Musealizing Cheap Nature

art, ruins and anthropocene in the South Forest of Pernambuco

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the operation of musealization in relation to the tributary processes of contemporary art and the dimension of ruin, which are aligned with the problematic of dematerialization and degradation of objects, converging with the recent emphasis of multidisciplinary interests in the concept of Anthropocene. Drawing attention to the environmental crisis as a political emergency and a context of material and ecological damage beyond the artworks and exhibition spaces already discarded as durable object, according to the current counterpoint to the perspective of anthropocentric art prevailing in the modern experience. Throughout the study, some poetics of interlocutors of the contemporary visual arts scene will be explored, with selected works that dialogue with the rural landscape conformed by the traditional plantation, exhibited in the Art Plant Botanical Art Park, which can be seen as a Contemporary Art Landscape Museum (MPAC).  Starting from the general (the conceptual dematerialization of contemporary art, the ruin as poetics, the appeal of the Anthropocene) to the particular (the regional experience of artistic processes with the plantation landscape in Mata Sul, Pernambuco), the research adopts as specific objective to analyze how musealization procedures behave within the temporal (historical) and regional specificities that situate this fraction of the visual arts circuit in a context of critical review of traditional museology and modernity.