Rescatando mi propio cadáver (un conjunto alterno de peldaños para el ascenso a la oscuridad). Parte 1, 9.81 m/s2. Un escenario posible, 2014-2024
Julieta Aranda Stealing One’s Own Corpse (An Alternative Set of Footholds for an Ascent into the Dark). Part 1, 9.81 m/s2. A Possible Scenario, 2014-2024 Flight suit, wire, 3D print, foam, clay, carpet, net, silicone, wood, rope, potato.
Single-channel video, 12’
Installation, dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artist
Julieta Aranda's work falls within the conceptual and political realm. This is the first in a series of four pieces. The work explores an alternative space for living, based on the artist's direct experience in a zero-gravity flight. This life experience challenges terrestrial conceptions of time and gives rise to a video installation that combines objects, music, and images which, in the artist's words, respond to the unsettling sensation of weightlessness of the "floating body."
With the title Stealing One’s Own Corpse, Aranda proposes a reflection on the historic gesture of "conquering" — in this case, space. This idea is reinforced through the use of traps employed to hunt animals and dominate nature, highlighting the duality between prey and predator. Among these objects are traps for bears, mice, and snails, as well as the first poem written in space during the Skylab 2 mission (1972), when astronauts mutinied, demanding "more time to contemplate the universe."
Aranda highlights antagonistic concepts such as freedom and confinement, prey and predator, victim and victimizer. The objects in the work include historical animal traps, from the classic "roadrunner" trap to 19th-century bear traps, fishing traps, and mousetraps, alongside the travel jumpsuit. The dialogue between art and science is reflected in the music composed by an ensemble from the sounds of the electrocardiogram that the artist recorded during her zero-gravity experience. This setting constructs various layers of meaning and reflection on the relationship between man, his habitat, and the dialogue between science and art.
Julieta Aranda explores diverse artistic practices, forming a universe where music, image, and sculpture offer a space for contemporary reflection.
TEXTS ABOUT THE ARTIST
(Fragments of a conversation between Julieta Aranda and Cuauhtémoc Medina)
Cuauhtémoc Medina (CM): Let's start with the fact that **Stealing One’s Own Corpse (An Alternative Set of Footholds for an Ascent into the Darkness)** is a trilogy. In 2014, when the Berlin Biennale invited you to create the first part, were you already planning a series for this special intersection of questions about the subjectivity of the present, or did more chapters become necessary in the process?
Julieta Aranda (JA): I originally wrote the first and second parts together, but the project's ambition demanded space; it became very difficult to manage all the content I wanted in a single video. There are three for now; I don't know if I'm done yet. The first part is about outer space, the second is about individual space, cities, language, and the place we directly occupy on the human scale. The third is about what I call "inner space," which includes religion, metaphysics, science, and "the invisible" in general. This is the part I feel is still incomplete.
CM: Throughout the series, you create something that gravitates around prophecy, essay, and poetry, without focusing on any specific place: a poetry of facts and materials, in which subjectivity is also an ecology and an economic system. It's a video installation, I would say.
JA: You know my education was as a filmmaker, and I abandoned it due to some fundamental problems I had with the field's structure. I wasn't interested in characters or identification processes; I never knew how to work that way. And so I ended up as an artist. This video series reconciled me with the language of moving images.
CM: The reason I made an analogy with installations is that you don't have a narrative but create a space where a series of themes, arguments, and aphorisms come and go.
JA: As I said, my biggest problem with cinema was the narrative structures and identification with characters. I don't think this piece depends on chronology.
CM: Without losing sight of its visualization, it seems that this "politics without oxygen" sketches a question about death in relation to our economic and social speed. The temporality of the decomposition of living beings into hydrocarbons is the moment when the biological cycle does not correspond to birth and death but to the processing of waste in a perspective not precisely cosmological, but perhaps meta-biological.
JA: There is a concept not directly alluded to in the piece but one I think about a lot: the idea of "double death." The processes of death and decomposition have generative potential: something rots and ferments until it becomes something from which life emerges, a fertilizer. When you go to the forest, you find rotten trees, and under their leaves, you find mushrooms, ferns, seedlings; you understand that death is a gift to life. It's a death that doesn't just create death, like those birds with stomachs full of plastic bags and lighters.
CM: Throughout the trilogy, you suggest a series of personal experiences. You appear in the second installment, experimenting with the absence of gravitational force. In the third, you are at CERN, the place of our obsession to return to the moment of creation and understand the incomprehensible. These installments are a kind of log of transcendental experiences.
JA: Yes, definitely. I've never talked about this, but I've written about it. This video series was born when I was invited to participate in a project where they sent three artists on zero-gravity flights. I had a great time: you can see I'm laughing my head off while spinning in the absence of gravity. There was, however, an expectant formality that, at any moment, a project would emerge. Every now and then, I was asked: "Have you done anything yet? What are you going to do?" The next moment happened when I was looking at a rather sordid magazine, Sports Illustrated, where they had model Kate Upton as Barbarella: floating in zero gravity in a silver bikini. That's when I realized we were playing a similar role, generating a series of aspirations. They were gentrification processes. The European version was obviously a bit more intellectual: sending three artists to float. The American version featured a blonde with certain memorable attributes, but the function was the same, scratching the same itch: "Where are we going to put the next Starbucks?" Once I understood the role I was being asked to play, I could conceptualize this series of pieces. I started writing, taking notes, thinking about how to put it all together. I spent a year trying to write a script. Filming was fun because I had a couple of actors sitting around a table, in a conversation no one could leave, like in Buñuel's *The Exterminating Angel*. There were six people dining, six voices discussing this problem. I filmed it in a very classic way. Although I knew I wasn't going to use this material, I tried to make sense of all the contradictions I found in that year of research. Truths and contradictions that need to be kept in tension and only become productive in that tension.
CM: In each part, there is a very violent observation of animals: in the first, you show open-heart surgery performed on a rat; in the second, you have a scene (that would have made Roger Caillois happy) of a praying mantis devouring a lizard. In the third, you present a very difficult image to forget: a snail that seems to be invaded by some kind of parasite. Can you talk about this animism in flesh, bone, and blood?
