Events: Paradise is Here

 

In this workshop, participants will be given some creative insights into the upcycling of cardboard — a material that is often disposed after its first usage. Cardboard’s unique properties make it a pliable medium that can be recovered for creating a variety of objects. We are going to look at how cardboard may be sustainably crafted while discussing natural resources and how human activity is shaping the Earth’s ecosystem.

 

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The gallery turns into a research laboratory where participants will investigate what happened to the Amazon fires after the bursting interest spread by the media over the past few months. We will talk about how these fires and other recently occurring natural phenomena shape our perception of the present and near future. The discussion will be moderated by guest artist Sofia Bonato.

Sofia Bonato is an Italian-Moroccan artist currently living and working in London. Following her undergraduate studies in Visual and Graphic Arts at Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia, in 2018 she received her MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins. Bonato’s practice interweaves a wide range of processes, including video, sculpture, photography, printmaking and installation. Her meticulously crafted constructions examine our daily actions, which offer us immediate satisfaction or ‘safeness’, in juxtaposition to the growing, collective anxiety about their environmental impact on a global scale.

 

For the closing event of Paradise is Here, Aleksandr Tishkov will be in conversation with the audience together with Pablo Luis Alvarez, Claudia Contu and Yalda Bidshahri. This casual talk will depart from the works present in the show to open up concepts closely tied to utopia, paradise, end of times, and the tension that contemporary technologies are creating in our perceptions of the present and the future.

Pablo Luis Alvarez is a writer, historian and curator currently doing his PhD project at the Royal College of Art. He has a general interest in the history of ideas and knowledge, particularly in those that have given shape to art historical writing, art criticism and curatorial discourse.

Yalda Bidshahri is a curator, researcher and writer. Fueled by lived experiences, movement, belonging, identity, and place are constant subjects in her practice. She is committed to facilitating the discussion of these topics, and beyond, through a multidirectional exchange that relates contemporary art to a wider context.