Eros Thanatos // Wildenboer

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EROS / THANATOS

– a series of mixed-species assemblages in shades of 'dark' and 'light'

Like the human psyche, modern society is dialectical – it has both a ‘dark’ and a ‘light’ side that continuously interpenetrate – and the very neutrality and ambivalence of reason (so central to Western development) facilitates the ability of society to manifest different shades of light and dark (from Dialectic of Enlightenment, written by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno).

Sigmund Freud’s seminal work Civilization and its Discontents (1930), introduced Eros and Thanatos, which he believed to be responsible for the disquiet, unhappiness, and anxiety humans suffer. These terms refer to the constant struggle between the life drive and the drive for destruction which he held to be at the center of the development of civilization and the struggle for existence.

In Eros / Thanatos, Barbara Wildenboer draws from her own dreams, anxieties and personal narratives and intuitively connects inner and outer worlds, present, past and future. She uses the medium of collage to create a contemporary Vanitas within the context of the Anthropocene era. The body of collage works are filled with both personal and mythological references. There is a strong emphasis on narrative and how classical and contemporary stories frame our understanding of the relationship between the technologies which are meant to help us and the world that we inhabit.

Using media images and information selected from various sources, such as science and natural history books, old war magazines and journals of art and culture, Wildenboer constructs alternate realities that intimate an ostensibly apocalyptic future -t hat of the post-Anthropocene - but one that also suggests adaptation and the forming of new relationships, where all is not lost and humankind ekes out a tentative balance with each other and the natural world. The collages are musings on modern human life and the fragility of the symbiotic relationship between humankind and our ecology. A nebulous relationship that is jeopardised by consumerism, wastefulness and a sense of disconnection with each other and with nature.

The collage works also make reference to the Chthulucene* as an alternative to the Anthropocene, describing a world in which there is a flattening of any hierarchy between species (after Pimoa Cthulhu, a species of spider). Delicate webs of non-hierarchical interconnection between species provide a counterpoint to a world where we could be devoured by a gargantuan horror of our own making.

* from Staying with the Trouble- Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Donna Haraway (2016).

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