Manifesto Terricola at Silesian Museum

Manifesto Terricola invites us to speculate on the future of cultural transmission and on the relationships between culture, art, society and the endangered environment of Arctic glaciers.

The work proposes translating a manifesto on the role of art in the future into DNA. Its molecules can then be preserved as a bio-techno-cultural message deep within a glacier, embedded in a hydrogel bioprint shaped like a human ear.

The ear is at once human in form, technobiological in its materiality and posthuman in the meanings it embodies. It listens to the Earth; it evokes the history of art and the changing role of the artist; it becomes a social voice while simultaneously carrying the cultural heritage of the transhumanist age towards future generations.

López invites us to speculate about whose ear it might be, while drawing on a lineage extending through the history of art and media art: from Vincent van Gogh’s severed ear to Stelarc’s internet-connected ear implanted in his arm, and from Joe Davis’s experiments involving a mouse ear and a map of the Milky Way to Japanese pop artist Etsuko Yakushimaru’s I’m Humanity, which explores the long-term preservation of cultural information as DNA encoded within living organisms.

The ear designed by López, however, introduces another dimension—both cultural, encompassing historical, artistic and ethical concerns, and ecological. It becomes an organ listening to the story of the survival of culture, humanity and the Earth: an attempt to stabilise an ecosystem that is, by its very nature, impermanent.

The presentation of the work is funded by the Embassy of Spain in Poland.

Credits: Solimán López