Texts
Texts
Blanca de la Torre
Quadra Minerale: Rare earth and critc minerals
Addressing issues involving fossil resources from the optic of the visual arts without falling into some of the most recurrent commonplaces and aesthetics is a highly fraught task, which is why Rosell Meseguer tackles this subject matter with apposite precaution, taking a subtle approach in which she appropriates the conventional dictionary format in order to offer the reader an apparently simplified way of reading some of the elements of the periodic table and their fossil derivatives.
This compendium compiles knowledge on Geology, Economic Theory and Political Ecology and combines them with the personal archive of the artist’s “memory” in the form of maps, drawings, photographs and sketches that have been part of her body of work since 1999, and even objects from her own family, like some beakers for soldiers in the Spanish Civil War belonging to her grandfather, and minerals she acquired or are on loan from IGME (Geological and Mining Institute of Spain).
Meseguer’s decision to opt for the format of the old encyclopaedia or dictionary would seem to ironically point to a particular period, the so-called Enlightenment, key to the history of the colonisation of Nature, in which, in the name of alleged —heteropatriarchal, white and Eurocentric—knowledge, the foundations of other types of traditional forms of knowledge were destroyed, like those of indigenous communities and, in consequence, those related to an understanding of and respect for nature.