Gaia project at LEA 13

An old friend like Nino Vichan (we have happily worked together at the Esselle Movie Magazine for a long time) gave me the honor to take part in an amazing project called "Gaia" at LEA. A collaborative event, coordinated by Nino and Aloisio Congrejo and Tani Thor of Tanalois, involving 11 artists (the three mentioned and Betty Tureaud, Kicca Igaly, Gem Preis, Chinon Beaumont, Comet Morigi, Cayenne Avon, Daco Monday and myself), called to be inspired by the well known Lovelock-Margulis Gaia Theory about Earth's life. 

Although it deals with ecology, of course, I wanted to experiment a quite different approach than the most traditional one to that theme. In shooting or selecting my photos I tried to show the lack of balance that industrial and urban development had introduced into the "organic" model built by the Gaia theorist to explain how our planet works as a whole.
So I used a simple trick: alternating images of nature and urban or industrial landscapes in the same frame, and letting the visitors changing them by clicking on easy, opposite symbols set on the photo itself (a burning industrial bin and a tree).

So, my pictures try to show two worlds which cohabit the same planet. The reference to Gaia hypotesis are mostly in the introduction and in the last photo shown.
In the text I started by a quote from one of the first popular books that started to build an ecologist awareness in the Sixties, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, talking of th absurdity of the fight humans are doing against nature, that's a fight against themselves. I continued with another quote, taken by an impressive more recent book, Kevin Kelly's Out of Control, envisaging a future where man doesn't give up "progress" to go back to "nature" (the most naif version of ecology) but where machines (the "Done") do work according to the logic of the nature (the "Born").

This is roughly symbolized by the last picture: tall windmills taking energy from nature in a pleasant and intact natural environment.

It's just an attempt to show something we can only to glimpse, today. But it could be the way for a future where the two worlds could be again only one, "organic" whole.

I can't finish with this post without remarking how the wonderful concert by Ultraviolet at the opening contributed to enjoy the exhibits at their best.