Lourenço Soares
uma biblioteca feita de estrume e cascas de fruta (compost library)
The exhibition at Lièvre_____ is organized on two floors. The first floor shows Books, a series of works on paper inspired by book covers. Books creates a sort of fictional library for existent and speculative knowledges about nature cultures, politics, and history. While some of the drawings use elements from published books, others combine text, typography, and images from different sources in collages that question scientific classifications and authorship. The colored pencil drawings are also an homage to the work of the often unknown illustrators of scientific publications. A regular grid on the wall behind the drawings is an attempt to trace overlapping and contradictory epistemic worlds.
On the second floor in the attic, the video installation firstpersonsingular@hyper-separation.episteme departs from grammar categories to look at how language represents nonhuman agents and ideas of human exceptionalism and individuality. The installation is presented with a large screen that stands on a landscape of cardboard stones and plastic plants. The image is a montage of 3D models overlapped with diagrams, drawings, and texts taken from encyclopedias, grammars, and theoretical books. The sound is a composition by musicians João Carreiro and Leonor Arnaut who interpreted a score by Lourenço Soares made up of word classes, pronoun declensions, and verb conjugations from the Portuguese grammar.
Lourenço Soares is a research-based artist working with epistemic ecologies. His work is informed by speculative fiction and deconstruction and focuses on the ways western knowledge represents nature. Understanding natural history as a political tool in the Western project of domination and control over nature, Soares analyses the history of ideas to trace the relationships between science and politics. Lourenço Soares uses different mediums — like video, 3D animation, and drawing — and is influenced by scientific illustration and knowledge visualization.