The INBA, (National Institute of Monuments and Fine Arts) presents Possessing Nature by the artists Tania Candiani and Luis Felipe Ortega, curated by Karla Jasso, a project chosen for its conceptual coherence, technical detail and aesthetic impact to represent Mexico at the 56th International Art Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia.

María Cristina García Cepeda, General Manager of INBA emphasises: “The presence of Mexico at the Art Biennale 2015 has become a benchmark for the development and promotion of contemporary art in our country. A presence that allows the divulgation of contemporary Mexican Art, and at the same time provides an opportunity to assess the international impact of our cultural politics. For the National Institute of Fine Arts, it is a privilege to reinforce Mexico's participation in the Art Biennale."

Possessing Nature is based on the idea of a juxtaposition between Venice and Mexico, “amphibious territories” that share the same origin and the same connection with water, even though they have taken radically different paths that have irremediably separated our destinies.

In effect, the imagine of a city founded on water belongs to the spellbound kingdom of dreams and fantasy. Thus Venice, an ancient seafaring republic, the “bride of the sea”, was built embracing the lagoon with an urban landscape of alleys, passageways, channels and canals, allowing it to maintain its connection with the water and rendering it the city of the sea par excellence, the most romantic city in the world. In contrast Mexico, insisting on and forcing territorial expansion by way of drainage systems, above all in the colonial period, drained lakes and rivers to found towns and cities: the Mexican landscape was distorted, completely destroyed by the desires of the Spanish empire that left water rich territory parched. Today, more than four hundred years later, Mexico still continues to constantly control the hydraulic system, claiming to be constructing “the best system in the world”.

What it is the relationship between political power, sovereignty, the economy and the power of the community in these two scenarios, where past and present meet on the same journey? This is the question behind the Mexican Pavilion's inquiry. The project responds to Okwui Enwezor’s proposal “to reflect on both the current ‘state of things’ and the ‘appearance of things’” in its monumentality; it concerns liquid memory, the utopia of colonization, sovereignty and the logics of catastrophe in the present.

A plan was drawn up following the alleys and canals of Venice, a path, a route that connects the spaces of the Mexican Pavilion at recent editions of la Biennale Arte. A line that, passing historical palaces, places of noble, trade, religious and military power, arrives at the Arsenale, revealing the connection between the characteristics of the city, the architecture, the water and history, and of Western power. Possessing Nature, the result of a collaboration between Tania Candiani and Luis Felipe Ortega, is “one work, two signatures”.

The two artists use different languages: while Candiani works mainly with the voice, with its narrative linguistic and musical potential, Ortega works with the image in motion and the passing of time, focusing on the material, on the sculpture and on space.

The artists wanted to trace the route, conceiving of a large installation that seems to devour the exhibition space and its visitors: a hydraulic device that continually inhales and rejects the water of the lagoon, generating a deafening, intense noise in a whirl of images and sounds that underline the unpredictability of a natural imbalance in the arrogant human insistence on possessing nature. The water in the sculpture expresses itself furiously, reminding us that the vitality of the natural element is a lot more powerful than any human attempt to control it.

In a globalized world, technology wants to dominate nature, only to find itself, inevitability, in a defective and compromised process. Candiani and Ortega's work denounces the perversion of colonial sovereignty, still present in today's governments: trying to possess nature becomes the mirror of power. Possessing Nature is completed by To Invoke Buried Rivers, a live performance, from 6th to 10thMay. It consists of a journey through Venice canals, revisiting the trace that connects the locations that hosted the Mexican Pavilion during the twenty first century. Through this journey, baritone Oscar Velazquez will name the rivers that have run dry, transformed into drains or avenues. By naming them, they rise again to the surface. The score is written by Gabriela Ortíz, a Mexican composer who started working with the idea of a recitative, and developed it with sound haikus for each of the rivers. The action recovers dead rivers that have been repeatedly supplanted by hydraulic infrastructure. It emphasizes the way in which water ‘carries the voice’ making use of the resonant nature of Venice's architecture and the canals’ acoustic.