NATUREZA VICIADA: Solo Show by Luís Damião

We are pleased to present: "Natureza Viciada", a solo exhibition by the photographer Luís Damião.

 

With a curatorial text by Graça Rodrigues and Jamil "Parasol" Osmar, the exhibition stems from a visual essay that the author has been undertaking since 2019 through a process of continuous expedition to spaces viscerally de-characterised by the pollution resulting from human action in the city of Luanda.

Through images in which the notion of contamination is manifestly stated, Luís Damião promotes, both materially and visually, a contemplation of the profound impact of human activity on the delicate balance of the global ecosystem. A body of work that, transcending the realm of theory, pushes us to immerse ourselves in the tangible consequences of unbridled consumerism that jeopardises the coexistence of living beings.

 

Two installations - one of an immersive nature and the other a collaborative production - and 22 new photographic compositions, conceived in an alliance between the documentary and the conceptual, result in the construction of a reverberating atmosphere, which rises in the light and under the reminiscence of this futuristic and dystopian landscape that has been the visual laboratory and object of the artist's labor.

 

A landscape where living infrastructures are intertwined in an amalgam and where nature and humanity succumb to the spoils of contemporary consumer society, reiterating the principle of building a society that goes on, convinced and blind, looking at progress on the horizon, but flowing towards self-destruction, desertification and ecocide.

 

To the panoramic views carved on paper mâché and kraft paper, alluding to the necessary renewal of the primordial raw material, Luís Damião adds in "Destilador" and "Pena de morte" a photographic structuring skilfully produced from "objets trouvés", shrewdly modified in favor of their personification and an undisguised ironisation conceived from the staging, the metamorphosis and an almost futuristic animism that brings them to life. Oblivious to this theatricality, vigilantes prevail as heralds: the children who clean, purifying and the charcoal burners who sow, reforesting.

"Natureza Viciada" (Vicious Nature) prompts a reflection on the evolution of the concept of the post-human in the succession of the geological era of the Anthropocene. Like an anamnesis, it asks us. Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going? Who will save us?