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Dora García, photographed by Isabelle Arthuis. David Nogués-Bravo, during his visit to CNIO as a guest speaker to the IV Seminar on Philosophy and Science, 2022./ Antonio Tabernero. CNIO
David Nogués-Bravo studies how biodiversity loss and degradation of the natural environment pose threats to human health.
Dora García will reflect with an artistic approach upon Nogués' research in the Arctic, where the impact of climate change is showing faster than in the rest of the planet.
During August, both have worked together for a week in the northernmost inhabited place in the world.
The seventh edition of CNIO Arte brings together artist Dora García, winner of the National Visual Arts Award, and macroecology specialist David Nogués-Bravo, from the Globe Institute of the University of Copenhagen (Denmark). This year’s scientific theme of CNIO Arte is “The Future of Climate and its Impact on Biodiversity”, and the Artic its study site.
In his research, Nogués seeks to understand how human-driven climate change is affecting biodiversity, which extinctions it will lead to and what are the consequences for our species. For this reason, both CNIO Arte experts have decided to focus their collaboration on the Arctic, one of the regions in the planet where climate change impacts are showing most rapidly.
As stated in the 2023 by the IPCC –United Nations’ international panel of experts on climate change–, the impact of changes resulting from the retreat of glaciers, or the melting of permafrost in some Arctic ecosystems, “is approaching irreversibility”.
Collaborating in the Svalbard Islands
Dora García and David Nogués-Bravo have been collaborating for months now. In August they have spent a week working together in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, the northernmost inhabited place on the planet. There, together with a sound engineer and a cameraman, they filmed the images and recorded the sounds that will serve as basis for Dora García’s artistic proposal.
In his research, David Nogués-Bravo compares data on species distribution in the past to current data, and makes predictions, based on the results, about how the climate crisis may affect us in 50- or 100-years’ time. “The most serious crisis of all –more than covid, more than the economic recession and even more than climate change– is the loss of biodiversity”, which “is going to cost trillions of dollars”, he declared last December at the 4th CNIO Seminar on Philosophy and Science.
Dora García received the National Prize for Plastic Arts in 2021. Her work has been included in all the major international art events, such as the Documenta in Kassel (Germany) and the Venice Biennale, where she represented Spain in 2011. She has presented her work in major solo and group exhibitions, and in 2018 the Reina Sofía Museum dedicated a large retrospective exhibition to her career.
Rather than works of an established materiality, García proposes narratives that challenge the audience by introducing them into the framework of her proposals. To this end, she resorts to elements of performance –in the sense of scripted framework–, and to a language close to fiction. Her themes emerge from countercultural and vindictive environments with a social transcendence.
Art and science in a unique setting
The site chosen by García and Nogués-Bravo, the Svalbard Islands, has unique climatic conditions (Svalbard means “cold coast”). More than half of the area is protected and only three of the islands inhabited.
There are more polar bears than people, which leads to the prohibition of leaving the urban areas without the company of a certified guide. Other Arctic species such as beluga whales, capercaillies and walruses live there, and the landscape offers spectacular scenery, such as glaciers, ice caves or the special environments caused by the midnight sun and aurora borealis.
For CNIO Director Maria A. Blasco, “CNIO Arte is one of the main programmes to bring science from the CNIO to society,” says Blasco. “It is wonderful that this year CNIO Arte’s professionals have decided to focus their work on a problem such as climate change, which science has been warning about for a long time”.
“We believed from the start in the mutual enrichment that the collaboration between these two figures –both excellent in their areas of expertise– could bring, and we actually confirmed at their very first meeting how in tune they were,” says Juan de Nieves, curator of CNIO Arte and Head of the CNIO Institutional Image Office.
About CNIO Arte
Every year since 2018, CNIO Arte brings together scientists and leading international artists so that creators can produce a work inspired by science. Maria Blasco, scientific director of the CNIO, is the executive director of CNIO Arte.
Participating artists so far have been Eva Lootz; Chema Madoz; Carmen Calvo; Daniel Canogar; Susana Solano and Amparo Garrido. They have worked respectively with biochemist Margarita Salas (who died in 2019); quantum physicist Ignacio Cirac; paleoanthropologist Juan Luis Arsuaga; computational biologist Sarah Teichmann; epidemiologist Pedro Alonso and biochemist Elizabeth Blackburn.