About

Human Nature is a photographic essay exploring the relationship between human beings and the natural world. Through digitally constructed images that combine natural elements and artificial structures, the project questions our perception of reality and the ways we inhabit our environment.

The word human derives from the Latin humus, meaning earth or soil, reminding us that our existence is part of the same living system. From this perspective, the work reflects on the boundaries between the natural and the artificial, our contemporary disconnection from nature, and the possibility of imagining new forms of relationship based on care.

The images are created through a hybrid process that combines manual making and digital manipulation. Reclaimed materials, soil and industrial elements are assembled, photographed and transformed into visual metaphors. Soil occupies a central poetic role, sometimes becoming a computer key—a symbol of human control over the environment.

Through this body of work, Florencia approaches artistic practice as a space of affective resistance, inviting viewers to reflect on the structures that shape everyday life and to consider care as a transformative act.

 

…”Florencia’s art pieces refer, from different languages and shades, to imaginary points of contact between our bodies and the living elements of nature. On the one hand, the product offering seems ironic: wouldn't an herbal pie, a fish perfume, be "disgusting"? On the other hand, it also drives utopian thought, a world of relationships where the human being is part, and not just the center, of a new poetic ecosystem.”…

Valeria González

In the current art scene, it is common to meet young artists and others who are not so much, who upon perceiving that the found image reports some response from the artistic institution, (sales, awards, notes, publications, etc.) begin to repeat it until it becomes a boring and predictable cliche. Florencia Temperley seems to go against it and prefers to risk looking for other ways. That is why in these new photographs that objectification of the world that arose from the dialogue between childhood and play, gave way to a new way of looking at that world, now totally stripped, “devoid of doors and windows, subjected to the rigor of isolation and silence ”(1). But in art there are no cuts, but continuities or reorganizations, so although at first glance there seems to be no link with the above and the feeling in front of the works is disconcerting, - since nothing is as it was, and the space that housed now depopulated childhood fantasies is more aseptic than ever - however, if the gaze slowly manages to enter that fractal dimension of the objects, and that iterative resource of the fragment, which the author uses to convert that space into this quasi-white and minimal, you will see in some of the multiple windows a little head, you will see some transgenic animal crossing some wall and even a deer with letterhead guarding the showroom. Florencia was once asked how it all started, “with a game” she said. And she kept building houses with the rasti (legos).

Eduardo Médici

Every game, when it really is, demands from its protagonists a certain dose of autism, of rejection to the gaze of others. The children, and also the artists (at least those who have not over-adapted), ignore the presence of the observer in their practices; they prefer to be one more player. There is no innocence in this lawsuit: if the outsider does not play, he is definitely the distant viewer who ultimately corroborates the hierarchy of a world tailored for vigilant adults and watched children. Games and arts require some complicity.

Florencia Temperley, in a deliberate hospitable tone (in its most soulless sense), houses in aseptic spaces those “boys and girls “ drawn only with a subtle line of ink or smudged with charcoal. The expressive supports, plots, photographs, coming from the repertoire of design and advertising, and graffiti, from urban art, reinforce that distanced and melancholic character with which our role as observers is committed.

The "creatures" of Florencia suspend their games and look at us. They play by not playing and by changing their status they are the ones who subject us to the most intense of questions, to the deepest of demands. Even her toys seem to have undergone a strange mutation: the tenderness of the teddy bear in steel shaving violence, the color of globes in black mourning, the hammock in pure orthopedics ... There is something brutal that does not agree in forced fun of the red nose and the profile of the "round the world" with the gaze of that girl disguised as a little clown. Her scope is no longer that of a pink, light blue or yellow room but that stripped room, devoid of doors and windows subjected to the rigor of isolation and silence ...

The white tree (of knowledge?) that serves as an introduction and epilogue to the exhibition-installation, parodically articulated as a mechanical artifact and accompanied by ferocious guard dogs, may not refer to the mythical Garden of Eden, to the Lost Paradise of childhood, but to that other promise of future happiness that these boys see in the strange games of the adults.

Héctor Médici