Slow Violence
Slow Violence is a site-responsive intervention in which a glacier documents its own extinction. By strategically placing blue-tinted sheets of paper underneath meting areas of the glacier, the artist has allowed the ice to map its slow but steady disappearance. The unstopping, yet constant dripping of meltwater slowly washed away the blue pigment – a non-toxic water-based ink – creating images that are not only made by the agency of the glacier itself, but which contain their own history.
The intervention takes its name from Rob Nixon’s book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), who describes it as ‘a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.’
Slow Violence | Installation view | Glacial melt upon blue-tinted sheets of paper
“Sbastida’s ‘Slow Violence’ takes us into the space of a glacier’s destruction to witness a poetic capture of hidden activity held in its icy cavities. Through the artist’s interventions, works on paper become a temporal document of a process that reveals both actions and evidence of how matter and material organises itself in conceptual and physical ways.”
“Depicting melting glaciers can very quickly occur rather familiar and cliché as polar bears and disappearing ice-caps have become the ultimate symbol to signify climate change. To break out of the numbed senses tied to an accustomed image and re-awaken the audience about the daunting reality, can be challenging. This however, is exactly what Sbastida has done with his project ‘Slow Violence’. By using the blue-tinted sheets of paper to document the process of dripping ice and placing them in the melted environments, Sbastida managed to encapsulate the speed of time. By doing so he goes beyond the symbolic and aesthetic and re-introduces the sense of realness and urgency of the climate collapse, without losing the poetics and elegance of the work.”
Born in Spain in 1989, Sbastida describes himself as a transdisciplinary visual artist working across installation, situated performance and video, investigating the intersections of cultural ecologies, geologic phenomena and climate breakdown.
His projects are often highly conceptual, developed from a synergy of scientific, eco-critic, and philosophical influences – including the post-humanities, the natural sciences, environmental activism and post-colonial studies. Through an interrogation of anthropocentric cosmologies within the context of contemporary nature-cultures, his work seeks to generate ‘spaces for critical reflection around concepts of sustainability, and to provide perspectives of belonging, cross-contamination and mutuality in our relationship with the Earth Organism.’
Miguel Sbastida is based in Madrid (Spain), and his work is represented by LMNO Gallery, Brussels. Sbastida graduated from an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2015–17), with the full support of a scholarship from La Caixa Foundation. He completed a BFA at Universidad Complutense of Madrid (2007–12) with time studying in the Netherlands (2011) and Canada (2012). His practice has been awarded several prizes and grants.