Immersed Bodies and Biotopia in the Visual Works of Carmela García and Tania Candiani: From the Utopian Space of the Lost Paradise to the Utopian Body of the Aquatic Ecotone

Abstract

Based on the creations of two multimedia artists who abandon terrestrial spaces to develop a poetics of the female body submersed in waterscapes, this article analyses the paradigm of immersion and its capacity to question our way of inhabiting the world. It draws on Foucault's theory of spaces and Deleuze's concept of the Body without Organs, to explore the sensitive experiences of the photographer Carmela García (Paradise, 2000) and the video artist Tania Candiani (Tidal Choreography, 2023) in creations that can be described as “biotopias”: a cross between “biotope” and “utopia”, both an environment for living and an imaginary ideal projection. These micro-utopias appeal to the productive force of art (Marcuse) to imagine a “new sensibility” stretched between aesthetics and political practice. But while both artists start from reality to elevate the human perspective beyond anthropocentrism and lead towards ecological utopias in which women are entrusted with reconciling with nature on behalf everyone, their creations invite a double decentring and a shift from the “utopian place” to the “utopian body” in a heterotopian space. For, while photographer García's utopian space is a place devoid of men, conducive to the construction of a feminist ideal, the intertidal zone of the ecotone filmed by Candiani engages in a more radical transformation: subject and environment actively interpenetrate; humans, animals, plants and minerals coexist in the multi-sensorial estuary of the River Shannon, apprehended according to a haptic and synaesthetic regime. Thus, the immersion of the female bodies in a moving aquatic space, the linking of liminal surfaces subjected to erasure, ensure the ethical and poetic proclamation of a vast choreography based on the dissolution of bodies and their fruitful rearrangement.