Tropical Hangover
Salvatore Arancio, Zuzanna Czebatul, Rowena Harris*, Laure Prouvost, Suzanne Treister
8 February until 4 March 2017, Tenderpixel, London, UK
– curated in collaboration with Stella Sideli
Imagine a land full of swamps emitting suffocatingly sweet scents in the heat. The air is thick with poisonous substances left over after the party, which involved snorting and getting high on the lusciousness of the Earth. The intoxicating dance of consuming degenerates into entropy. Rhizomatic connections happen underground, underwater, and in the air. Algorithms mimic natural growth. Cells permutate and exchange. The senses are overloaded with the magical and the exotic, while we wonder about a nature after nature.
'This jungle was very thick and tall and lived mostly on dead seaweed and rotten fish. It grew as high as possible, and where it stopped it was met by sallow, rowan, and alder branches that bent down as far as they could reach. Walking between them with your arms outstretched was like swimming. Bird-cherry and rowan, especially rowan, smell like cat piss when they're in bloom.' – Tove Jansson, The Cave
* Rowena Harris’ video, After Attenborough, (www.tenderpixel.com) is an online commission for Tenderpixel's website, as part of the exhibition Tropical Hangover. For this occasion, the floor of the gallery has been painted ‘chroma-key blue’, and functions as a special effects screen in the film for a digitised, post-produced nature.
