The artist and writer Verónica Gerber Bicecci (b. 1981, Mexico) explores the effects of human and environmental catastrophe on landscape and language in a free display of photography, video and installation.

In the Eye of Bambi brings together works by Carlos Amorales (b. 1970, Mexico), Bleda y Rosa (each b. 1969, Spain),Carmen Calvo (b. 1950, Spain),Victoria Civera (b. 1955, Spain),Sophie Ristelhueber (b. 1949, France) and Concha García (b. 1960, Spain), drawn from ”la Caixa” Collection. The display is the fourth and final instalment in a series of exhibitions and new texts highlighting the collection, guest-curated by leading writers over the course of a year. Veronica Gerber Bicecci’s has written an original short story in which the words of Greta Thunberg, Donna Haraway and W. vB. Yeats pepper a cautionary tale of the destruction of the natural world by humans represented as ‘the creatures with three hands’.

Gerber Bicecci proposes a science fiction scenario based on the aftermath of a catastrophic event envisioned by Carlos Amorales in his animated film Useless Wonder (2014). In this double-sided projection, a world map disintegrates into small fragments on one side while on the other humans and animals struggle to co-exist. An enlarged eye peers out of Victoria Civera’s circular canvas. The gaze is that of Disney’s plucky fawn orphaned by the destructive actions of humans in one of the earliest environmental novels, Bambi, A Life in the Woods (1923) by Felix Salten.

The sinuous, red woollen tendrils of Concha García’s Trepadora roja (Red Creeper) (2004) invade the gallery and alert visitors to an unspoken earthly danger. Carmen Calvo’s ecru-coloured painting is described by the artist as a ‘cemetery of nature’, with tiny ceramic trees sprouting across its surface. Fait #7 by Sophie Ristelhueber examines through photography the marks and debris strewn upon a landscape scarred by war. Bleda y Rosa (María Bleda and José María Rosa) revisit the sites of colonial-era battles in Latin America where they photograph the now desolate places where humans once lived.

In a second work by Victoria Civera, A-be-ce-da-rio (1991), viewers are presented with a new alphabet of painted forms which point to an uncertain and changeable future. These themes are elaborated in Gerber Bicecci’s experimental writing, which transcribes the sounds of mutating creatures, groaning plants and disintegrating languages into a post-apocalyptic chorus.

Gerber Bicecci is a visual artist who also writes. She is best known for her novel, Empty Set (Coffee House Press, 2018), which a combines text and drawings to tell a story of modern loneliness, exile and imagination.