That the Earth is the Middle of the World
Artist: Mara Eagle
Exhibition: January 22 to March 5, 2022
Projet Pangée is thrilled to present That the Earth is the Middle of the World (2020), a two-channel video by Mara Eagle. The artwork incorporates excerpts from Pliny’s Naturalis Historia (23–79 CE), a scientific encyclopedia cataloging all the earth’s elements, systems and creatures known at the time in the early Roman Empire. This text is one of the first of its kind in its formulation of an encyclopedic approach towards natural phenomena, and has since become fundamental to the study, documentation and knowledge of nature in the West. On the left screen, a submerged humanoid narrator recites chapter headings from the table of contents of Naturalis Historia, while on the right we bear witness to a baroque and hallucinatory ecosystem seething with natural and synthetic life forms.
The video is a collage of over 500 elements, and imagines “nature” as a product of conceptual bricolage informed by the arts, sciences, technology industries and pop culture. The endless list of natural phenomena recited by the narrator conjures both creation à la Noah’s arc and extinction— an endless womb-grave in which the human is imagined as a residual or vestigial structure of the landscape. […]
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The video is a collage of over 500 elements, and imagines “nature” as a product of conceptual bricolage informed by the arts, sciences, technology industries and pop culture. The endless list of natural phenomena recited by the narrator conjures both creation à la Noah’s arc and extinction— an endless womb-grave in which the human is imagined as a residual or vestigial structure of the landscape. A self-conscious investigation of apocalyptic aesthetics, the work both indulges in and grapples with the cinematic languages of spectacle and destruction. As the two scenes are intermittently drenched by rainfall and fogged by morning mist, foley tropes borrowed from horror and sci-fi cinema create a narrative that vacillates between earnestness and irony, between the Romantic, the tragic and the absurd.
That the Earth is the Middle of the World was made with the generous support of the Berggruen Institute and the Transformations of the Human Program.
Biography
Mara Eagle (b. 1988, Boston, MA, USA) is an American video and installation artist based in Montreal. Pulling intuitively from the world of pop-culture, the Internet and technology industries, her work explores the legacy of West-ern philosophy and science from a feminist perspective. Most recently her major projects have been animation-based and focus on how practices of observation, description, and representation in Western art and science have formulated a concept of nature amenable to industrialization, colonialism and spectacle.
Mara Eagle holds a Bachelor of Arts from Marlboro College (Vermont) and a Master of Fine Arts from Concordia University (Montre-al). She is Concordia University’s 2020 Bron-fman fellow, as well as a fellow of the Berggru-en Institute with which she participates in the Transformations of the Human working-group focused on biotechnology. Recently, her work has been exhibited at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, The Canadian Centre for Architecture, Eastern Bloc, Critical Distance, the University of Kentucky Art Museum, as well as Centre Clark, Studio XX, Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, and Saw Video Media Center. Her research has been generously supported by the Conseil des arts et des Lettres du Québec, the Berggruen Institute, the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et culture (FRQSC) and the Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Family Foundation.
