Oratorio for a Constitution of the Earth

As in Poland and its neighbours, across much of Latin American countries there is a growing tendency to reassess the political and economic transformations set in motion in the 1980s. What is at stake in these ongoing debates, however, is not so much an accounting of the past as a reflection on the politics of tomorrow.

The works brought together in the exhibition Oratorio for a Constitution of the Earth invite us to exercise our imagination, distancing themselves from patriarchal and technocratic visions of modernisation. They also demonstrate that, despite geographical distance and cultural differences, engaged artists from Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe are seeking answers to similar questions today. How can we free ourselves from enduring forms of colonial and imperial violence that perpetuate contemporary social divisions and enable the unrestricted exploitation of resources? Can the legacy of twentieth-century emancipatory social and cultural movements be reconciled with the struggle for the rights of nature?

The exhibition takes its title from a work by Marcelo Expósito, one of more than twenty artists presenting their work at the CSW. His Oratorio para una Constitución de la Tierra (Oratorio for a Constitution of the Earth) is a score for a performative action, composed, among other things, of excerpts from the contemporary constitutions of Ecuador, Bolivia, Mexico and Bhutan, as well as Chile’s rejected draft constitution of 2022. Like Expósito, many of the other invited artists draw on practices of writing — and, above all, the writing of law — using them as a productive starting point for creative paraphrase and speculation.

Equally important to the exhibition, however, is what precedes language. Through a selection of examples, Oratorio for a Constitution of the Earth traces a shift from twentieth-century forms of performance art, centred on the human being, to contemporary approaches to performativity that place the more-than-human at the heart of their concerns. It is no coincidence that, as new ways of thinking about nature as a subject in its own right — rather than merely a passive object of human action — emerge, art increasingly foregrounds its agency.

The exhibition presents recent artistic and activist practices alongside works from the 1980s and 1990s. It does not, however, aspire to be encyclopaedic; rather, it takes the form of an exhibition-essay. Through associative juxtapositions, it brings together practices from two opposite hemispheres, in which a concern for the well-being of the planet as a whole makes itself felt to an equal degree, albeit in different ways shaped by their respective contexts. We hope that this exhibition will offer a new perspective on issues that are becoming increasingly important to contemporary culture in Poland and other countries of the former Eastern Bloc.