JA: Interestingly, you refer to the main characters of each of the videos. If there's a point where I'm interested in creating a moment of identification, it's through the animals. In the third video, I wanted to allude to the porosity of life, to the process of symbiosis: the way we are all mixed with other living beings and how a certain percentage of our constitution is specifically bacterial and viral. There's nothing clean about life; it's dirty, promiscuous, and wonderful. When the snail appears in the video, I wonder if when we talk about life, we're talking about human life or life in general, because life is much more complex. Like Matryoshka dolls, we have something inside that has something inside... What does that snail have? It's sick, and it's doing something totally against nature: going to the sun so a bird can eat it, and the parasite reproduces inside the bird, which will carry its offspring, and then another snail appears. It's a somewhat brutal reproduction process.
Source: [e-flux](https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/388217/julieta-aranda-stealing-one-s-own-corpse-an-alternative-set-of-footholds-for-an-ascent-into-the-dark/)
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Mono y esencia by Sofía Dourron
On the occasion of the exhibition at Ignacio Liprandi gallery, Sofía Dourron published an insightful reflection on her work in the Radar Supplement.
(Fragments)
According to the Infinite Monkey Theorem, a monkey randomly pressing the keys of a typewriter could produce, depending on the version one chooses to support, the complete works of Shakespeare, or any book found in the National Library of France. This theorem –Wikipedia warns us– should not be confused with the so-called Hundredth Monkey Effect. This other macaque phenomenon describes the rapid spread of learned knowledge from a group of monkeys x to all the monkeys in the world or 8 (infinite) monkeys. In the spring of 2011, on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, a crested macaque took the camera of British photographer David Slater and proceeded, like a teenager seeking their own subjectivity in front of the bathroom mirror, to take a series of perfectly framed and focused selfies, whose virtual radiation was not long in coming. This brief but media-covered episode seems to finally bring together the Infinite Monkey Theorem and the Monkey Effect into a single global phenomenon with countless ramifications for copyright laws, but also for probability theory and its associated notions of time and infinity. If it is not an exquisite text, but a viralized self-portrait, an easily transmissible skill, if the eternity of a monkey is nothing more than the second it takes to press the shutter, what does that mean for the life of the monkey? More importantly, what does this fact mean for our own lives? This tangle of monkeys and typewriters is at the very heart of the exhibition in Buenos Aires by the artist and co-editor of the online publication e-flux, Julieta Aranda. Tools for Infinite Monkeys (Open Machine) brings together a series of works created between 2008 and 2014 around the aforementioned "Infinite Monkey Theorem."
Within these pieces are questions aimed at unraveling the politics of time, the mutability of text and its possible translations, the complexity of language, and certain outdated notions of communication. In the small galaxy of esses (the apparently favorite letter of monkeys) that wallpapers the gallery walls, fills entire books, and is continuously expelled by an inkjet printer carelessly placed on the floor, in each of these modalities, the letter/text appears muted. "S" for infinity is the title of the collection of books piled on a shelf, compilations of the impressions of Monkey protocol suite, a small experimental simulation, or the image of the futility of such an experiment. If a monkey lived infinitely and in its life only typed on a typewriter or computer, what would it say and what would be the purpose of a simian achieving such longevity wanting to mechanically repeat this operation until producing the complete works of Shakespeare, or simpler still, a single phrase from Hamlet. It is, in any case, a time without events, like the "S" plotted on a mirror that reflects it ad infinitum, a lifeless and useless time that passes for the mere fact of passing. The question remains: what to do when time is nothing more than a dull needle spinning on a white plate?
The politics of time and its possible uses are a recurring theme in Aranda's work, who, along with artist/theorist Anton Vidokle (co-editor of e-flux), even conceived a new institution for its management, a Time Bank. The project, initiated in 2009, traces its origins to the store founded in 1827 by anarchist Josiah Warren in Cincinnati, and in the New Harmony community founded a few years earlier by Welsh industrialist Robert Owen, promoter of utopian socialism in the United States. Both figures promoted the circulation of time as a currency, based on mutualism and the labor theory of value, essential tools for any social reform enterprise. Time/Bank, an updated version of this nineteenth-century project, presents itself as "a tool with which a group of people can create an alternative economic model by exchanging their time and skills, instead of acquiring goods and services through the use of money or any other state-backed value." For us Argentines, this modality may take us back to the Barter Clubs that flourished throughout the country after the 2001 crisis and continue to multiply in every country suffering from our same ills, even reminding us of the Venus Project run by Roberto Jacoby and the Start Foundation, whose currency of exchange was not time but Venusinos and which had a fruitful life of six years. In short, both Time/Bank and the Venus Project promote individual and collective ways of acting in the world, networks of material and affective reciprocity, that turn the exchange of objects and services into eloquent bonds, and the passage of time into a lived and meaningful passing. The allusion to indifferent and abstract time as opposed to the tumultuous historical present allows small modalities of agency to filter through, eroding social canons and imperatives, rudimentary microeconomies that could function as collective tools, something akin to rubbing two sticks together to start a fire.
Projects like Pawnshop (2007), also in collaboration with Vidokle and American artist Liz Linden, follow this same path, transforming the e-flux space in New York into a pawnshop for artists, who could leave their works in exchange for a sum of money; once 30 days passed without claims, those works were sold to the public. If Time/Bank reverses the planet's most widespread socioeconomic model to take it back to its roots, Pawnshop casts a shadow of doubt over the art market and its eternally complex relationship with artists. Reflection on the art field and its internal articulations does not appear as an isolated fact; the artist as a producer and generator of objects and experiences is part of the extensive network of possible adherents to alternative exchanges. In this context, artists have the ability to assemble and disassemble the established representations of ways of linking, their particularities, and their temporalities.
Time as a strictly objective and rectilinear notion, as a universal measure, collapses when Aranda adjusts a clock to follow her own heartbeat in Two Shakes, a Tick and a Jiffy (2009). Monotonous passing becomes individualized becoming, bustling, full of transcendent and trivial events alike, but events nonetheless. In contrast, in You Had No Ninth of May! (2008) Aranda maps the zigzags of the International Date Line, an imaginary terrestrial surface line drawn over the Pacific Ocean that separates two consecutive days of the calendar. This line, straight in its origins and concept, has undergone modifications throughout its history at the request of nations such as the Kiribati archipelago, which managed to shift the line so that their territory would not be divided temporally into two parts. This literal and material aberration of our linear time-space conception demonstrates the possibility of bending, curving, almost coiling the notion of time to adapt it to the needs not only of individuals but also of a country's, town's, or village's community.
