Sensitive Resources: What Art Can Still Reveal
In Geneva, the biennial (re)connecting.earth unfolds a journey through art, science, and the landscape to examine our dependence on natural resources. Straddling sensory observation and critical reflection, the project explores a fundamental question: how can we make complex systems perceptible without diminishing their scope?
Here, the exhibition does not begin in an enclosed space. It stretches out, disperses, compelling visitors to walk and see things differently. Along the Greenway, between Geneva and Annemasse, the works are situated within a territory already traversed by flows, human, material, and economic. The landscape is not merely a backdrop: it becomes an anchor point, a surface of focus. With (re)connecting.earth, the art-werk association offers a journey where natural resources appear less as a theme than as a network of relationships.
Extraction, transformation, circulation: all processes that shape our environments while often remaining invisible in our daily lives. In this context, art acts as a tool for shifting our perspective. It is not so much about providing answers as it is about making certain dynamics, sometimes diffuse, sometimes difficult to grasp, perceptible. The dialogue with science, championed by the project, extends this approach by opening a space of exchange between sensory forms and knowledge.
Bernard Vienat, curator of the exhibition
Curation: Organizing the View
Rather than imposing a single interpretation, the curators seek to allow different perspectives to coexist. As Bernard Vienat explains, the biennial is rooted in a specific area, the Voie Verte, which connects the Comédie de Genève to the Villa du Parc, while embodying a tangible history.
“This connection is not merely practical. It is an integral part of the project. This territory allows us to link a very local reality […] with much broader issues related to the extraction and circulation of resources on a global scale.”
The approach is deliberately concrete. Rather than remaining in abstract discourse, the project focuses on tangible elements, sand, energy, soil, infrastructure, to make visible the chains of transformation that structure our environments. Without seeking to impose a single interpretation, the biennial advocates for a plurality of perspectives, artistic, scientific, and at times political, and leaves room for open interpretations. This is a way of preserving the complexity of the issues while making them accessible.
From one work to the next, resources appear in many forms: matter, flow, system. It is these shifts in perspective that shape the visitor’s journey.
Three artists, Three ways to approach resources
Ana Alenso - making extraction tangible
For Ana Alenso, resources are inseparable from territories and infrastructures. Her work, grounded in field research, reflects encounters within extraction sites.
“Each mine […] has left a trace in my work […] not only visual, but also relational.”
She focuses on invisible traces left by industries and environments, conveying an embodied experience rather than direct representation.
“The work becomes an invitation […] to feel […] a world organized around extraction.”
Extraction emerges not as distant, but as a system embedded in everyday life.
Ana Alenso, Lo que la mina te da, la mina te quita , 2020, installation. ©Ana Alenso
Séverin Guelpa, Energy as a Vehicle , 2026, Immersive sound installation at the Comédie de Genève, mock up version.
Séverin Guelpa - listening to invisible flows
Séverin Guelpa turns to urban flows, networks and infrastructures that shape the city invisibly.
“To study a city’s flows is to speak of its entrails […] capturing what circulates beneath our feet.”
His work invites viewers to perceive the city as a living organism, crossed by hidden circulations
Gabriel Massan, How Do We Get There ? , 2024, 3D Animation, 13’21’, loops. © Gabriel Massan
Gabriel Massan - imagining other systems
Gabriel Massan explores speculative worlds where resources become narrative elements.
“The environment is at the center of my narratives […] some resources are abundant, others rare.”
By reworking ideas of abundance and scarcity, he reconfigures ecological issues within imagined systems.
What (re)connecting.earth brings into play is not merely a reflection on resources, but a way of making them tangible, that is, perceptible, situated, and at times unstable. In a context where ecological issues are deeply embedded in the artistic field, the biennial seems less intent on producing a discourse than on opening up a space for attention. A space where the works do not resolve the tensions they evoke, but keep them active. Perhaps this is where their significance lies: in this ability to allow different approaches to coexist, without imposing a single one, and to leave the viewer the possibility of moving between them.
