Regina de Miguel: Things Fall Apart | Toronto Biennial of Art
In Poisoned Waters, the protagonist spends her days waiting to receive another mission. However, this will not be assigned to her in a direct manner, but rather through knowledge and through dialogue with various human and non-human actants that populate the planet she inhabits by accident. In this way, she befriends an old woman with whom she discovers that the swamp is an interface that brings back voices from other times; specifically, from a group of suicides: Anne Sexton, Sarah Kane, Dalida, Antonieta Rivas Mercado, Alejandra Pizarnik, Sylvia Plath, Jean Seberg, Ana Cristina César, Chantal Akerman, and the Unknown Woman of the Seine.
A choral lament which provides evidence that these final acts are a failure of the collective—a lack of listening, a lack of attention. She also converses with the Arecibo Observatory, which tells her how the fundamental elements for the formation of life were found on comet 67P; how the probe that inhabited this primordial brick of the cosmos also performed a suicide maneuver, slowly crashing into it while broadcasting live.
This antenna feels it has witnessed scientific events explaining the formation and origin of life, but has not understood how the moment of annihilation arrived on Earth.
Multiple connections begin to unfold in the consciousness of the scientist after a nocturnal walk. Animated and inanimate things begin to form a whole, a chorus that precedes the certainty of her next mission.
This “whole” reveals a harmony with the speculations of Bruno Latour or Object-Oriented Ontology, which is condensed in the song that closes this film—created in collaboration with singer and composer Lucrecia Dalt (Pereira, Colombia, 1980), who creates atmospheres that generate dense and dreamlike soundscapes.
There is a rose growing that is a snail and a quartz. A bottle that is a river and a flame. A perfume that is a fingernail and a copper wire. A bone that is a clay vessel, that is cheese and wine. Bread that is a bridge and is late. A house that is a train and a tomb. A war that is skin and fish. A lion that is a door and a coat. A dump that is a pool and a palm tree...
Science fiction underpins this imaginary of desolate and estranged landscapes, but not in a dystopian, nihilistic, or reactionary way. In front of “a world that leaves a suicide note,” the protagonist, in the twilight of planet Tornus, receives messages from other times and places, through “exotics”—particles that connect different universes, real and dreamt: “The more remote, the more urgent the question.”
In this story, the acceptance of uncertainty, vulnerability, fragility, listening, and empathy with everything that exists operate as a form of resistance, and art serves as a medium; perhaps the most unsettling thing about this chronicle, this meticulous report, is that we do not know to whom it is addressed, nor for what purpose.
Ana Ara and Rosa Ferré