A perverted time, a muted text, an obscured message, a monkey without a razor but with a typewriter. The substantial experience of time for each individual, human or monkey, can become a particular choice with a propensity for radicalization, and even certain micro-scale utopian potential. All these elements shed light (a light that is hardly clear) on the power of politicized subjectivity to unravel atrophied imaginaries. These are insignificant events whose poetic reverberations expand beyond their realms of concern, whether it be the geopolitics of time or the photography of wild animals in their natural habitat, to impact, in their clumsy way, the construction of our disjointed contemporary daily life.
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Inter-species Journeys by Cuauhtémoc Medina
One of the most tempting but terrifying historical experiences is to witness the incipient crisis of an era. Whether due to the imperceptible and infinitesimal accumulation of changes and dysfunctions or being in the midst of a monumental event that eliminates all our securities (as is happening right now with the experience of the pandemic), there is a moment that disrupts the coherence of the routines and prejudices that gave meaning to an era. The thread that connected our sensibilities with different hypotheses about society and the cosmos has unraveled: our images, motives, and words no longer find their place.
The series around which Julieta Aranda’s work has gravitated over the past six years has been a record and a meditation on how our common sense has vanished. Under the suggestive title Stealing One's Own Corpse (An Alternative Set of Supports for an Ascension into the Dark), Aranda has composed three films that constitute an assemblage expressing the conditions surrounding the emergent sensitivity of the 21st century in terms of a mediated revelation, free of all mysticism, and a poetic-scientific, economic-ecological adventure, as geological as it is introspective.
These videos, which ignore the conventions of both the video essay and the documentary, and seem to master the ambition of uniting contemporary art with intellectual work, appear as a series of moving notes on the still somewhat confused axes that will form the basis of the new subjectivity of the Anthropocene oracles. These pieces are attempts to reconfigure our intuitions, desires, values, and fantasies of exchange and relationship. Patches of new fabrics made of agglomerations that are more than just unprecedented, they are radically unthinkable, overflowing the imaginary banks of what we designate as the "horizon."
Giving new meaning to her training as a filmmaker, Aranda proposes a reinvention that questions fundamental categories such as spatiality, the production of the urban, and the relationship between the inner excavation of the subjective and the modes of production and self-production of extractivism. In an incessant counterpoint of images, aphorisms, and poetic hybrids, these films interrogate the way the indiscernible in artificiality and spirituality frames the impossible task of building a future. Suddenly, the voids of meaning in our psyche are compared to the abysses created by open-pit mining, the tunnels of particle accelerators, and the underground deposits of ancient decaying forests and animals.
How can we replace the specters of so-called spirituality if not through a mythopoetics of subatomic particles, like the Higgs boson? What kind of politics can we establish on the corpse of individual arrogance, one that includes a physiological animism and sees us as hives of millions of viruses and other microbes? If we accept gnoseology as a new subjective project, we must understand death as part of the cycle of creation and consumption of carbon energy, and thus conceive the countless craters and abysses we have drilled into the earth in search of oil and minerals as signs of a cultural and economic onanism. The complex task demanded of us by this century is to overcome the raw perspective of exceptionalism and the purity of human life to embrace the multitude of conditions deriving from the deconstruction of a universe that, half a millennium after Galileo and Copernicus, remains essentially anthropocentric.
Watching Aranda's filmic meditations, I thought of Robert Oppenheimer's face as he watched the first atomic bomb fall in July 1945 and recalled Vishnu’s words in the Bhagavad-Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Aranda, exhibiting the third video in her series, which she prophetically subtitled in 2019 as an essay on "politics without oxygen," also decided to inscribe it in an installation where, among other phrases, appears a fragment of hope: "No one has ever died of contradictions." May this be our motto. "Stealing One's Own Corpse" is a manifesto of heterogeneity in the increasingly unattainable project of inventing some kind of future.
Abraham Cruzvillegas
Blind Self-Portrait with the Little Black Head, Envying the Ovenbird’s House, Flying with a Thrush, a Spotted-Breast Thornbird, a Mockingbird, a Common Miner, a Blue-and-White Swallow, a Seedeater, a Straight-Billed Reedhaunter, a Wren-Like Rushbird, a Dove, a Caracara, a Neotropic Cormorant, a Southern Lapwing, a Heron, a Ibis, a Great Kiskadee, a Mockingbird, a Parakeet, a Monk Parakeet, a Chimango Caracara, a Duck, a Coot, a Plover, a Sandpiper, a Scarlet-Headed Blackbird, a Yellow-Breasted Bird, a Plain-Breasted Hawk, Spotting a Cavy, a Ferret, and a Marsh Deer, Flying Over the Water, Preparing to Dive for a Sip of Its Waters, Tasting Some Tararira, a Catfish or a Mojarra, While Hearing the Distant Murmur of a Crowd Banging Pots and Pans and Continuing to Draw Silhouettes, Not Ceasing to Imagine That It Is Still Possible to Eradicate All Forms of Violence and Authoritarianism Peacefully, 2024
The Blind Self-Portrait series, in different colors and arranged in the space without specific indications, builds an aesthetic universe that leaves perception free for the viewer.
The artist keeps documents from his daily life, such as napkins, envelopes, newspaper and magazine articles, receipts, bus, subway, train, and plane tickets, post-its, business cards, correspondence, invitations, postcards, invoices, among others. These elements form a hidden document that attests to the memory of his days. According to the artist, it is "a kind of extremely sincere diary."
Creativity and potentiality with minimal resources point to a policy of self-sufficiency, provisionality, and cooperation as resistance against economic inequality.
Courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto
ARTIST TEXTS
Conversation between Abraham Cruzvillegas and Rodrigo Alonso
(Fragments)
(...) Rodrigo Alonso: How have you approached your work for Buenos Aires?
