Politics and social issues weave their way into the metaphors and symbols found in Diego Orihuela Ibañez's work, something that he attributes to growing up in South America. The artist is able to straddle the strong beliefs that he holds with the creation of visually stimulating artwork.
Featured in our New Tenants exhibition, we caught up with Ibañez to speak about the importance of nature, the life experiences that have impacted his work and the profound influence that being in lockdown has had on him. Find the full interview below and head to our virtual New Tenants exhibition to view Ibañez's work in the gallery space.
How has living in Peru informed your work?
The perspective of specifically South America is having a very political point of view towards what would normally be established as normal things. This kind of critical thought, critical analysis, that I'm sure a lot of other regions in the world also have, allows me to navigate the world and how I want to have an agency through my work in the world.
Do you feel like you don't have a choice but to be politically active? You've not made a choice to be aware of these things it's just in the nature of where you've grown up.
Of course, this would be true also of a lot of countries, maybe all of them, it depends on how you construct your identity and the social conditions in which you are born. Going more specifically in Peru, I think we have a nice tradition of melancholic contemplation. In general, the culture is based on this kind of ambient high mountain culture and this capacity of contemplating or maybe projecting the inside on the outside, on the territory and the landscape. Also, the capacity of fiction to be able to create or build a world. The fact of the world built through fiction is very important and I think that is something I try to do in my work.
The piece that you submitted where you explore this digitally created nature-fueled environment. Why did you choose to look at nature for the piece?
I did the piece when the quarantine here in Peru was very strict, last year and we had our first wave. I was not able to go outside of my house so I started working a little bit with video, editing, virtual reality and virtual spaces. I started to think about what working in these spaces implies. What are the relationships which are appearing between the virtual world and all my nostalgia and need to go out and be present in that space? The concept of nature and how we understand territory as an image but also as a fantasy is my main line of research, so I normally work on those subjects. Terraformation one is all about space and how the Covid situation made us think of territory as something that is shrinking, a very limited space. I want to do Terraformation Two which will be about time and how the Covid situation makes time seem elongated.
I come from a very traditional art school, painting, sculpture and whatever. I was doubting this video because I didn't have much craft put into the work. I was playing, I recorded and I tried to build up this beautiful text that I put in the subtitles but I was like maybe it is not enough. I actually understood the power of text and the oral narration at the same time going with the image and these two objects going around. It was a very nice moment, actually that you have accepted the piece, I am very happy because I trusted the ideas but I didn't know if it was good enough or skilful enough.
Watching the film in lockdown and knowing that you made it in response to being in lockdown there is a feeling of escapism. Is that something that has developed in your work since being in lockdown or something that you have always explored?
For the last five or six years of my life, I've been travelling constantly, every year doing something. Suddenly, having this all disrupted and having this very strong change towards what I can do and what I can not do, where I can go and where I can not go, all these situations made it necessary. Then I was thinking it is necessary but how is this shaping a new vision of the world. A new vision of territory, a new vision of space in general.
All my friends and everyone I know were like 'have you seen this website where you can go and drive around any city.' All these kind of nostalgic things because we can not go outside and we're trying to balance out this need of actually going around, navigate around, walking around. Virtual space being just space. This new territory and the question is what is next? What comes from these intuitions? In this new territory, what are the echoes that go with, for example, the notions of colonialism and terraformation? Are we actually forming a new territory like maybe 100, 200, 300 years ago, colonial thinking was exercising power in new territories where they thought it was neutral.
It's crazy to hear you talk about driving around a city as nostalgic. What really interested me is your interest in video games.
I have a strange relationship to video games because when I was very little I never owned a video game. I was quite a nerdy kid and I really liked books and I really liked to draw I was not very attracted to video games. Then I started to approach video games because of the lockdown. I also suffer from this strange nostalgia, I found myself going to Google street view just to feel like I was walking in the city because it had been months and I didn't even remember the name of the street I used to cross every day to go to university. I was like 'what the fuck are you doing? Why are you doing this?'
Video games are a safe place for me to not go mad. You can see in the video these very simple pixilated games, very bad quality for the illustration but I actually didn't care. It's not even about the task because normally with video games you have a task, you have certain missions. It was just going around, wondering this fake landscape and finding the edges and falling down the edges and accepting that it was only a piece of land made for my own amusement.
Looking through a lot of your work, creating nature-inspired pieces through technology is a common theme. What is it about this that really interests you?
When I was growing up, I had this very intimate relationship with plants and with little animals because I was very socially anxious so I didn't have too many friends. Then when I was growing up I discovered my own queer identity. I felt very left outside of the natural discourse of things, like how can I reconcile the good relationships I used to have with the natural world when I was a kid now that these other desires that come from my body are supposedly unnatural? I really struggled with that for a time and in the end, I decided that there were two options: making everything natural or making everything unnatural. It was a big revelation when I found Donna Haraway's book The Cyber Manifesto and began to understand technology as part of natural conceptions and natural bodies and just another device for enacting power. It was very important for me to reconcile these binaries. 2020 was very productive for me because the condition of this little invisible thing making a lot of political injustices and abuses visible was very interesting. I didn't want to talk about the virus directly but the consequences that the virus has had on the world and how we think about the world.
Are there any personal experiences that you think really shaped how you look at art?
There's one about five years ago, I was travelling around the North of the country, in the mountains. The highest mountain here is called Huascaran and I went in the region of it and there was this national park and they offer this trip to the national park. I went with a lot of tourists and the bus made some stops for some iconic objects or plants in the national park and they stopped in an apparently not very important place. They made us go out of the bus and there were these little ponds in the ground and they were orange, rusty orange. The guy was like 'one year ago you could drink from these ponds because it was very pure water that comes from the snow on the top of the mountain.' Everybody thought it was because of the mining industry but it was actually because of a bacteria that randomly decided to pollute all the water. We cannot drink it but there are a lot of fungus insects and plants that are very happy with this water and right now they are flourishing because of this bacteria. It was the first time I understood that there are other species that are living their lives around us and we are so self-centred to think that the world is made for us. There are other agendas and their agendas are not necessarily linked to our benefit as humans. That was a very beautiful and special moment for me to start developing my line of research.
Are you optimistic about the future?
I will say yes. I am optimistic about the future but it's obvious that we are driving directly towards a very specialist trench and very impactful moment in human history. I think it's inevitable. These questions about resources sustainability, relationships with others, I think we have been trying to avoid all these questions towards the 80s, the 90s, even the first years of the 2000s but right now everything is coming back. I really like to think about the comeback of the material, the comeback of what has been forgotten or we didn't want to see or acknowledge. I'm not talking only about climate change I am talking about, for example, the environment. These strange underground, invisible relationships that we weren't paying attention to are coming back in very strange forms to mutate and to history a little bit this pretentious narrative of the total control of the world by humans. I am optimistic because I think we will be able to find a way to cohabitate with others, with other bodies, with other relationships but probably will be a quite traumatic experience at the end of the time. Probably it will present itself in a very traumatic form but let's hope that I am totally wrong.