Portable Nation : Disappearance as Work in Progress

The Project

The history of artistic aesthetics of the Maldives is not widely documented, the archipelago is not known for its visual arts activities but rather for its most central aesthetical themes such as supreme beauty of the ocean, ecology and environment. CPS intends to treat the culture and nature of Maldives as our central subject, marking its importance through its ecology, and what it would mean for the islands to disappear.

Through inviting artists and contributors to donate their powerful visual and intellectual abilities to the Maldives pavilion, our intention is to provide a meaningful experience and breadth of knowledge about the concept of Contemporary Environmental Romanticism in relation to the nature and culture of the Maldives. Consequently, we are looking for an unusual treatment of the Maldives Pavilion, something in the direction of how Contemporary Environmental Romanticism underlines the interpretation of nature as a source of aesthetic experience.  From this experience, the eco-activism projects will also return their investment by donating funds to environmental causes.

Combining our curatorial team of three appointed curators and commissioners, we wish to partially capitalize on their diverse cultural identities from Europe and the Middle East suggesting the overlap of international cultures that coexist on this paradise island. On the one hand Western thoughts concerning nature has been marked by dualism, the notion of the opposition of nature and culture. On the other hand Eastern thoughts consider nature a guide and source of intellectual and spiritual inspiration, because in the Eastern thoughts the natural world simply “is” the law, and human activities are adjusted according to its mechanisms. The collaboration we wish to capture is to prove the duality between art/culture and its inter-dependencies with environmental causes. Only through such activities are we able to regulate interests into ways of sustainably developing positive impacts that will help avoid negative impacts on our own cultural ecologies. By bringing awareness to the activities happening in the Maldives, we wish to break away from allowing such losses of land to happen in this advanced digital age. Observation is what converts possibility into reality.