Eugenio Merino+Avelino Sala
1.5 degrees Celsius is not an arbitrary figure. In fact it is a goal that we as humanity should stick to if we want to protect the Earth — the place we live in, even if we sometimes forget — from global warming. The Paris Agreement, signed in 2015, listed a series of commitments from political leaders, who pledged to keep the rise in global temperatures “well below” 2.0 degrees and to do everything possible to limit the increase in temperatures to 1.5 degrees this century… Well I’m sorry to break the news, but that summit was, like so many others regarding climate change, nothing more than a jet set meeting (paid holidays for everyone) of Heads of State (each of them with their own private jet and therefore, a huge carbon footprint, in short, all very coherent — note the irony) where they set a utopian figure that we have obviously already surpassed and, consequently, have already failed to meet: 2023 was by far the warmest year on record for planet Earth. The average temperature of the Earth was 1.48 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial reference period (1850-1900), thus already close to a very relevant threshold: the famous 1.5 degrees. So one wonders, if we have already reached the end-of-century ceiling and we are just leaving behind its first quarter, what’s in store for us?
“RESISTENCIAS” is a wake-up call to this already surpassed 1.5 degree threshold. A somewhat poetic reprimand to the lack of self-criticism of us humans. An invitation to “stop and think” even if we already ran out of time. It is an exercise of committed cultural contemporaneity in the form of artistic object and action.
curator: Teresa Arroyo de la Cruz
