Cultivating the Uncanny, Álvaro Perdices

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Image courtesy of La Virreina Centre de la Imatge.

Cultivating the Uncanny alludes here to a melting pot of meanings. Cultivating as a reference to that which needs to be fed in order to grow, be it a crop, an ideology or oneself. Cultivating as a mention of landscapes, nature and botany on the outskirts, which signify so much in Álvaro Perdices’ work. Cultivating as a tribute to the book Cultivos (2008, Crops) by the writer and editor Julián Rodríguez, a fundamental figure in the artist’s development.

And the uncanny, understood here on the basis of that definition that associates it with the queer and even the strange, in keeping with the famous exhibition series by Mike Kelley—another of Perdices’ referents—as there is a distortion, a search for those indecipherable zones that destabilize the normative and make it obsolete or alienating, zones to which Perdices dedicated no small effort to sowing and sustaining.

Perdices has been a pioneer in opposing human action and the response to it by a nature that warns us through ecological anarchy of the dangers of progress. In addition, thirty years ago he explored free education, cooperative approaches with children in their formative years and the tools they themselves can make in the face of coercive pedagogical models.

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