Mané PachecoBestas
15.09.2022 – 19.11.2022
More than a closed narrative, mythology is an instrument of the ethical being that formulates a trans-corporeal materiality whose beliefs and forms are mutually constitutive. To look into the oeuvre of Mané Pacheco is to accompany her trajectory in creating a myth- imagination. In Beasts, a myth-imagined exhibition, the artist creates hybrid, genderless monsters that are nevertheless sexual (too sexual?) and whose post-extractivist predisposition draws from the folk wisdom and beliefs surrounding the rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis) native to the Amazon. This tree supplies the raw material – latex – to produce natural rubber, a material recurrently used by the artist.
Due to the biodegradable, renewable and potentially sustainable nature of the material, this choice is also ethically and environmentally responsible, especially when compared to the equivalent synthetic polymer alternative. Rubber tree production ensures the existence of an ecosystem capable of absorbing tons of carbon, as well as a significant livelihood to indigenous communities.
Its lifecycle, the genealogy of rubber-harvesting and the rituals and myths associated with its extraction have led to a research based on the mythology of the Amazon. The ethical and ecological functions of the fables and mythical characters offer both resonance and a point of departure for extractivist myth-imagination, in which the hybridization of some materials that are prevalent in contemporary industry (transportation, communications, tubing) is complemented by bio-morphological forms that configure a trans-corporeality in which the dominant/dominated roles are subverted.
From the forest to the BDSM scene, the issues of domination are at once expressive and ambiguous. Who dominates whom or what? When and to what extent? Both the simulacrum-dimension of domination and its unavoidability in nature and the world coinhabit in a circumscribed space expanded by the imaginative drive. Cooperation, seduction and threat are the tools that beasts reach for to ensure the balance of unavoidable extractivist actions, which condemn to chaos and curse those who transgress the myth-imagined rules set by Mané Pacheco.
© Vasco Stocker de Vilhena