THE BODY IN THE MIDDLEWith Landra

On the last day of the exhibition Jumana Manna: Screenings and Studies, and at the end of a reading club dedicated to the study and critique of imperial, civilizational and colonial processes, Landra takes us outside. Attentive to the qualities of this place we inhabit, it is amidst people’s ways and their culture that we seek fragilities. Which indispensable life-bound processes have fallen out of our control? What kind of comfort or discomfort lies in this condition? Our walk ends in nameless places; peripheral sites, unsurveilled, lawless. At times, hope lurks from the shadows, patiently waiting for the right moment to save us. We’ll identify forms of life without order: from the little banished weeds to the unapologetically emerging great trees. In freedom, these beings teach us autonomy; they lead us to revolution.

Landra is the name Sara Rodrigues and Rodrigo B. Camacho give to the land they live in, and how they are known as an artistic duo. The term refers to the acorns of oaks in the Iberian Northwest. Through landras, the duo pays homage to a culture of autonomy, sovereignty and self-sufficiency, which they seek to recover. Landra is developing as a resilient food-forest and is also a place for theoretical and practical experimentation with methods of agro-ecological production, energy conservation, and art-life politics. Sara and Rodrigo started working together in 2015 at Goldsmiths, University of London. Their projects develop via audiovisual composition, performance, installation and public space interventions. They are interested in creating systems that continue over time in an organic way, and that are flexible and responsive to constant change. Complementing their background in the arts, they studied permaculture and soil microbiology, whose concepts and techniques they employ in soil remediation and ecosystem restoration projects.