Gelen Jeleton

Historia política de las flores: comeflores (The Political History of Flowers: Eat Flowers)

Historia política de las flores: comeflores is an artistic research and formalisation project centred on expanded and performative drawing, focusing on the language of representations of flora. Part of a long-term body of research initiated in 2014, the project critically addresses the material, symbolic, and political conditions that inform plants and their uses. Drawing on iconological repertoires and approaching the subject matter from the sociology of the image, the artist examines issues such as monoculture, so-called ‘weeds’, invasive species, and processes of displacement and adaptation tied to climate change. Her research also explores domestication, agricultural and pharmaceutical exploitation, and the relationships of interdependence among plants, insects, animals, and humans. The project unfolds as a drawn, sung, and performed narrative that proposes regenerative ways of living linked to the commons and to practices of ecological resistance.

Bio

Gelen Jeleton (María Ángeles Alcántara Sánchez, Murcia, 1975) has developed her practice alongside Jesús Arpal Moya as part of Equipo Jeleton since 1999. Her work is channelled through long-term projects such as Historia política de las flores (The Political History of Flowers), in which they critically and unconventionally reinterpret literary, musical and visual repertoires with the aim of transforming poison into medicine. After graduating in Fine Arts in Cuenca, she completed a postgraduate course at the Department of Drawing at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Barcelona, specialising in Renaissance symbolism and alchemy. She further expanded this line of research in her doctoral thesis, Una archiva del DIY (Do It Yourself): una fanzinoteca feminista-cuir (A DIY (Do It Yourself) Archive: A Feminist-Queer Fanzine Library) which she defended at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Murcia in 2016. This project remains part of her artistic practice today.