A Growing Wave breaks in the Shore of Time (Tomorrow I was a plant) 2020-2021/2024 Performative installation

Elena Bajo's works investigate the ecological, political and social dimensions that permeate our daily lives in order to conceptualize, through them, strategies for resistance and for the resetting of the current man-nature relationship. A Growing Wave Breaks on the Shore of Time (Tomorrow I was a Plant) investigates the possibility of turning medicinal plants into narrators of their own conception of history. In the context of this project, the artist has carried out different works that are related to each other, and among those we present in the exhibition. The installation Poppy Studies Installing reflects the results of his field research into ancestral uses and representations of the rubble throughout history. Mixed within the piece, we also find A Plant Manifesto, some ceramic heads in the form of capsules from this same plant, with which the artist proposes the realization of a performance in which the participants connect with them through their intake and come to feel and act as such.
Finally, in The Dance of the Opium Poppies we find a possible image of this fusion between human being and rubble, reinterpreted in this case by Google's artificial intelligence and the way in which it considers the psychedelic effects to be they produce in the brain after the intake of a psychoactive substance such as opium from this plant.

The Dance of the Opium Poppies 2021
Tapestry of cotton fabric woven with Jacquard loom, dyes and essences of Papaver Somniferum. Image created from analog photographic collage in collaboration with the Papaver Somniferum and machine intelligence.
Poppy Studies Installation 2020/2024
Debris, dried poppies, seeds, petals, plastic
A Plant Manifesto 2021
Performative sculpture, engobe and handmade glazed ceramics, dyes, plant parts.

Courtesy of the artist. Produced with the support of A/CE Acción Cultural Española, EKWC and Matadero Madrid
​


​


​