ADRIANA BUSTOS

Adriana Bustos maps diverse histories and iconographies to analyse and critically rethink the processes through which present-day forms of knowledge have been constructed and made to seem natural, and to build new networks of transhistorical associations. Her painting and ceramics in ‘Rethinking Nature’ explore how the systematisation of relationships between living beings and ecologies in the European natural and geological sciences underwrote colonial processes. Bestiario de Indias I features images gathered from the chronicles of the natural scientists and other European voyagers and settlers who arrived on the shores of what would become South America as the outriders of waves of colonisation. Describing beings with mythological and monstrous features, these accounts reflected the religious and social prejudices present in Medieval bestiaries, and also wove in elements from indigenous cosmologies encountered in the Americas. In rendering a less than human image of indigenous peoples and consigning their worldview to superstition and ignorance, these images ideologically underpinned the genocide and expropriation that ensued across five centuries.

Artist statement

I am interested in how humanization is a constant element in the representation of monsters, giants, pygmies, mermaids and hybrid beings – how it speaks of human beings’ relationship with the natural world and with the culture of their time, and invites us to accept the validity of the anthropocentric view of nature in our culture and in what we believe to be the real nature of the world. Since growing up in Cordoba, a city central to the history of colonialism in South America, I have centered my artistic practice on how iconographic and epistemological research can help approach history through non-linear critical terms and envision new articulations for it in relation to the present. Anthropological investigation, scientific research, popular culture, fiction, image assembling, academic and intuitive knowledge, the juxtaposition of multiple epistemological frameworks, the unfolding of official and personal histories, the tension between objectivity and subjectivity and notions of fragmentation are among the tools I use to build new networks of transhistorical associations between past and present occurrences.