Con(-)centric spatialities - Liliana Mercioiu Popa

The large-scale installation presents multiple perspectives of knowledge brought together and becomes a space for meeting, dialogue and exchange of ideas for the community.

The installation proposed by Liliana Mercioiu Popa, as an extension of the works in the Expanded Nature exhibition, presents several perspectives of knowledge brought together. On the one hand, it contains the idea of articulating life (from a scientific perspective), from the simplest unit to the most complex (atoms, molecules, organelles, cells, tissues, organs, organ systems, organisms. .. biome, biosphere) and the way of their interconnection, and on the other hand there are reflections here about the social plane, with the ideologies/images/stories we create over time about the world and their force to influence our existence.

In this way, the exhibition space expands infinitely around the viewer, and the geometric figures present multiple possibilities for reconfiguring fixed and mobile points. Liliana Mercioiu Popa: "Starting from Michel Foucoult's concept that man is a recent invention, the work is visually articulated in a kind of lapidary history of life on Earth, with a small pause also in that of man, as he was or would could have been written, with what we know or do not yet fully understand, with what was a landmark and is no longer, with what could have been different (?).

Thus, after a brief foray among the first plant-animal life forms, among prehistoric trees, among fish that disappeared and reappeared from one extinction to another, among the descendants of dinosaurs - the thousands of bird species, among moving stones, among global migrations, which have taken place since the dawn of humanity, among the megalithic circles, the totemic pillars or columns of memory I stop at a crucial moment, the one that decided the way of the legislation of (rational) knowledge, of travels around the globe and of colonialism, of the evolution of science , industrialization and the centering of technology, which we perceive today, simultaneously, as part of the problem and part of the solution of the Capitalocene.

I pause to ask the question - What if? What if the image of the Vitruvian man, which in the version drawn by Leonardo da Vinci, is placed in a cosmography del minor mondo (of the microcosm), would have had a greater impact on humanity, along with other representations of the world, such as Anima Mundi or the one thought by Plato in Timaeus, as a correspondence between micro and macrouniverse, a world seen as a large living organism, endowed with mind and soul and containing everything (an idea that is also found in other ancient cultures - Mesopotamia, Iran or China), and not the image of man as the measure of all things, in the sense of conquering/dominating the world (the Enlightenment image of the world).

The work is ultimately about information, both as it is passed down to us biologically (encapsulated in DNA), but more so how we choose to use it consciously and in accordance with the complexity of the world."

Proiectul face parte din Programul cultural național „Timișoara – Capitală Europeană a Culturii în anul 2023” și este finanțat prin programul Grow Timișoara 2023, derulat de Centrul de Proiecte al Municipiului Timișoara, cu sume alocate de la bugetul de stat, prin bugetul Ministerului Culturii.

Part of

Sci-Art Your Life (META Forum)

Sci-Art Your Life (META Forum)