Abraham Cruzvillegas: Almost all of the works presented at Fundación Proa have been created on-site, with the help of a local team that provided materials and technical support. They belong to three different bodies of work that I have presented in various places, always using local materials, which inherently bring diverse layers of experience and transformation, appealing to local economies, societies, and individuals. The first series includes two new large-format drawings made on surfaces of three by four meters, painted with numerous layers of white commercial acrylic paint, like the type used for painting walls in domestic spaces. The drawings are made with ordinary mops, with which I drew the likenesses of two primates of different species known as mandrills, a female and a male. I have been drawing apes since the 1980s when I worked as a caricaturist for various publications in Mexico City, some of national circulation. In my country, caricaturists are called “moneros” because we draw “monitos,” which I take to heart, so I have drawn monkeys (orangutans, gorillas, bonobos, chimpanzees, etc.) on a considerable variety of surfaces, including paper, fabric, and walls, with various materials, including pens, oils, watercolors, Chinese ink, markers, pencils, and saliva. Also from the context of caricature, with a current political twist, comes the analogy of apes —unfavorable for them— with dictators and authoritarian rulers. Three drawings of the same dimensions belong to a second series of works I have been doing for several years, as abstractions of routes or psychogeographic maps of inefficient drifts through cities, neighborhoods, or countries, making routes between favorite or significant places. In these cases, I use primary colors (blue, red, yellow), plus pink, green, and gold, to draw lines —also with mops on prepared fabrics— that converge in circles of different sizes, representing those places. Four new sculptures are entirely made from recycled materials, sourced from a scrapyard of a pipe factory. Affirming their genealogy, in the use of industrial materials that would have gone through, or have already gone through, various processes of transformation, from their mineral status to that of utility objects, the sculptures refer to different moments, no longer of smelting, of having been slag, of transitioning from liquid to solid state, of their reduction to be called “pipe,” but those of human history, from the invention of fire and the recognition of metal to its conversion into tools and weapons, to ironmaking, to the grand promise of modernity, to industry, to the future and environmental destruction, to the utopia in reverse.
Pending, like the promise itself, the largest of these sculptures has taken shape from random decisions linked to modern physics and the lightness of its internal relations, of which we would only be voyeurs, waiting for things to fall of their own weight. The others, of small format, aim to be interpreted, in a strictly musical sense, by someone who recognizes in their materiality the potential of the mass.
RA: How have the relationships between individual and group work been approached in this case? What is the balance between aesthetic decisions and discoveries?
AC: The happiest way of any learning process is called a question. I share them in my belligerent ignorance, implying the possibility of complicity from within the institution, without marginality, without concealments, but also without pamphlets or propaganda, except when strictly necessary, urgent. From the species of bugs and bushes that surround and inhabit industries, buildings, schools, prisons, and hospitals, from their natural generosity, whether through their nutritional or healing virtues, from their origins and their indigeneity, from our existence with everything else, in what we still call “nature,” as long as it can exist, including all beings, those who migrate, those who leave, those who fight, those who surrender, and the authoritarian, the violent, that’s where collectivity is born. Without it, as a human being, I am destined for failure, ethically and aesthetically, once again.
RA: The local work group has had a lot of freedom in selecting the materials with which you create your works. Is this an explicit decision to challenge the omnipotence of the author, as an authority to which all significant elements of a work are referred?
AC: As I mentioned earlier, speaking about the public’s interpretation of any work, from any field, in this case, rather than trying to challenge anything, I’m interested in thinking that my reading of a work of mine may be the first, but very unlikely the best. In the selection of materials, there is another will, which has to do with inclusion: not discarding anything that is given to me to make a work. I ask the people in charge to help me find materials in specific contexts, like a blind date, and when I make the work I try not to exclude anything, so the criterion of that commissioned person to find the materials is what counts, not only are they local materials, wherever it is made, but also local perspectives, with which there is always a dialogue, complicity, and occasionally friendship.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Instability and Fragmentation / Improvisation and Self-Construction: Abraham Cruzvillegas’ Sculpture by Mark Godfrey
(...) Cruzvillegas’ research into local economies determines not only his sculptural process but also the materials he uses. In 2008, the artist spent some time at Cove Park, Scotland, an old farm now converted into an artists' residence, after which he exhibited at the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) in Glasgow a series of constructions made from wool, sheep dung, old plastic buoys, pieces of wood, discarded hangers, etc. Although at first it might seem that his interest was in creating disparate combinations of natural materials and industrially produced objects, similar to Jannis Kounellis for example, Cruzvillegas did not distinguish between materials produced by sheep and those made in factories; everything he used in his constructions was found in the area where he worked and clearly formed part of the region's agricultural economy. His previous sculptures also show how Cruzvillegas chooses, uses, and combines various materials. This variety of materials that the artist uses in any exhibition is evident in the list of media appearing on the works' labels. For example, the publication accompanying his 2003 exhibition in Houston includes evocative lists such as “polycarbonate, screws, and wooden maracas,” “metal fabric, shells, and cotton,” “rock crystal, obsidian, and plastic bucket,” “palm hat, branch, and rubber bands,” “candles, nails, and drum cymbal,” and the longest one, “tequila glass, bongos, drum material, steel bars, Colombian leather seed shaker and leather, and cowbell.” It is obvious that the artist loves to accumulate all kinds of objects in his studio, and one might wonder how they get there. Cruzvillegas insists that it is not about strolling through the city and being enchanted by obsolete objects, in the manner of André Breton and Alberto Giacometti’s encounters with found objects at the Paris flea market. Nor is it like Gabriel Orozco’s accumulation method at the Penske Project, where the artist aimed to collect construction-related waste from New York streets. Cruzvillegas, without a specific project, brings materials to his studio that have no particular appeal, simply with the idea that they might have some future utility. Many of his sculptures are the result of experimentation with these accumulated materials; however, one of his most famous works, Horizontes (2005), emerged from excess and an impasse. For months, the artist had been collecting objects throughout Mexico City without completing any constructions, but before leaving for France, he had to vacate his studio and decide what to do with the material. Cruzvillegas decided to use it all at once, painting one half of each item pink and the other half green (the colors of the Mangueira samba school, by Oiticica); the color canceled the identity of the objects, dissolving any hierarchy between them. He then placed each object on the floor in circular shapes across a vast space. (...)
The artist has mentioned his desire to “transform objects into themselves” and to strip them of “the ballast of meaning.” When objects become part of the structure, they function as materials with specific properties of shape, rigidity, weight, etc. The palm hat from 18 de Julio, for example, serves as a round woven base that offers an opening and counterweight to the branch; the sickles of La Moderna are rigid metal structures whose even curves contrast with the jagged edges of the oar. The objects have not been chosen primarily for their cultural connotations, the Chinese hat or the sickle as a symbol of communism, for example, and yet these associations are inevitable, especially when both the hat and the sickles are juxtaposed with wooden objects that do not carry those same connotations. The structural juxtaposition calls into question the identity of each part of a construction: a particular element may function as a structural unit and also as a cultural unit, and these two roles do not necessarily share coherence with the other object. The more one considers the role of the object in the structure, the less its cultural connotations are taken into account. The construction as a whole acquires an indeterminate identity, and in many works, the instability of identity is literally reinforced by a structure that seems on the verge of collapsing, or materials that fade over time, etc.
