Galeria Francisco Fino is delighted to share AnaMary Bilbao’s article on Adrien Missika’s work, titled Adrien Missika: Towards a Potential Future, in Contemporânea.
As Henry D. Thoreau (1817–1862) recalls in Walden; Or, Life in the Woods (1854), mythology and ancient poetry suggest that husbandry was once a sacred art; yet, today, it is "pursued with irreverent haste and heedlessness by us," for the primary purpose of owning and harvesting. The reality we live in is that of a bigger desire to regard "the soil as property." We know nature "but as a robber," as we commit to oblivion the sacred character it had once been granted. Thoreau is here referring to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, from which a growing, pitiless deification of material goods and a profound spiritual decline proceeded. How is one to return to a dialogue with Saturn and Ceres, those solar deities of renovation, creation, and liberation? And how is one to depict, or what is one to depict, when the soil itself grants life, is life, while still representing the whole logic of labour and activity? Or what is one to think when the soil consists in a general space of privatisation and domestication in which, primarily as a source material, all living beings are united?
