The Octopus in the Parking Garage

Two-channel installation

An article about a living octopus inhabiting a dark parking garage in Miami inspires the title of this two-channel video installation.

One channel shows a trance-like narrative made in 2016 about radical cultural, social, political and environmental changes. It also shows human-made structures under mercurochrome colored skies. The other channel shows slow, synthetic images of underwater spaces and creatures. Some underwater videos imply that the floor mutates, becomes liquid, it all sinks. They show the bottom of the ocean as space for failed human migration, where dreams rest.

How to face the speed and the disorientation of the Anthropocene, as the terrain under our feet begins to change radically?

Art tests prototypes to overcome trauma but, as concrete presences, they do not always respond to what they were designed for. On the other hand, art escapes or tries to scape its hyper-definition and may end up as a spaceship buried in a cave with nobody knowing how it works. Like images of an obsolete civilization, we didn’t know it existed inside of us.

Pedro Pousada 2020

In 2021, it is not anymore a type of disorientation caused (only) by us migrating, but also about disorientation of humans who never left home, it is about the escaping understanding of survival.

This work responds to the speed and ferocity of the changes in the environment and in the macro-societal structures (Bauman, 2007; Virilio & Richard, 2012; Augé, 2015; Latour, 2018), as legacy of colonization, exploitation of all natural kingdoms in planetary magnitude: necrocapitalism. It is an attempt to shift our experiences beyond ourselves, to other humans; and then beyond the human space, to other existences. This installation attempts to bring the perception to subtle signs of other modes of life, humans and non-humans, animals, plants and soil, baring the dream to assemble all beings.