Artist Juan Zamora paints the Sorigué Foundation blue to talk about biodiversity

An intense blue, between indigo and cobalt, colors the environments of the life in emergency at the Sorigué Foundation in Lleida. The artist Juan ZamoraPrincess of Girona Award for Arts and Letters 2017, evokes that moment of transit at dusk or dawn when chromatic intensity precedes a change of statea birth or a death.

This blue accompanies us through 9 rooms with pieces from 2008, in which his work stands out between art and science: sometimes to talk biodiversity or extinction -as in Every flower lostin which he accurately draws plants in danger of extinction in Catalonia–, and others to translate into metaphor -as in Lovetwo opposing clocks whose hands are joined by a string that becomes entangled with the passage of time, or even with music.

We missed some room sheets that explain the biological processes with which Zamora works, such as diseased elm leaves, which are devoured by beetles, whose patterns of holes are assembled into a pentagram and played on various music boxes that the spectator can activate; or about the decellularization process that some leaves undergo to make them bioluminescent in collaboration with the Institute of High Technology in Bergen and the Carlos III Institute in Madrid.

'Cultivar el aire' is his most spectacular piece: in it he brings together bacteria and fungi obtained after exposing Petri dishes to the air from different places in Lleida

Zamora maintains her drawing practice. Perhaps today it doesn't make sense to draw with the same precision as a fingerprint or a botanical atlas. given that the artist does this with the help of an electron microscope and its hyper-precise lines deceive the eye. Except for the caveat that she uses notebooks from when her mother was a seamstress and wrote down family members' measurements, or a textbook from her grandfather. There, the drawings are given new meanings from the personal to the universal, influencing an anthropocentric view that points to the human being, and the artist himself, as the axis of history.

But let's not be mistaken, Zamora is not a mere cartoonist, is also a biohacker. your piece the light appearsin which he inoculates a bioluminescent fluid into the veins of spinach and sunflower leaves, is biotechnological and brings him closer to classic bioart artists such as Eduardo Kac and its famous GFP Rabbit (2000), a bioluminescent rabbit that he inoculated with jellyfish DNA and named “Alba.”

Zamora's installation comes out every minute and a half so that biomodified leaves appear on the floor of burned forests in Madrid and Catalonia under black lamps, building a scenography between sensationalism, science fiction and magic.

cultivate the air It is his most spectacular piece. In it, he brings together bacteria and fungi obtained after exposing the Petri dishes to the air from different places in Lleida, including the foundation itself or the cathedral, creating a microbiological forest of more than 100 species that hang from the ceiling, timidly lit, forming a beautiful portrait of the invisible world that surrounds us and that we unconsciously inhale when we breathe.

[Juan Zamora, by its origins]

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