Natural contingencies have put the entire society in check.  This confronts us with a rethinking of policies on nature.  Along with the design and applicability of environmental laws that determine our ways of dealing with natural resources in a clean and sustainable way, a policy of affectivity that integrates society into nature must be implemented, helping us re-signify the idea of nature as a resource in the service and care of civility.  To be able to be protective, we must know and love that which we must take care of.  Yet, paradoxically, this noble and altruistic intent slides in an anthropocentric foundation that needs reviewing:  the strong man taking care of the fragile nature.  Today we are becoming aware that it is society that is itself debilitated and that it is society that must seek refuge, protection and teaching in the robustness of nature with its billions of years of virtuous existence.

The MUNTREF Art and Nature Center (CAN) constitutes itself as a node of artistic and scientific practices interlinked with nature, establishing a horizontal dialogue between actions that respond to different thinking logics.  It restores the urban and the wild to an original practice of nature-culture that retraces the exhausted exercise of apprehending the logic of the living stuff as something mechanical:  a kind of understanding based on the culture-nature binomial and its constructs;  namely, exotic-native, use-protection, resource-availability, among others.

From its original location at the former Zoo of Buenos Aires City (today “Ecoparque”), the CAN -academically anchored in the IIAC-UNTREF- has as its mission to develop a profuse program of artistic practices being in a permanent dialogue with the scientific field and the open and articulated public environmentalism, thus involving prestigious national and international exhibitions with practical and learning germination stems into various cultural sectors. The projects that have already taken place involved Teatro Sarmiento;  the cloisters nested in the scientific academy of excellence, such as the Museum of Pharmaco-botany of the UBA; and the city’s first corridor of scientific culture, as articulated with the Cultural Center of Science of Argentina’s Ministry of Science and Technology.

The CAN has shaped into a decentralized network through citizen collaboration and university guidelines, materializing itself and dynamically reformulating its essence in the course of interrelationships.

The spirit of CAN is to generate citizen knowledge based on the communal aspects of contemporaneity, taking as a starting point those controversies of the natural ambit encoded in the key of exhibitions, making these into the kickoff for the construction of critical reflection and knowledge based on the use and circulation of images and installation objects related to the nature-culture scope.  Public exhibitions are articulated with lectures, workshops, theater plays, performances, and an educational program for university students who wish to be placed in the institutions of contemporary art.

CAN is a network of practical research to give academic way to an entire polysemy of ideas and actions in order to constitute a corpus of work-thinking on the world we inhabit, as well as the world which we want to inhabit; all of it thought about through the concept of the nature-culture of a virtuous future.

–  Practical-conceptual exhibition programs.
–  Training programs for University educators.
–  Programs of artistic transfer to the community.
–  Inter-institutional programs in support of the citizen nature-culture.

Citizen Education:  interactive cultural and informational liaison center with cultural institutions of Buenos Aires City:  Centro Cultural de la Ciencia (Cultural Center of Science),  Planetario (Planetarium), Jardín Botánico (Botanical Garden), Museo de Ciencias Naturales (Natural Science Museum), and Teatro Sarmiento (Sarmiento Theater), among others.

This is how it will be easier for the user to access the institutions that germinate the collective imagery of the environment and nature, thus facilitating their articulation and public use.

Pablo La Padula.

–  Botany as the logic of the living stuff
–  The body encoded in nature-culture as a social biographical footprint articulation.
–  Matter geology as a shift to the bio and geocentric universe in a displacement of the         antropocentric. Articulation with Centro Materia MUNTREF (Muntref Matter Center).
–  The memory of the drawin as a trace of what is to come.