Mery Godigna Collet
INTERFERENCE: Recent Works

Early on, heralding the spirit of our anthropocene era, Mery Godigna Collet’s art embodied a profound attentiveness to our undeniable responsibility as humans to repudiate, deflect, remediate destructive political, economic and ecological actions endangering all living – organic and inorganic – matter sustaining life in our planet. As boundless a task as it may seem, Godigna Collet has addressed these issues as she witnessed them in her own life. In the 90’s her work focused on the massive conflagration of Kuwait’s oil wells, causing over 20 years of involvement in the Gulf and Iraq war; the worst environmental and human disasters in our time.

In the present exhibition, Godigna Collet installs a poignant series of intervened flags, their colors representing the hosts of invading nations, while their fallen stars are placed in ammunition boxes on the floor, signaling loss of independence, wellbeing and national identity. More importantly, this work unmasks the ongoing and perversely hidden neo colonial exploitation and total depletion of material and human resources in developing countries, by world powers. In fact, the catastrophic aftereffects of their surreptitious interferences underlie massive human extinction and a refugee crisis all over the world.

Carnage is perhaps Godigna Collet’s most literal and conspicuous statement, as she lines up blood colored gauze strips, hanging with meat hooks from high wires. Here, she confronts us with our homegrown epidemic of massive killings in schools, public places, and working environments. Three images of victims face us on the wall, underscored by the name of the specific weapon used to kill each one.

Surrounding this loud denouncement against violence, a more quiet, and no less impactful installation of smaller “mise-en-scènes” are presented like precious objects protected by plexiglass boxes. Here we contemplate seven dissonant situations caused by human interference in nature, a bee next to a wasp nest, an ostrich egg hatching charging digital cables, a rose’s thorns turned into prongs of barbed wire…

Expressively spanning from direct representation to poetic evocation, Mery Godigna Collet’s art is anchored in her compassionate probing of collective suffering, beyond partisanship, national identity or personal interest. Hers is a voice to be reckoned with.