The exhibition by the artistic duo Anca Benera and Arnold Estefán, “UnWorlding”, open at the Art Encounters Foundation between October 24, 2024, and March 1, 2025, curated by Krisztina Hunya and Diana Marincu, carried forward an initial project realized by the artists at Neuer Berliner Kunstverrein (n.b.k.) in 2023. The exhibition revisits some of the works presented at that time, with the addition of new ones, shaping, as a whole, a remarkably profound work on the ecology of the relationship between nature and culture that has preoccupied the artists in recent years.

The exhibition was set between the two major focal points of current affairs – the increasingly clear ecological threats and the resurgence of armed conflicts. This presents a unique vision of the artists’ approach to ecological themes through the way these two subjects intertwine in their work.

The artists’ work is based on assiduous documentation, data collection and correlation (using databases, archives, images and information provided by satellites, etc.), together with direct, journalistic-style documentation in the field. However, beyond this rigorous and methodical stage, which even involves expertise or collaborators from other fields, the framing often takes on poetic, emotional, and highly expressive visual tones, bringing and provoking a reflexive richness that goes beyond the objective scope of media coverage and awareness, revealing new perspectives of perception and reflection for the audience.

In this sense, in the video Blue Ground (2021-2022), all these aspects stem from the anthropomorphizing of a diamond, capable of telling its own story and perception of it. Through such narratives of non-human and human subjects, profound connections and influences between people, minerals, plants, and animals are revealed.

In other works, such as the Debrisphere. Landscape as an extension of the military imagination (2017) project, we are provided with concrete data, neatly configured in images, through small-scale models (with precise coordinates and real dimensions inscribed alongside them) of certain land areas that have been affected, along with their habitats, as a result of military interventions. And in the project Tired Mountains (2018), images of various minerals (taken from an atlas book) are collaged together with fragments of military arsenal, revealing their provenance, as in a visual acuity test.

In the works Proxy Climates (2019) and Conflict Line (2018), we discover a kind of procedural pattern –documentary, comparative analysis spread over several spaces at a certain geographical distance, recourse to scientific expertise, and the use of technological means to put the works into practice.  These procedures provide a layered commentary on the phenomenon of desertification encountered on our continent in recent decades, in an increasing number of arid regions (including the Sahara of Oltenia, in Romania), or on the relative nature of perceiving borders in certain geographical areas that are still tense.

The implications of the nature-culture relationship are addressed on several levels, through a whole network of cultural references, but it is impossible not to refer here to Nicolas Bourriaud’s ideas about excavating the past or moving backwards. This can be glimpsed in the two-channel video installation Exercises for Peace (2023), which revisits a moment in the past that reminds us of attitudes that can sometimes change the course of history, such as courage, reaction, and non-violent resistance, introduced through the story of the woman who managed to drive away the Ottomans, dressed as a fearsome creature (a Transylvanian legend celebrated in spring during the Lolelor Carnival).

This installation brings together a synchronicity of powerful visual components – the heroine’s performative dance (recreated by a dancer), her costume (specially created by a designer, combining elements of military camouflage with phantasmagorical details) and the whip and mask (traditionally reconstructed props). All this, together with the use of a language of performed signs (taken from the army) and real military equipment (tanks crossing the background of the initial action, now taken over by military training), creates points of encounter between then and now, capable of new awareness.

And in the video installation UnWorlding, the dialogue between past and present is once again present, through the use of a renowned work of art in an artistic project. This approach reminded me of Pierre Huyghe’s use, in 2011, of a copy of Constantin Brancuși’s Sleeping Muse, alongside a live crustacean, coexisting in an aquarium in the installation Zoodram 4 (in the retrospective exhibition at the Centre Pompidou), and perhaps the similarities are not a mere coincidence, but a conscious continuation of certain ideas. In this case, we are also dealing with a copy of a work by Brâncuși – Cumințenia Pământului (1907), only that it is made of salt and placed in a field where it can freely interact with animals, in a setting different from that of a museum (it is an escape from the museum). In addition, it seems to visually echo archaic figurines, which themselves once referred to a different relationship with nature. The way in which they come together can reveal the indistinctness between different forms of existence and between art and life in more distant times.

The visibility of the flickering image, like that emanating from a firefly, seems to correlate with another concept developed by Bourriaud, starting from Walter Benjamin’s statement “Knowledge comes only in lightning flashes” and the works of Philippe Parreno (a series of drawings featuring fireflies, messengers on the verge of extinction due to climate change), are once again ideas that seem to be taken as a reference in the video installation Exercises for Peace (2023) video installation. This can be seen in the concrete textual interventions that alternate with the luminescent pulsation of a firefly, which runs synchronously (on one of the channels) with the story of Ursula, the woman who found supernatural powers within herself.

In Benjamin’s dialectic, this correlation between past and present does not refer so much to the past shedding light on the present, or the present shedding light on the past, but rather to the newly configured image, like a flicker in the darkness, which unites the then and the now in a flash, forming a new constellation and bringing a new revelation.

Last but not least, the aptly chosen title of the exhibition, “UnWorlding”, inspired by the title of Nina Casian’s anthology of poems written after she emigrated to America, simultaneously refers to the making of the world, the dismantling of the world, the destruction of the world, and, why not, the remaking/healing of the world (not its construction). Among the recent versions of the becoming of man in relation to the world – uprooted, dehumanized, decentralized, etc. – the rehumanization of man (centering on oneself, not on the ego; centering on oneself, not on the world) could be equivalent to the (once natural) rehumanization of things – diamonds, animals, plants, etc., in this enormous web of infinite interconnections.