Interlaced. The Planet as a Single Organism

Every year since 1992, Florencia Bohtlingk has headed to the settlement of La Flor in the middle of the Misiones jungle to recharge her batteries. There, she studies the movements of local residents of different nationalities: human bodies emerging from the jungle to settle in new but also familiar territory. La boca del Infierno (The Mouth of Hell, 2019) depicts this movement. It is an artwork that shows us that in the lush undergrowth everything is alive and all that life is part of the same flow. Every creature interacts with each other like the dance of a body made up of thousands of different organisms. Within that complex ecosystem the wave of human migration is coloured red by the earth, adopts the snaking form of the river and mingles with families of parakeets, monkeys and plants. In the green chaos of the jungle, everything overlaps and links together and there is no sense of hierarchy between figure and backdrop, just different scales that elude attempts to focus on one alone. The immense painting demonstrates that the jungle should not merely be seen from the outside but rather experienced from within through a body that is also part of a greater whole, one that is always changing, that possesses independent organs, that is sometimes abstract and sometimes blurred, occasionally coming into sharp focus for a moment before disappearing into its camouflage once more.

The artwork we have chosen this week depicts a very relevant symbiosis between society and nature in which both are demonstrably part of a single universe. If there is something we can learn – or remember – from the coronavirus crisis it is that our skin is more porous, vast and permeable than we think. Today more than ever we understand that the earth is a complex network of interdependent organisms and that the interspecies movement of the virus, the impact of its mutations and its aggressive nature are directly related to the climate crisis, exploitation of natural resources, the agricultural industry and other disruptions to the natural equilibrium in the Anthropocene era. If we tried viewing the atmosphere as a skin protecting a single, interdependent organism we might start to look at things on a more expansive scale and begin to see how human beings act similarly to a virus, raising the earth’s temperature as though it had a fever, eating away at the Amazon like a giant pair of lungs. Wartime metaphors that treat the current threat as an external enemy overlook the socio-environmental causes of the pandemic, which are very much the work of humanity. What if we began to realize that we are the enemy? Might it be a start along the path to a better future?

This week, from the Modern Museum we propose to think of the human being without separate it from nature: in the network of species in which we are immersed and in the