City of Gaia

Period 2023. 12. 22. ~ 2024. 2. 25.
Location ACC Creation Space 3 & 4, Asia Culture Center

The 2023 ACC Focus City of Gaia is an exhibition designed to explore the relationship between plants, which represent nature, and humans, who have been drivers of civilization. Gaia is the ancient Greek goddess of the Earth and a mother goddess who oversees the cycle of birth, growth, death, and rebirth.

In this exhibition, however, Gaia refers to Mother Nature as an active being, namely a self-regulatory system that maintains a stable chemical condition for the Earth that allows all life, including humans, to continue. The explosive impact of capitalism and industrialization in recent centuries has opened a rift between humans and nature and sparked an antagonistic relationship. A superior position for humans as rulers over nature was asserted and emphasized. As a result, Gaia became reactive to the human-centered mechanistic world view by activating its self-regulation mechanisms and maintaining homeostasis, bringing about an altered climate, natural disasters, and all kinds of viruses and diseases. In recent years, the discourse on coexistence between humans and nature and future sustainability has developed along through a reconsideration of nature from a posthumanist perspective.

After recognizing the importance of ecological balance and solidarity by rethinking the relationship between humans and nature, people have reached a moment in which we are compelled to pursue not an industrial civilization, but rather an ecological one. This exhibition seeks to share thoughts about the sustainability of an ecological civilization by addressing how elements from nature can be transformed and displaced to cities in accordance with human needs and desires. It also examines the vitality of plants as they exercise an active will to coexist with humans despite the human-centric environment of cities.

‘Green Animals in the City,’ focuses on the characteristics of plants as life forms, such as their dynamic reactions to phenomena, rather than their supposedly passive nature. It sheds light on the vitality and resilience of plants that have adapted to urban environments in which the distance between humans and nature has broadened with the proliferation of gray concrete-covered cities, suggesting the possibility of an ecological civilization in which humans and nature can more closely bond.

‘The Voice of Gaia’ takes the perspective of nature to examine how humanity has treated it. Revealing the contradictions within humans who are the main actors behind the destruction of nature but who also yearn for a symbiotic relationship with plant, it guides us to listen to Gaia as she urges to achieve an ecological balance, and allow us to explore the interactions and organic signals that nature and humans inevitably exchange.

In the hope of facilitating an ongoing discourse about ecological solidarity, City of Gaia aims to provide an opportunity for a better understanding of the organic relations between human and non-human beings as well as the sequence of Gaia’s responses to maintain them.