Statement of PLANTA

Through the exhibition ‘Blind Sensorium: Visual Anthropology’, a co-production by Fundació Sorigué and Matadero Madrid, Linke proposed a visual approach to climate change and its material landscape from a rigorous and reflective perspective. The exhibition, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Spain, was presented at Nave 0 in Matadero from March 12 to May 20, 2021 and was visited by more than 19,000 people.

The Fundació Sorigué, through its PLANTA project, has supported for the last five years the research carried out by the artist together with his collaborators on the forces that impact the surface of the Earth. Linke has materialized his project, which combines cinema, photography, documentation, interviews and field work, in the film ‘Blind Sensorium’ (Fundació Sorigué collection). It is a film conceived as an artistic essay that examines the many aspects of the Anthropocene.

‘Blind Sensorium: Visual Anthropology’, proposed as a visual witness of climate change and its landscape, invited us to become aware of the critical situation of the Earth and of the conflicting role that human beings and modern societies play in its transformation. The images incited us to reflect on the actions of man and to observe and interpret the new natural and artificial landscapes that we inhabit. The exhibition was offered as a tool for understanding the circumstances and the possible negotiation of new solutions for our planet.

Blind Sensorium

The centerpiece of the exhibition, ‘Blind Sensorium‘, is a synthesis of more than ten years of fieldwork by Armin Linke and his collaborators Giulia Bruno and Giuseppe Ielasi. Through the combined use of photography and video, they have produced a visual corpus of climate change politics, asking: What is the role of images and representation in today’s political landscape? What does it mean to observe processes of which one is an inherent part?

Linke and his team have followed and interviewed scientists, politicians, and activists, gaining access to laboratories, data centers, United Nations negotiating rooms, natural resource extraction zones, and sites critical to Earth’s ecosystems. Research on the institutions of modern times and the role they play in today’s world leads us to question whether they are capable of responding to the existential challenges of the present.

As a result, a 103-minute film where this journey is narrated and a visual analysis of the conflictive spaces of climate change and the intersections and the permanent blockade between politics, science, economy, finance, culture and the logic of technological innovation is carried out. . For all these reasons, ‘Blind Sensorium’ is a visual anthropology of the problematic role that human beings and modern societies play in the current planetary transformation.

Armin Linke

For more than twenty years, Armin Linke (Milan, 1966) has explored the question of how humanity uses technology and knowledge to transform the Earth’s surface and adapt it to its needs. His films and photographs document man-made changes on land, in the sea, and throughout the biosphere. His work focuses on documenting the effects of globalization and infrastructures on different local populations, and is also an artistic reflection on the changing role of photography in a world governed more and more by abstract processes and their infrastructure. material and conceptual.

Linke has been a professor at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG) and at IUAV Venice, as well as a research associate at the MIT Cambridge School of Architecture and Planning, USA. He is currently a visiting professor at ISIA Urbino and artist-in-residence at the KHI in Florence – MPI. Linke lives and works in Berlin.