We live like trees inside the footsteps of our ancestors, an exhibition curated by Dr Mariana Cunha (University of Westminster) & Dr Marianna Tsionki (Leeds Arts University), opens at Blenheim Walk Gallery in Leeds on Thursday 11th May, 5-7.

Featuring works by Marianne Hoffmeister Castro, Jeannette Muñoz, Renata Padovan, Maya Watanabe.

Rooted in the indigenous philosophy of Wayuu people in the Venezuela-Colombia border, the poem voices their cosmovision, relationship with nature and understanding of the natural environment. Drawing on Apüshana’s words and imagination, the exhibition We live like trees inside the footsteps of our ancestors presents diverse responses to environmental spoliation on human and nonhuman life, inviting us to reappraise human-nature entanglements.

Encompassing mix-media, sculptural and audio-visual installations, the exhibition moves radically apart from colonial legacies and capitalism’s fixation with material surplus, which became the foundation for exploitative economies, extractive practices, and the schism between nature and culture. Engaging with the intensifying environmental crisis, the artists’ pieces presented in the exhibition disrupt long-established ideologies of landscape and territorial ownership, thus challenging conventional colonial, anthropocentric thinking. Instead, the exhibition invites us to immerse ourselves in the radical coexistence, networks of care and imaginative elaborations of the environment.

Find out more about the exhibition here.