The montage, the rhythm between images, sounds, and stories, is at the heart of Theo Eshetu’s aesthetic research. An experiment that, like the technical image – electronic and digital – manifests itself in time, whether it is manipulated, inverted, fragmented, repeated, mirrored, or orchestrated, without forgetting that it can also be spiraled. Eshetu is a key figure in a scene once known as video art, a poetic trajectory that takes us back to the 1980s, when the artist photographed the music scene and experimented with art in compositions of multiple monitors, remixing issues related to history, science, nature, social themes, iconography, rituals, and spirituality, offering a new perception of the world.
The multiple operations Eshetu created with the monitor – stacking it until it became a wall, arranging it in diagonals, suspending it from the ceiling of a museum, or even attaching it to different structural and installation devices – make the artist a manipulator of audiovisual language as a cultural system of meanings, or even as a cultural technique. Cultural technique precisely in the sense that it assumes a notion of plural cultures, externalizing and materializing imaginaries, beliefs, and statements, involving a continuous symbolic labor.
Eshetu’s technocultural reflection for the 36th Bienal de São Paulo operates on the nature of plant life. Not so much as a garden that manages nature for human appreciation, but rather the garden as a philosophical environment prior to human intervention – “a contemporary reading of the role of Nature as an integral aspect of Humanity,” in the artist’s own words – which establishes situations of coexistence between nature, life, and humanity. Images of flowers, plants, biomes, and ecosystems become kaleidoscopic music videos about the nature of humanity. And as such, an effort is not made in silence; the sound component of Eshetu’s garden is equally important. A soundtrack that surrounds and envelops the work is poetically composed by mixing the voices of figures like Maya Angelou and others who have reflected on resilience, the strength of humanity, and the consciousness of plants.
