Backlighters project
Coordinated and organised by Lola Nieto and Paco Contreras
Cartagena, 2005
Backlighters was a project that sought to bring citizens of Cartagena who normally don't attend art exhibitions, the artistic creations of a group of young artists born or living in the city.
Projects' support, in this case, clearly it marked the final result of the pieces: pieces were mounted and they were purpose-built to be inserted in billboards that normally serve as advertising support. These billboards are commonly known as mupis (urban fitments), and we can find them in the streets of any city in our country.
When it came to conceptualizing the project, we had to decide a driving theme which allowed each of us linking our individual paths with the common project. We chose to use the idea of nature as an interesting topic on which everyone could work.
Nature, which it is around us and which we are inmersed at all times in, it has always represented a difficult concept to define throughout centuries, and what we think nature is, it has changed at the same time that the concept that human being had of itself. In this way, cavemen saw nature as something magical, indecipherable and where it occurs events that escaped their control.
Soon there were born
creation myths, that would fill those empty spaces with supernatural beings that would have given rise to everything known. They were Gods, with their different names and representations. Nature turned to a scale more human, more explainable to everyone, although it still was escaping the control of human being, since those gods were those who governed everything, including mankind.
With the arrival of the monotheistic religions human being became Lord of all creation, the Earth and its resources. This idea had put the man aside from nature, putting it below him. It had to be born science, and more specifically natural sciences, so that it rotates once again the idea that man had about the world: Darwinism put the human being again right in the middle of the forest. The man was not something external to nature, on the contrary, his origin was in nature itself. From that step until today, everything has happened very quickly: biology, ecology, genetics, physics, astronomy, medicine... all are fields of science affecting in one way or another our everyday perception of nature.
Also field of art has reflected these changes of meaning about the idea of nature, from cave paintings to the present day, and artists have tried to convey its interpretations in very different ways.
Nowadays, Nature topic occupies an important part of the research of many artists around the world, and more specifically, in this project it has given rise to various derivations which show different personal concerns about nature.
Such is the case that there have emerged proposals dealing with a critique on the use and handling of the nature; others are fixed in the nature of human beings; other proposals are more intimate, bordering on visual poetry pieces, they show personal universes that idea of nature motivates.