The 2022 edition of the CAMPO Artfest explores the complex and vulnerable choreography between humans and nature. The works and programs in this year’s festival speak to the unlikely and unintended environmental consequences of human actions and the feedback loops they create with the environment. These dances result in new kinds of ecological patterns that repeat themselves throughout the globe and connect local landscapes to planetary phenomena. For example the Trigona amalthea, a bee species native to South America, has benefited greatly from industrial agriculture and has become both essential for large scale pollination and the dominant bee species in the region, pushing other bee species near extinction, both regionally and internationally. Global industrial infrastructures produce carbon dioxide that alters the atmosphere, taking as their victims landscapes and waterscapes that range from the Great Barrier Reef in northeast Australia to the forests in Lapland, Sweden. These effects of human activity are not necessarily immediately catastrophic, but happen slowly, over long arcs of time, in varying landscapes, and to all swaths of life.

Much like a pipe that leaks slowly over time and eventually leads to a collapsed floor in a house, it is hard to notice the relationship between cause and effect until something more visible, more life-altering, happens. To that effect, this edition of CAMPO Artfest relies on what anthropologist Ana Tsing refers to as feral effects, the uncontrollable and unscripted ramifications of human actions on the environment that can be traced at both the molecular and planetary levels, in both concrete and abstract ways. The artists and practitioners in this edition are invited to think about how such effects are entwined,across different scales of time and place and across human and non-human registers (such as animals, plants, stones, and bacteria) and how they can be made visible in our ecological, political, and social everyday life.

The area around Laguna Garzón, which since 2000 has been a protected region because of its unique biodiversity, makes for a timely and important host for this edition since these effects are felt—if not already seen—in the local environment in examples such as the cyanobacteria and algae blooms that are recurring with more frequency. While the region’s characteristics are unique to this place, the effects of human development and activity are shared with other similar but distant places as Florida, the Arabian Sea, and Fiji where annual algae blooms have become a threat to local marine life and fresh water sources. These undesired affinities point to familiar patterns of these feral effects—as abstract and remote as they may seem from each other—caused by overdevelopment and climate change.

– Roxana Fabius, Patricia M. Hernández, Natalia Zuluaga

Patricia Margarita Hernández is a curator and researcher based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work, which is often grounded in collaboration, focuses on the intersections of contemporary art, climate change, and feminist theory. She currently holds the position Associate Curator of Learning at Amant, Brooklyn, NY.

Natalia Zuluaga is a curator and editor based in Miami, Florida. Since 2014, she has been the co-director of [NAME] Publications. In 2018 she co-founded, alongside Gean Moreno, the bilingual online journal Dispatches. She previously served as the Artistic Director at Oolite Arts (formerly ArtCenter/South Florida), Miami.