These notions of instability are key to Cruzvillegas's project. The artist asserts that the meaning of the objects he uses in his constructions cannot be fixed, that their identity as a whole is multiple and mutable, just as his ideas about the totality of sculpture are, which are always in formation as he studies art history or develops his contact with craftsmen. Cruzvillegas's ideas about instability trace back to his studies in critical pedagogy and his commitment to ideas that value the processes of learning and unlearning more than the products and results (the artist studied pedagogy while also studying art). Cruzvillegas enriches this perspective with readings of continental philosophy, especially the text L’écriture du désastre (The Writing of the Disaster, 1980) by Maurice Blanchot, a book of loose thoughts where Blanchot describes the fragmentary nature of thought, the way writing disassembles meanings rather than concretizing them: "Writing is perhaps to bring to the surface something like an absent sense, to welcome the passive impulse that is not yet thought, for it is already the disaster of thought." "Writing is already (and still) violence, rupture, breaking, fragmentation, tearing of the torn in every fragment." "To write is to distrust writing absolutely while surrendering oneself entirely to it." (...)
Cruzvillegas's recent sculptures—such as those described at the beginning of this essay—also carry the title Autoconstrucción (Self-Construction) and are presented alongside material related to his family's home. The sculptures should not be seen as direct representations of the house; the materials were also not chosen to make the public think of its architectural characteristics. Ultimately, while the sculptures from the Autoconstrucción project at Thomas Dane included some objects collected in Mexico, those in Glasgow were made from Scottish rural waste. Viewing the video and archival material alongside the sculptures allows us to understand that for Cruzvillegas, the resulting works are less important than the process of improvisation and unplanned construction that shaped them, and these are the same processes used to build the family home and that formed his own identity and way of thinking about identity—understanding it as something improvised and in constant construction. However, we do not need to read anything about Cruzvillegas’s house or hear his parents' memories to understand that even without that material, the Autoconstrucción sculptures radiate the atmosphere he remembers, with their exciting sense of potential, of what creativity can achieve even with minimal resources. The processes at play point towards a politics of self-sufficiency, the provisional, and cooperation, and, at the same time, to what the artist calls a "critical approach to reality": for the sculptures always deal with self-construction, taking power instead of submitting to external authority and regulation.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------I3P by Abraham Cruzvillegas
More than an autobiographical account, the following handful of letters attempts to describe the process of an artist who shaped himself during the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century, in a country in constant crisis, of absolute and perhaps irredeemable inequality, in a violent and cruel society, where imagining that one can professionally dedicate oneself to cultural production—in literature, in the traditional arts of the various cultures of the country, in dance, in music, in performing arts, in visual arts, in design, in architecture, in all areas of creation—might mistakenly seem like an act of narcissism, a luxury.
My case is not exceptional but it is the one I know best. I never tire of repeating that I was born in 1968 in the Ajusco neighborhood and grew up in this collection of irregular settlements located on the rocky hills of Coyoacán, between the University City and the Azteca Stadium. The neighborhood was mostly composed of indigenous people—mostly from the states of Michoacán, Puebla, and Oaxaca—newly arrived to what promised to be a modern city of opportunities for all. There were no streets or solid buildings; the community was built from shared work and festivity, but also through its politicization to obtain land ownership, basic services, and essential rights, especially education. Neighborhood organization became a bastion of culture, or rather, of the cultures of the various members of this neighborhood which, when not a crater, was a quagmire. I grew up with the same needs and demands as all the kids from Ajusco, and from many other neighborhoods, going to marches and demonstrations where I learned to chant slogans against raids and evictions, against the police, then against the government, especially against the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). We protested against the abuse and authoritarianism of the government, demanding water, electricity, streets, markets, and schools. During Miguel de la Madrid’s presidency, I spent much of my time drawing cartoons and portraits of infamous politicians from here and there—from José López Portillo to Jimmy Carter, passing through Anastasio Somoza—inspired by my heroes, the political cartoonists of the magazines La Garrapata and Quécosaedro and the newspaper unomásuno. In 1985, I met one of them: Rafael Barajas "el Fisgón," who became one of my first mentors, both in politics and in art.
Learning to be a professional cartoonist, I met Damián Ortega and we grew together as artists and as citizens. However, in 1985, I did not enroll in the School of Fine Arts but in Pedagogy at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), just as my childhood idol, Professor Rubén Morales, whose family—like my father's—was from Nahuatzen, Michoacán, and who was one of the most tenacious advocates for adult education in my neighborhood and who disappeared prematurely due to the effects of violent repression by the police during an eviction.
I studied this career because art schools seemed more like centers of techniques or trades, but not of art. I—perhaps naively—wanted to transform education, not just artistic education, but all of it. It was a tumultuous time. In 1985, I participated with neighbors from my neighborhood in emergency brigades to remove rubble from collapsed tenements, especially in the Tepito neighborhood, due to the earthquake of September 19. There I met Felipe Ehrenberg, an artist who had settled in that part of the city and who spontaneously organized the volunteers and the neighborhood.
In 1986, I participated in the strike of the University Student Council of UNAM which sought to defend the almost total gratuity of tuition fees, anticipating a probable attempt at privatizing public education. In 1988, I went out on the streets to vote—it was the first time I did so in presidential elections—and to support Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, who in many ways represented the end of the PRI.
I went out again, along with many people from my generation, to protest against the historic electoral fraud, the infamous “fall of the system,” orchestrated by the Ministry of the Interior headed by Manuel Bartlett, who remained in Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s incoming government in the education sector. But since 1987, thanks to Damián, I met Gabriel Orozco, also Gabriel Kuri, and Jerónimo López, with whom we embarked on a "pedagogical misadventure," as it was informal, spontaneous, and free.
