Nature flees
Opening: March 17, 2026
Space: Room 0
Commissioners: Valentín Vallhonrat and Ignacio Miguéliz
The natural environment in which we live is marked by climate change caused largely by human activity, which, in part, is currently being attempted to be reversed. However, despite the scientific data, part of society is still reluctant to accept this change. It is in this context that Natura Fugit, a project by Jesús Mari Lazkano (Bergara, 1960) within the Tender puentes artistic residency program Tender puentes Museo Universidad de Navarra, comes into play.
According to the artist, art can serve as a catalyst for awareness, as its ability to evoke emotion is a perfect "bridge" for sparking the necessary debate and changing our behavior, not through propaganda but through sensitivity and reflection. In this work, Lazkano draws on the process of transformation that the landscape and nature are undergoing, in this case focusing his attention on the Mer de Glace glacier in Chamonix, in the Alps. In his work, he captures the changes in light, atmosphere, weather, and space that the glacier experiences and mixes and blends them with period images, such as paintings, postcards, old photographs, and various iconographic material, incorporating a sample of "views" that result in a film and a series of pastel drawings. As he himself points out, this line of work is based on William Kentridge, as the best-known reference, and his processes of drawing on drawing to "film" in stop motion. To this end, Lazkano carries out a similar process in which he has used nearly 3,000 drawings that are destroyed and reconstructed in the filmmaking process, and which remain hidden under a final layer formed by the 122 final drawings. The film offers a temporal journey through the process of landscape transformation, from the last Quaternary glaciation to the near future with the total disappearance of ice, occupation, urbanization, and destruction of the environment, its extinction, and subsequent natural collapse, from which a "supernature" finally emerges to occupy a new place in the world.
To carry out this project, Lazkano started with an image from the MUN collection, Mer de Glace (1875) by S. Thompson, which depicts the view towards the Grandes Jorasses from the Montenvers refuge in Chamonix. Lazkano linked this photograph with the painting High Mountain Region (1824) by Caspar David Friedrich (1744-1840), one of his main references, painted in the same place.
RELATED ACTIVITIES
Wednesday, March 17, 7:00 p.m.
Date
March 17, 2026