Inside a dark room, a panther dreams that it wanders through the jungle, yawns, lies down sleepily, stretches... Animated by artificial intelligence, the big cat decides in real time what its next move will be, in an infinite cycle. that does not stop even when the work is not exhibited (A Dream Dreaming a Dream). Outside, very close by, inside a curved glass pavilion, a small community of stick insects and tropical leaf insects blend in among the native plants and shrubs of the Collserola mountain range (A Transparent Leaf Instead of the Mouth). And, along the route, life, this time also from the street, sneaks back into the museum through seven filaments of light that react to the presence of the spectators, the weather conditions outside and the sound of a flute that refers to oil extraction (Breathing lines).
We are at the Macba and this is A leaf instead of the eye, the first major retrospective in his city of Daniel Steegmann Mangrané (Barcelona, 1977), an artist who, at the age of 23, traveled to Brazil with the intention of doing a three-month investigation on the Amazon and stayed for twenty years. His name may not mean anything to you, but he is one of the Catalan artists with the most international projection, his works are part of the Tate collections, he has participated in group exhibitions at the MoMA and has starred in monographic exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Münster or the Bicocca Hangar in Milan.
The attraction for the tropical forest, which Steegmann Mangrané conceives as a living being where the emergencies facing the contemporary world materialize, comes from when he was a child and dreamed of becoming a biologist. “That lasted from the age of 9 to 15, when I realized that I was terrible at science, let's say that the right side of my brain is not active, and I decided to be an artist.” The decision to move to Rio de Janeiro was also influenced by the impression made on him by the work of Lygia Clark that he saw at the Fundació Tàpies, where years later, in 2018, he himself deposited a silk cocoon whose interior contained a colored butterfly. bright blue (of the species Morpho helenor) that for a time flew freely through the exhibition halls. With Clark, he says, he learned the codes to break the false dichotomy between art and life.
“I was educated – he remembers – in a Mediterranean context that considered the viewer as a kind of disembodied eyes that entered a white, neutral cube, in which they could see art properly. Luckily, no one believes this idea of the autonomy of art anymore. “We all have a body as well as eyes, and the relationship between the interior and exterior of the museum is fundamental.” In fact, he believes, more than what happens in the rooms, “what interests me is what happens when we leave the museum, how our reality is transformed and how art reconfigures our relationship with the world.”
Hence the title of the exhibition, A leaf instead of the eye: “The gaze changes reality, but reality also changes our gaze. The leaf also makes the eye that looks at it.” A multispecies and hierarchical view that puts an end to that way of understanding the world “through that system of divisions and oppositions: nature/culture, body/mind, objects/subjects... in which we have trusted for at least 400 years.” years, since Descartes, and that is not only false, but has led us to the ecological crisis in which we find ourselves,” argues Steegmann. A crisis, she adds, that at the same time is shaking that pillar of beliefs. “It may sound ambitious, he concludes, but my goal is to move towards that new cultural paradigm that recognizes the system of interrelationships and interdependencies that make up reality.”
