How many idiots are here? 2024
SÍM Gallery, Korpúlfsstaðir, Iceland
How many idiots are here? 2024
SÍM Gallery, Korpúlfsstaðir, Iceland
How many idiots are here? 2024
SÍM Gallery, Korpúlfsstaðir, Iceland
How many idiots are here? 2024
SÍM Gallery, Korpúlfsstaðir, Iceland
How many idiots are here? 2024
SÍM Gallery, Korpúlfsstaðir, Iceland
How many idiots are here? 2024
SÍM Gallery, Korpúlfsstaðir, Iceland
How many idiots are here? 2024
SÍM Gallery, Korpúlfsstaðir, Iceland
How many idiots are here? 2024
SÍM Gallery, Korpúlfsstaðir, Iceland
How many idiots are here? 2024
SÍM Gallery, Korpúlfsstaðir, Iceland
How many idiots are here? 2024
SÍM Gallery, Korpúlfsstaðir, Iceland
How many idiots are here? 2024 Plants, tray, table, towel and lamp Platform, golf putting mat, concrete supports with tubes, branches and tape Artificial turf golf mat, lava with moss and lava with cement 170 x 400 x 500 cm
To create this work, I have spent the last few days collecting discarded objects. I walked among piles of trash and debris, discarded objects due to their obsolescence or lack of utility. And there, in that desolate landscape, I built false trees with pieces of wood bound with tape, placed on concrete bases with tubes that once held something more important. These "trees" are mine, an artificial, grotesque, and fragile creation, but they are also a reflection of our human behavior. We have become experts at building simulacra, at accurately recreating what we have destroyed, while pretending that everything is under control. Yet, the artifice is always present.
In one corner of my work lies an artificial turf golf mat. It is no ordinary turf, of course. It is soft, green, and perfectly uniform. It represents absolute control, the domestication of nature turned into entertainment. In the middle of that mat is a piece of lava with emerging moss and another with cement. This small juxtaposition speaks of something greater: the constant struggle between the living, the organic, and the untamed against human imposition. The moss grows slowly, almost imperceptibly, colonizing surfaces that seem inhospitable. Meanwhile, the cement, rigid and cold, represents the ultimate intervention, man's hand leaving its mark, as if saying "this is mine" were more important than respecting what was already there.
Among these tensions—nature and the manufactured—a silent drama unfolds. In these recent days, I have been gathering plants for a herbarium. A herbarium I may never complete, as I do not dry them as I should, but instead try to keep them alive in an improvised fountain, which seems, in a way, an act of redemption. I water these small samples of life daily, hoping they will survive in a context where almost everything else is false. But even this gesture sometimes feels empty. Is it truly a genuine attempt at reconnection, or merely an extension of the same instrumental rationality that has reduced nature to another resource, an object of care under our own conditions?
Because there lies the core of the problem: our relationship with nature has long been one based on utility. We approach it not as part of a whole, but as a resource to exploit and dominate. We use nature under the logic of instrumental rationality, that engine of capitalism that teaches us to see everything—alive or dead—as something that can be manipulated, reconfigured, until it ceases to have value for us. What was once a tree is now a structure made of wood fragments, bound with adhesive tape, placed on a steel base that defies its own purpose.
And then, there is hypocrisy. Ah, the grand green farce. The artificial grass that represents our idea of "nature" in its most sterile form, while we try to convince ourselves that we are taking care of the world. In every false gesture, in every perfectly designed park, in every garden with not a leaf out of place, we simulate a connection that does not exist. We claim to care about nature, we say, while our actions betray us. We care only to the extent that it does not interfere with our comfort, with our power structures and consumption. We flaunt our "green efforts" while continuing to use the same logic that has devastated what we supposedly want to protect.
In my work, the dialogue between the real and the artificial, the living and the dead, is a way to make this tension visible. It is not simply an aesthetic representation but a commentary on our own disconnection, on how we have turned nature into a spectacle, a simulacrum that we can manage. But nature, for its part, remains there, slow and persistent. The moss on the lava rock, the plants in my fountain. Small victories, perhaps, but not for us. It is nature reclaiming its space, slowly colonizing a world we have tried to control for too long
Adolfo Vera