IN-PERSON: Prague – Section B

Abstract

This proposal explores and reinterprets, in the language of art, important and significant places, works and artists of our historical-artistic cultural heritage that have traces, allusions or consequences of events that could be attributed to issues related to climate change . Thus, as examples, the mountain of Sainte-Victoire, which Cézanne painted 87 times before he died of pneumonia in 1906 due to a heavy downpour that surprised him while he was painting en plein air probably the eighty-eighth version , generated the pictorial series “The Rain Profile”; or the list of works in the National Gallery that were damaged by the flooding of the River Thames in 1928, including “The Deluge” by W. Turner and “A Flood” by C. Corot, which inspired the work “Ruins List”; or the immense disaster of the Florence flood of November 4, 1966, which has led to the realization of the “Black and Mud” exhibition at the Academy of Florence in June 2022, with works made with the original mud of 1966 still deposited in the basements of this institution; or the daguerreotypes that John Ruskin used in the 19th century to ‘preserve’ the state of Venice’s architectural heritage as a witness to its history, which have led me to make some current daguerreotypes inspired by the floods of this city, exhibited (with other works) at the Academy of Venice in June 2021 in the exhibition “After the Storm”. These are just some examples of my artistic research that I propose for this paper.