Various Artists

toxiThropea.sunset

Various Artists,DEPBLFHTHDIG, Kunsthal Extra City, Antwerp, 2019.

Various Artists, ‘toxiThropea.sunset’ (2019), in ‘Deadly Affairs’, Kunsthal Extra City, Antwerp, photo by Tomas Uyttendaele

toxiThropea is a series of installations that poetically investigates the tense and increasingly toxic relationship between humans and nature. Conceived as a speculative ecology, the works emerge from the premise that human intervention has rendered the planet ecologically unstable, giving rise to mutations that function as omens of deeper, irreversible transformations.

The series imagines future scenarios in which natural resources are depleted and human presence is reduced to absence, retreat, or passive observation. These are landscapes that exist beyond nature’s capacity for self-repair. The viewer is positioned as a witness to aesthetic simulations of an intoxicated biosphere—beautiful, fragile, and terminal.

Formally, the installations consist of illuminated glass tanks containing sculptural elements suspended in chemically altered water. Bonsai-like forms appear frozen in states of submersion, fossilisation, or slow dissolution. Light, colour, and opacity evoke sunsets, radioactive afterglows, and artificial horizons. These seductive atmospheres conceal the violence embedded in their making and maintenance.

Reflecting the logics of economic productivity they critique, the works are laboriously produced using energy-intensive processes, largely dependent on fossil fuels. The installations thus embody a paradox: they require constant technological support to remain “alive,” exposing the contradiction between aesthetic preservation and ecological exhaustion. What appears serene and otherworldly is, in fact, precarious and resource-hungry.

toxiThropea recalls a time—perhaps our present—when chemical processes continuously alter the state of nature, operating independently of human intention or control. In these environments, humanity no longer acts as steward or destroyer, but as an absent cause. The works stage a quiet confrontation with our inability to sustain the only biosphere we inhabit.

As part of the broader research project Água com Gás, toxiThropea contributes to an ongoing investigation into water-related issues such as pollution, privatisation of water supply, depletion, and salinisation of water sources. The series exemplifies how this research unfolds through multiple concepts and materialisations, generated by different configurations of Various Artists, each addressing the political, ethical, and ecological dimensions of water in a destabilised world.