For me, this process took on the face of the artistic training that institutional schools lacked. For four years, we set up a space for dialogue, criticism, exchange of information, and—above all—listening under Orozco’s mentorship. It became the beginning of an educational process that was definitely unfinished, using Marcel Duchamp’s way of referring to his work. In 1991, I was a substitute teacher for a professor on sabbatical, Rosario García Crespo, and began teaching in the art degree program at the then School of Fine Arts of UNAM, which is now called the Faculty of Arts and Design. Since then, I have continued to work, in one way or another, in the field of education at various levels and academic contexts, north and south, in different economies and countries. I still believe that education is one of the most important tools for transforming a society, one that operates without resorting to violence, and that to transform education, it must be done from within.
Classroom work with students remains one of the fundamental elements of my work as an artist. In 1993 and 1994 (the year the Zapatista Army of National Liberation emerged), to generate income to support my projects and research, in addition to teaching, I worked as a museographer in the collections of Pago en Especie and the Acervo Patrimonial of the Ministry of Finance and Public Credit. There were then a couple of exhibition spaces: the Casona on Avenida Hidalgo 79 and the building on Guatemala 8, behind the Metropolitan Cathedral, where the then-emerging curators, María Guerra and Guillermo Santamarina, organized unusual contemporary art exhibitions with works by artists from various generations—sometimes very young—who did not belong to the Ministry’s collections.
The works under their custody were normally used to decorate government offices or event rooms, when they were not simply stored away, waiting to be shown in the museums that ideally should house them, such as the Museum of Modern Art, almost created for this purpose, or the National Museum of Art. It was said that sometimes the works did not return to the Ministry’s warehouses, even though they remained in their inventory, once the administrative periods of the current officials ended. Today, works received as tax payments—through a renewed evaluation committee composed of specialists, curators, and artists, and not just tax administration officials—can go to institutions that display them to their different audiences without having to transit through the Ministry. The rest of the collection is intermittently displayed at the Ministry of Finance museum, in the former Archbishop's Palace on Moneda Street.
This should also apply—as a tax payment, not as a "tax exemption" because it is not—to those who compose poems, symphonies, choreographies, who make films and plays, who extract teeth and plant trees, who invent new languages in science and technology, and to those who write history books, because this way their work effectively becomes part of the heritage of society, and does not remain in the hands and privilege of a few.
In 1995, I received a grant from the FONCA Support for Projects and Cultural Co-investments to research artisanal techniques from the Purhépecha region of Michoacán. With this grant, I created, over a much longer and more expensive period than originally planned—ultimately using my own limited resources—a set of works that aimed to generate questions about the processes and contexts of production of the cultural group to which my paternal family belongs.
During the presidency of Luis Echeverría, I heard too many times that government speeches talked about the vindication of indigenous cultures, of their heritage as a patrimony, but they did so as something in a showcase for tourists or as a subject for books, as something of the past. Everything alive or present, which the speeches referred to as ethnic groups, was considered a problem. My intention with the grant was not to talk about indigenous people or use their knowledge and traditions for my work, but to learn from the people to whom a part of my identity belongs, to find myself in them. And despite the always limited resources from the grant, during that embryonic stage of my language and artistic discourse, it would have been impossible to start several projects without them.
I was also a grantee in the Young Creators program of the National Fund for Culture and the Arts (FONCA) in 1991 and again in 1998, first in Sculpture and then in Alternative Media, as this category did not exist before. However, state investment in the formative stages of artists—not just visual artists—has occasionally been seen as superfluous, insofar as it does not represent an efficient or immediate benefit to "society" and appears as a privilege in the eyes of some people. In other latitudes and formative environments for artists, most of the time, people who decide to dedicate themselves to cultural production do not have a state administrative apparatus to support them and are forced to finance their artistic work in ways that end up precarizing—or definitely inhibiting—their processes and possible professional horizons, thus canceling a huge potential of added value in culture—which represents another type of capital, not necessarily monetary—for their societies and countries.
Nuestra imagen actual: La pérdida no es tan mala como querer más (Mandrillus sphinx)
Nuestra imagen actual: No hay mayor peligro que subestimar al oponente. (Mandrillus leucophaeus)
Our Current Image: Loss Is Not as Bad as Wanting More (Mandrillus sphinx), 2024 Acrylic on canvas Our Current Image: There Is No Greater Danger Than Underestimating the Opponent (Mandrillus leucophaeus), 2024 Acrylic on canvas
300 x 400 cm
300 x 400 cm
The depiction of monkeys in Cruzvillegas's work dates back to the 1980s, when he worked as a cartoonist ("monero" in Mexican slang) in Mexico City. This nickname left a deep mark on his work, leading apes such as orangutans, gorillas, bonobos, and chimpanzees to become protagonists in his artistic production. Caricature has always been a powerful medium for social and political critique, and in Cruzvillegas's work, it is no exception. Through the analogy of apes, he reflects on figures of dictators and authoritarian rulers, offering a sharp satire that has persisted since his early works and remains relevant today.
The process of creating these drawings for Cruzvillegas is a choreographic act, a kind of giant calligraphy resembling tai chi. It requires bodily balance, concentration, and skill in handling tools like the broom.
In his selection, mandrills stand out, which the artist associates with an industrial tool. This comparison highlights firmness and strength, characteristics shared by both the primate and the utensil.
Courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto
Autorretrato pendiente contemplando el impresionante ballet de la transformación industrial, añorando poco la fantasía de la promesa de pertenencia al universo moderno (incluyendo la panacea de los combustibles fósiles), especulando sobre el posible placer que representaría idealizar un modelo económico pletórico de contradicciones, sudando la transición del sólido al líquido, al rojo vivo, y descubriendo de nuevo al agua en casi todos sus estados, comenzando por Veracruz, con unos hielitos mezclados con algo bebestible y compartible, para cotorrear, 2024
Glockenspiel taoísta 3, 2024
Pending Self-Portrait Contemplating the Impressive Ballet of Industrial Transformation, Longing Little for the Fantasy of the Promise of Belonging to the ‘Modern’ Universe (Including the Panacea of Fossil Fuels), Speculating on the Possible Pleasure of Idealizing an Economic Model Full of Contradictions, Sweating the Transition from Solid to Liquid, Red-Hot, and Rediscovering Water in Almost All Its States, Starting with Veracruz, with Some Ice Cubes Mixed with Something Drinkable and Shareable, to Chat, 2024
Invited by Proa to create one of his iconic sculptures, Cruzvillegas traveled to Veracruz, Mexico, to learn about the process and materials at the Tenaris plant. He observed the recycling of scrap metal in the construction of pipes and the natural surroundings, and selected these elements to configure the large central piece.
