In the beginning, someone names a garden and declares it perfect. God forms man from the earth and gives him for dwelling an orchard of delights where everything exists in abundance, without fatigue, without the burden of a history of its own. That first paradise was also the first to be lost. Sin cursed the earth, the cursed earth yielded thorns, and what remained, from then on, was another world: one open to possession, available to whoever had the will to transform it. With the expulsion comes labor. And with labor, the right to intervene upon a matter that had once been sufficient unto itself. 

Modern literature inherits that same structure, though stripped of its theology. Every utopia is enunciated from outside, as a description arriving from a place foreign to the one it describes, substituting fabrication for action. To fabricate an Eden is more or less that: to force an entire landscape into a form someone else has decided upon and, in the process, to cover it with a word. 

Hence the loop this exhibition examines: to name a place as paradise is already, in itself, the mechanism that triggers its precarization. The devastation of territories and the violence inflicted on bodies are likewise consequences of having conceived them, from the outset, as an available reserve. The operation occurs in the past tense, since it presupposes that something existed and was ruined, and that relation tends to end in nostalgia. What happens here, by contrast, occurs in the present continuous, without consolation. 

The American landscape of 1492 was a managed landscape, and much of the virgin jungle recorded by later travelers was, in fact, the result of the demographic collapse that followed the conquest. The forest grew over the abandoned fields of the dead. And over that void, European knowledge constructed a tropical paradise. 

The same apparatus that catalogued the flora defined peasant, Indigenous, and Afro-descendant bodies, converted into the human scale of the landscape. Where there is a shared territorial genealogy, the precarization of nature is the precarization of the human, and in the present, this translates into geographies subjected to illicit economies of global extraction. 

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There is a second promised land in this history, a much older one. Joshua inherits from Moses the promise of Canaan and fulfills it through bloody conquest. The walls of Jericho fall at the seventh blast of the trumpet, and what follows is the city's total destruction. And so, from that first narrative onward, the promised land came with instructions for razing already included. 

The destruction of Gaza is broadcast in real time. We see bodies buried under rubble, buildings collapsing, fields that were once fertile, now devastated; hunger. Two conquests separated by three thousand years, recounted in almost the same vocabulary: a promise, a covenant, and silence.