Atelier 35 presents the exhibition “Do I need a map to travel to the center of the Earth?”, signed by the artist Matei Emanuel and curated by Alexandra Elisabeta Moț.
“The exhibition “Do I Need a Map to Travel to the Center of the Earth?” presents a playful reflection of artist Matei Emanuel on global conflicts and the nature/culture dichotomy. With an impulsive curiosity for the ways power is exercised through scientific research, the artist imagines an atypical scientist, from whose perspective he conceives the entire project. This fictional appropriation of the scientist’s moral background — situated between the innocence of a child and the ambition of a genius — allows him to question anthropocentric thinking within a framework of fragile curiosity.
The artworks form an encyclopedic collection of strange, oversized objects that seem to have been gathered from a child’s table. Beyond appearances, each object fits into a specific typology of the “cabinet of curiosities” (Wunderkammer). These heterogeneous categories of objects are not collected merely to satisfy the desire for possession or to indulge the senses but rather represent the material archiving of a research endeavor. The exhibition’s title overlaps with the methodological drive behind the research — a sincere, rhetorically articulated question posed by the child-scientist, fascinated by scientific instruments and astronomy, as well as visual arts and botany, alchemy and medicine.
The attempt to explore with maturity the possible answers to a childish, trivial, and scientifically inert question — “Do I Need a Map to Travel to the Center of the Earth?” — reflects the artist’s strategy of integrating speculative methods into domains deeply marked by the humanist paradigm. A diffuse review of Western visual culture and classical literature, with references to the mirage of last century’s progress and today’s reality, marks within the same cluttering of objects the imagining and reproduction of the surrounding world’s meaning. Invasive scientific procedures, the imaginary and the dualistic signification of materiality penetrate the system and its methods through which humanist epistemology is constituted, reiterating the violent control over nature. While the fictional character studies the universe, he symbolically battles the colonizing impulse to dominate the object of study and questions, from the outset, the conventional tools used to represent the seen or unseen world.” (curatorial text)
Matei Emanuel (b. 2001) is an emerging visual artist who studies and works in Bucharest. His artistic practice involves formulating political and social ironies through objects created using a variety of materials and techniques. The artist relies on introducing work with the aesthetic of mass-produced goods into an art world where sophisticated values and expectations often discredit the appreciation of a humorous attitude.
