that art can address this planetary crisis by offering viewers perceptual tools that serve to build a collective appreciation of the profound implications of water’s role in our lives. Since his earliest videos works, Foschino’s primary artistic focus has been toward nature observed, whether in the form of sweeping panoramas of glaciers, farmyards populated by wandering chickens, or collective human behavior inside urban environments. Here, Foschino has employed similar strategies to explore how water manifests as vapor, as ocean, as waterfall, as sweat, and as snow. The exhibition space has also been left intentionally in semi-darkness, in an effort to slow down the visitor’s visual transition from one installation to another and enable a common thread to emerge between individual works.

A key component of Thirst is the Center of Water Studies, which, despite having a separate entrance, functions throughout the exhibition as a gathering point for meetings, lectures, workshops, concerts and screenings, all of which relate directly to the underlying theme of the exhibition. In the spirit of opening up public reflection on these critical themes, the discursive nature of Centro de Estudios del Agua (CEA) is intentionally conceived in direct contrast to the more impressionistic sensations generated by the artworks themselves, in hopes that viewers will find themselves moving freely from one space to the other.

—Dan Cameron, Curator