ESTEBAN PÉREZ

About the Work:

Liquid Land is a video & sound installation informed by Indigenous ways of knowing from Ecuador and by ideas that Squamish artist, Aaron Nelson-Moody aka Splash shared with me during our collaboration on the Earth Project. The work attempts to stop seeing nature and the forest through an extractive gaze, where nature is only a commodity and an object that needs to be exploited for capitalist profit, and instead tries to understand the complex living ecosystem of the forest where more-than-human entities, human bodies, and spirits from the past meet.

Liquid Land presents a 15:03 minutes video of a brick sculpture made from a mix of unceded territory —land from outside the school— and First Nations Land — collected with Splash. The idea behind placing the sculpture back in the forest was to let the biological and natural processes like rain, snow, and wind, dissolve the ideological divisions embedded in the land narrative. The video presents a slow process of decomposition that forces the viewer to experience a different sense of time, a more-than-human time.