Shot from beneath the sea, Juan Covelli’s Oso de agua (2020) displays the mechanisms of world building that underpin the artist’s world building excursions. Focusing on an illuminated tardigrade, otherwise known as a water bear, the moonlit scene incorporates natural and man-made elements, exposing the techno-colonial forces that infringe upon undistributed nature.
Drawn from Covelli’s Fragmented Garden (2020), this edition continues the artist’s investigation into the relationship between Western power and the New World. In these scenes, the abundance of natural resources found in Latin America are exposed to the biological experimentation found at the frontiers of science, betraying a pervasive logic of exploitation.