Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens: Turning to Stone
Co-curators: Sylvie Fortin (IKT Member) and Solana Molina Viamonte
On view until 24 May at Móvil, Buenos Aires Argentina
Featuring two new installations and an epilogue, Turning to Stone is the first outcome of Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens’s fall 2023 research residency in Argentina, during which they travelled to the epicenters of mining and citizen resistance in La Rioja and Jujuy. It is also their first solo exhibition in South America.
Performative and exploratory, the exhibition relies on assemblage as an artistic and philosophical approach. Ibghy and Lemmens aggregate matter, images, words, and space-time to immerse viewers in a multisensorial reconsideration of the contested notions of energy “transition” and sustainability. Inflecting criticality with humor, Turning to Stone also contextualizes the financialization of the climate and biodiversity crises in relation to the sweeping shift in valuation spearheaded by the ascendant economics of “natural capital.” We are living a paradigm shift, a global reconfiguration in which capitalism’s insatiable expansion no longer relies mainly on labor or production. Ours is a neo-feudal capitalist era, defined by the marriage of magical thinking and savagery. Valuation is now a speech act, with many casualties.
Turning to Stone is Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens’s first solo exhibition in South America. It was initiated by Transitive Properties, a long-term curatorial research project ideated and developed by Sylvie Fortin to look into economics and finance’s debt to hospitality.