Lothar Baumgarten. Culture Nature

by Chiara Bertola

In the spaces of the GAM video library, a homage to Lothar Baumgarten, an artist who passed away in 2018, known for intertwining aesthetic research with profound anthropological and ecological reflection.

The selection of works on display - in particular photographs - documents his immersive experience in the Yanomami villageVenezuela, where he lived for over a year in the late 1970s.

In these shots, the landscape becomes narrative, nature becomes language, memory, visual and symbolic construction.

The images do not simply restore what has been seen, but open up new perspectives, allowing multiple, layered meanings to emerge. As in a famous photograph by the artist, where a bowl of milk with a fragment of green jelly evokes, in transparency, an entire landscape vision, Baumgarten's works question the separation between object and representation, between the visible and the thought.