Carlos Ramírez (Zorromono) at Esdir Exhibition Hall in Logono (La Rioja).
Carlos Ramírez (Zorromono): The Nature Of The Beast
6 November - 8 December 2020
Esdir Exhibition Hall, Logoño (La Rioja)
We should ask ourselves what voice our beleaguered Nature would claim for itself in these times when its existence seems doomed to disappear as we have known it up to now, even if we can sharpen our imagination and fable exactly what the consequences would be, not so much for the planet, whose capacity to regenerate is tested, but for the human species: a supervening extinction produced billions of years earlier than expected and, undoubtedly, much earlier than even the laws of physics are fulfilled for the celestial bodies, and the Sun devours us gravitationally and irremediably.
Some, faced with the brevity of their lives, rightly demand the authoritative aphonia of science, which calls for immediate and coordinated action so that its worst predictions are not fulfilled, even though we have been riding on the back of the Anthropocene since the Industrial Revolution. Researchers, without repressing the pain, see in anguish the disaster towards which we are inexorably heading and from which we too know we will not escape, while we watch with parsimony as governments prolong the agony with their ineffective management. And even less so when we witness how the ambitious Sustainable Development Goals do not overcome strategic geopolitical and economic tensions, which will lead to radical decisions being taken sooner or later.
Political, economic and social systems must be adaptive, as well as highly cohesive, to resist the tensions and fluctuations introduced into the system itself by the monopolistic interests of large global financial, digital and industrial corporations. This is in case it is not the government itself that exercises such evil intentions3. As long as the decisions that are agreed upon do not affect our "way of life" and sustainable and sustained growth over time, that is, as long as our "first world" privileges are not incorporated as an unknown quantity into a hypothetical equation about a future cataclysm, we will continue to live moderately happy - or so we think. We will, of course, feel sorry for those countries and cultures that have been left behind by progress and that still have colonial obstacles, and which we will continue to subject perpetually in the distance. This abject humiliation is accompanied by an ever closer tapping: do you hear it? it is the oclocacy knocking at the doors of our democracies.
Power reserves the right to show the immense magnificence of its strength. Stealth is part of its elegant refinement to continue the massacre and remain unscathed: an extinct species, a devastated forest, a dry river, a vanished sea, thousands of displaced people, are not only evidence of the indisputable climate change, but also of the inhuman and serious inequalities on a planetary scale that make slaves of the populations that suffer the loss in first person and, consequently, are victims of the disintegration of their cultures. For these peoples, climate change does not exist, but rather a mutation (if not a mutilation) in all orders of life. The exchange of roles that will one day be imposed will aim at a more equitable distribution of wealth and also of poverty, which can only be combated through struggle, i.e. war.
The Earth, with the biodiversity that it treasures in each of the ecosystems that it shares and of which we are a part, will not wait unscathed for our desired change of attitude to come about or, unfortunately, for us to achieve it after decades of unfulfilled agreements - brave silliness. A civilising transformation of the transcendence that we are venturing into requires a similar evolution of the consolidated democracies. Who, then, will rescue humanity from its delirium and our insatiability for consumption and consequent devastation? The question, as you may suppose, has nothing to do with having free energy sources, now that we are beginning to feel nervous that we are late, very late; and the beast - the one that Carlos faces in this exhibition - has already become ill with gluttony.
