Guardian of nature

PROJECT

Guardian of nature

“I’m searching for experiences beyond human comprehension, features of unknown, unfamiliar, both in natural and artificial landscapes. I’m not searching for realism. I’m hunting magic.”

Maria Lucia

The documentation process started in june 2017 during summer solstice day, and since then it has been documented as diary. This is a story about a durational transformative process of a human being trying to dialogue with other then humans in order to become a legal representative in court. It is an immersive story to imagine a universe of archaic rites, interbeing and kinship. The personification of nature is an archive of multispecies embodiment, processed by dialoguing exercises as a attempt of decolonization of the self, dehumanization, (re)animation and (re)conciliation with nature.

Through the use of performative rituals and animistic dialogues we must go beyond the “imagined disaffection”, we need to understand the sublimity of nature and search for the quality of greatness beyond human eye. As in the same way Michel Serres, proposes a contract with nature, when he asks ”what language do things of the world speak, that might come to an understanding with them, contractually?

Maria Lucia Cruz Correia

Correia's artistic work speaks her deep engagement for ecological crises and climate emergency. She reacts to the environmental crimes of our times by bringing audiences into participatory laboratories that connects the artistic with the voices of scientists, activists and lawyers. Correia’s visual installations, performances and participatory laboratories talks from the idea of
 a complex ecological community, incorporating humans and non-humans, as a reality in which audiences are triggered to connected to a ‘more-than-human-world. Most of her projects are temporary and autonomous platforms proposing utopian and resilient public services as alternatives for the current capitalistic system. Correia's proposes contemporary discourses on the anthropocene, nature colonization and climate emergency and therefore her work is mostly long therm projects as process of radicalization, transformation and restoration. From 2013-19, Correia is an artist in residency in Vooruitkunstcentrum and her work has been supported by Imagine 2020 network. In 2017 she received the Roel Verniers Prijs at the Theaterfestival with her first theater piece Voice of nature: the trial and in 2019 she has been nominated for COAL prize with her new project, Kinstitute.

Credits

Project by: Maria Lucia Cruz Correia