Imperium Anti-Naturae: The historical mistake(s) of Modernity

Mexican artist Mariel Rodríguez will discuss her work ‘Flowers of Evil’ for the finissage for her exhibition at Artistic Bokeh in Q21. The installation, as it is shown right now, presents a summary of the history of the coca plant until it?s inclusion in the List 1 of the 1961 Single Convention of Narcotic Drugs. For the Finissage the video and some elements of the installation will be changed in order to convey the recent history of the commodification of the plant. The illegalization of the coca leaf after the Single Convention aroused multiple social movements claiming for the distinction between cocaine and the coca leaf. Maybe the best well known of these movements is the one headed by Evo Morales, President of Bolivia and leader of cocaleros (coca farmers) himself. In 2012, during a UNO Convention on Narcotic Drugs celebrated in Vienna, Morales, reclaimed the reparation of what he called a ?historical mistake?. Referring to the inclusion of the leaf in the List 1 of the Convention, but also to the prohibition of the traditional practice of chewing coca leaf and using it for medicinal purposes.

Mariel Rodríguez is a visual artist and researcher. Her work explores the use of images in the fabrication of hegemonic discourses that help to shape different identities. Through her visual works and artistic research she seeks to bring forward questions about the entanglement of power with the occidental regimes of the visible, seeking to find poetic ways of subverting meaning.

The exhibition is part of the program UNO, DOIS, DREI? AN EXHIBITION IN THREE INSTALLMENTS a Mz. Baltazars Laboratory curatorial project in collaboration with RIAT Research Institute for Arts & Technology at Artistic Bokeh in Q21. For this exhibition series Patricia J. Reis and Anna T. have invited artists focusing on language in a multitude of ways. Being based in a place that has been so divided in the context of immense sociopolitical changes, while becoming more multi-cultural, the curators wanted to look into language as a technology of communicating, connecting, and coming together. The exhibition series examines the visual language of colonialism (and who or what becomes illegal), the human and machine language and its threshold of function and dysfunction, and the embodied language of a queer migrant body that opens up and connects with other bodies and spirits alike. Mz* Baltazar?s Lab?s curatorial viewpoint brings together artists from different media and backgrounds that speak to the diversity of the creative hub that is Vienna. Mz* Baltazar?s Lab further aim at highlighting the lengthy process of artistic practice as research in the framework of social and political themes, such as migration, Eurocentrism, cyborgs, queerness, and the overarching theme of language. We are happy to present Mariel Rodríguez, Isabella Kohlhuber, and Pêdra Costa in a series of exhibitions running from August to December 2016 at the space of Artistic Bokeh in the MQ?s Electric Avenue.

This work is funded and supported by kültü? gemma! 2016, and it?s presentation made possible by Mz Baltazar’s Laboratory and RIAT Research Institute for Arts and Technology.