With a team of collaborators, he began to work according to his particular method linked to the concept of "self-construction." Without a beginning or end, nor fixed rules, the artist sought the balance point that suspends the work. In his words: "I have tried to generate a balance, which in reality is a giant imbalance, in the construction of objectual modules that have occasionally been called assemblage, installation, or sculpture."
The pieces explore issues such as the transformation of material, recycling, and the energy involved in pipe manufacturing, reflecting local and global economies, as well as social, political, and cultural themes. The selection of materials highlights the supply chains, from extraction in the mine to their final uses.
Additionally, Cruzvillegas shows his interest in the encounter between man and nature, highlighting the natural species surrounding the industries. This is made tangible in the rooms displaying native plants from the Los Pantanos nature reserve in the city of Campana.
As part of his work, the artist created small satellite sculptures that branch off from the central piece and will be musically activated, adding an interactive and sound aspect to his installation.
Creativity and potentiality with minimal resources point to a policy of self-sufficiency, provisionality, and cooperation as resistance against economic inequality.
Courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto
Otras rutas: El éxito es tan peligroso como el fracaso: la esperanza es tan hueca como el miedo, 2024
Otras rutas: Dirige una gran nación de la forma en que cocinarías un pez pequeño: no exageres, 2024
Other Routes: Success is as Dangerous as Failure: Hope is as Hollow as Fear, 2024 Other Routes: Lead a Great Nation as You Would Cook a Small Fish: Don't Overdo It, 2024 Other Routes: A Leader is Best When People Barely Know They Exist, 2024
Acrylic on canvas
300 x 400 cm
Acrylic on canvas
300 x 400 cm
Acrylic on canvas
300 x 400 cm
Cruzvillegas presents three works that are part of an extensive series titled Other Routes, where he maps imaginary paths between points of emotional or symbolic interest in the places where he creates them, this time associated with people working at Fundación Proa. Each route is meticulously traced with mops, using a color palette that includes blue, red, yellow, green, pink, and gold.
Gold, uncommon in Cruzvillegas's work, is incorporated as a tribute to the distinctive colors of the La Boca neighborhood in Buenos Aires, marking a significant aspect of the local identity of the pieces. By combining psychogeographical elements with a color palette loaded with personal and cultural meanings, he creates visual maps that explore the relationship between the artist, the city, and the surrounding contexts.
Courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto
Matriz de voz, Subescultura 13, 2011
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
Voice Array, Subsculpture 13, 2011
Intercom, matrix of lights (LED rods), holosonic speaker, custom hardware and software
Variable dimensions
Studio Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
The concepts of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer intertwine with tangible reality and technological introspection, transforming space into a stage for human interaction and artistic reflection. From his start in chemistry to his venture into performance, Lozano-Hemmer invites us to explore how technology is not just a tool but an inevitable extension, a common language within a globalized era.
The contemporary work exhibited at Fundación Proa, Voice Array, offers the viewer a unique experience where the artist merges technology and participation. This immersive installation captures and reproduces the voices of visitors, creating a choir. In a gesture that connects the intimate with the public, each voice contributes to a symphony of ephemeral memories, reflecting the transience of our existence.
Lozano-Hemmer comments on the work: “It is a piece that has two properties. The first is that it is unfinished, meaning it is not completed by definition but is populated with the contents of the participating public. It is a platform that never ends, a territory that allows participants to represent themselves. The second property is that the work is out of control, which means there are no instructions indicating what can be said or how to express oneself; it is an open platform without censorship. It is one of many works in which I seek to make the voice visible. The voice is an almost universal property that we humans share; it represents our ability to express ourselves. When our breath is within our body, it is something private, but in the voice, it becomes something public.”
He first presented his work at the Fundación Telefónica in 2012, and this is the second time his work can be appreciated in our country. The artist engages in intense research and educational activities.
ARTIST TEXTS
"Being unpredictable sets us apart from machines": Interview with Rafael Lozano-Hemmer by Sonia Sierra
(Excerpts)
The artist reflects on the interaction between Artificial Intelligence and public space, something that was part of his work Translation Island.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (Mexico City, 1967) is not afraid that artists will disappear with Artificial Intelligence or that originality will be at risk because, in any case, artistic creation always draws from the past; he himself has made AI an almost everyday tool in his studio in Montreal. Lozano-Hemmer has been using AI as a tool in his works for decades, and with it, his art has evolved, offering new responses to the exercise of establishing new relationships between viewers and technology, technology which, he reiterates, is neither neutral nor innocent.
During his visit to Mexico to present at the Zona Maco Fair works with galleries Max Estrella, Pace, and bifforms, the artist discussed one of the major projects he presented in 2023, Translation Island, on Lulu Island in Abu Dhabi, projects that interact with Artificial Intelligence and public space.
Each of the works in the Translation Island exhibition, which was shown between November and January, required the voice, warmth, heart, and participation of the public; in the end, 150,000 people attended, says the artist. The exhibition consisted of ten gigantic public art pieces, some were variations of previous works like Almacén de corazonadas, while others were related to literature or based on the concept of translation, understood by the artist as a way of making invisible things become tangible, but also as an exercise of interpreting from one language to another or relocating a person to another space.
One of the works in this exhibition, Translation Lake, occupied the lake on the island where three white boats were illuminated by translations of James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake, which, with Artificial Intelligence, was translated into 24 languages spoken in the United Arab Emirates; another piece, Translation Stream, consisted of 100 meters of projections on the floor, of verses by contemporary Emirati poets over which visitors walked; in Collider, the translation was of another type, starting from the detection of cosmic radiation that reaches Earth from stars and black holes, but which is invisible; then technology translated such radiation and made it visible as waves of an immense curtain of light that could be seen within a radius of 10 kilometers. "My projects are always about this relationship between presence and absence, who is the observer and who is the observed? How these technologies are not neutral, how they do not capture but create a reality. The use of Artificial Intelligence in most of my works has to do with how to give the computer the ability to detect the presence of the public and act upon it."
Sonia Sierra: What limits do you and your studio set regarding Artificial Intelligence? We are facing debates, for example, from illustrators and other creators claiming that authorship is being violated... What do you think about this issue ethically?
