Päivi Maunu: With the Rainforest, Performental Art, Gamboa, Panama, 2019

Completion year: 2019

Technique: Performental Art, Performance and Environmental Art

Shedding one’s skin in a new era is an artistic and bio-metamorphological project that I implemented at the Digital Naturalism Conference 2019 in Gamboa, Panama. It is a visual work with tropical rainforest plants, their shadows, and animals such as ants.
I used Performental Art, a combination of performance, environmental, and community art. The purpose of the method is to instigate a deep understanding of one's own role in the ecosystem by observing, studying, analyzing, imitating, and blurring the distinction between the human animal and other natural beings and systems. In meditative work, I reflect on the possibilities of Posthumanism. How would I thank the earthworm that aerates the soil? What position do I adopt in relation to interactive technology? A critical examination of one's lifestyle forces one to live one's own art.
By a new era, I am referring to the Anthropocene, and humankind’s profound geological effect on a changing world. Through art, the project aims to bring us closer to a realization of our existence as part of a whole and to the recognition that, by destroying our environment, we are perpetuating a process of self-annihilation. The methods the project uses include artistic and biological metamorphoses –transformations– that have been implemented in performance and environmental art works. Openness to interpretation as well as tolerance of chance and contingency open the project up to wonder and the restoration of seasonal change.

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