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: I don't think anyone has it clear. We are facing something irreversible, I mean, here is a series of technologies that allow us to make certain averages from a vast amount of information and certain predictions or extrapolations, which has, on the one hand, a real utility. In the studio, I confess, we use ChatGPT a lot because much of the programming we do is facilitated as a language by ChatGPT; we ask it to make certain programs for us, and as long as you pay attention to where to insert it and how to modify it, it actually reduces costs and facilitates the production of new works thanks to the reuse of codes that were already there. But there is a quite problematic thing: we are part of the Open Source movement, and we advocate for the idea that all our software, absolutely everything, can be reused by anyone who wants to. But then, for example, ChatGPT or GitHub from Microsoft come along and take all that content that is given in Open Source and then charge you for reusing your own technological development. The problem is not only in the technology itself but in how these companies are monetizing the work of millions of people, specialists who have worked on a subject and published it altruistically.
SH: Which brings us to the issue of originality in the artwork...
RLH: I am aware that when I program something, I am not doing it from scratch. I am myself an Artificial Intelligence agent, making variations on what I have learned and read; I am already copying; artists do not work separately from the rest of history and society; we all have idiosyncrasies and baggage from what we have learned, so we cannot pretend that we are pure and clear and that we are the origin of ideas. That’s why it’s very important, when working with Artificial Intelligence, to feel part of a collaboration, of a network.
SH: What risks do you see in the misuse of Artificial Intelligence?
RLH: One of the serious problems is that we suddenly depend on algorithms to give us the best information on how to maintain, for example, a healthy environment or a functioning economy or police work. That suddenly the security of countries, access to banks, and personal data is done through resources that have no neutrality or a process of checks and balances where you can respond and demand transparency. There is a demand for us to understand what is behind it. Now, all of that is fine, but at the same time, I am very interested in discussing the fact that we will never stop existing. For the illustrator, it may have an impact, but this fear also existed when photography was invented and it was said: "Paintings will no longer be necessary." What happened is that painting changed thanks to photography. You, as an artist or illustrator, always have the ability to improvise and generate a certain difference with AI.
SH: Is it exaggerated to say that AI will replace artists?
RLH: My utopian position is that Artificial Intelligence will not replace artists because we die; death is something that separates us from algorithms that remember everything. Forgetfulness is a fundamental part of poetry. The ability to have these mental gaps and then find certain resonances and knowing that your life will end is something that computers do not have. Montaigne said that to philosophize is to learn to die, and making art is somewhat similar: we are all facing the limit of our own lives, and that is not something machines have; machines remember everything. I read recently that forgetfulness is fundamental to evolution; it is, in fact, genetic mutation.
SH: We have that margin of unpredictability, what machines do not control, where there is still improvisation...
RLH: I love that our society is based a lot on random numbers made by machines; cryptography now gives you the ability to get something very close to improvisation; but it is still a no-place for machines, where you can improvise — and I have to be careful because it is true that humans are also very bad at improvisation. But what artists need to do the most is to be unpredictable, not to be part of a pattern or formula but always to create something that brings them closer to improvisation, to randomness. That will always be something much more civilized than trying to have a preconceived, teleological objective. One must act in an unpredictable way, and in the future more and more, humans will define ourselves by the freedom to be unpredictable.
SH: How has your notion of occupying public space with art changed?
RLH: It depends a lot on the country; it remains about this idea of searching for ways of self-representation, how to make public space a catalyst, a meeting place, a place that people occupy in non-commercial activities? How to make our parks, squares, streets become ours, and not just a result of capital optimization? For me, art is an intervention, an interruption of those great narratives of capital optimization. It’s about making people meet in space and share an experience; the idea is that instead of cameras we have projectors because if you have more images, you will have more to talk about and you will develop more community. Many of the resources of popular representation turn into projects of popular repression; it’s ultimately what we are seeing in a public space that disappears like the internet. People like me came from a tradition of thinking about the world of the internet as a place where one could express oneself, where you had the ability to not be censored, that the network had a malleability to survive different types of centralized attacks. I still believe all this, but now I see that our interactions tend to be more passive, I have three children who are totally connected to their phones, there is a sense that your activism is liking a post. This is not activism; it still requires taking to the streets. I am certain that public space is being attacked. We are seeing a brutal concentration of media and money in a few hands.
SH: What options do you see?
RLH: Solutions are always difficult: redistribution of media, dignity, ending economic violence... These are processes that take generations, but people want quick solutions, and they think the solution is an autonomous car. No, the solution is public transportation, thinking differently about how we interact with each other, we need to design cities to be built on our scale.
Source: Diario El Universal https://confabulario.eluniversal.com.mx/ser-impredecibles-nos-separa-delas-maquinas-entrevista-con-rafael-lozano-hemmer/
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Iluminet Magazine
Light for a Democratic Moment by María Isabel López Barreiro
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is an artist who expresses his creativity through electronic resources, and one of his essential elements is light. He is Mexican, and his work is better known and more awarded outside his country of origin, which is why Iluminet sought the opportunity to converse with him to bring him closer to the audience with whom he feels a lot of empathy.
María Isabel López Barreiro: What does light mean to you?
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: I am interested in light primarily at an urgent, social, aesthetic, practical, strategic, empirical, and scientific level. I understand light, in principle, as something extremely violent; for example, it begins in the Sun with enormous fusion and fission nuclear reactions, creating matter, waves, particles, and photons through beautiful solar explosions. I like, for example, to emphasize that light is schizophrenic, as we don't know if it is particles or waves; science describes light as a phenomenon that can be characterized as a particle or a wave depending on how you study it. I like to think of the light that comes from Border Patrol helicopters in the United States, pursuing Mexican migrants, the violence of those search and capture light cannons. I am interested in the lights of Albert Speer's fascists, those enormous Nazi intimidation spectacles at the 1936 Nuremberg rallies; so my attraction to light has a very perverse vision, it is more related to the sinister. Goethe said that the brighter the light, the darker the shadow, and what I like is the romantic landscape of this darkness that light creates, how to use light to hide, not to highlight, not to demonstrate, not to index, but to hide, in some way to avoid. So I have a vision of light that is very contrary to many of the artists I admire who work with light, like James Turrell; he comes from a Quaker tradition, which is a religion, especially in the United States, that does not believe in churches or the pope. It is a very curious religion because it is based on a collective of people who hope to sit and see the inner light. So in James Turrell's works, you have luminous environments where you sit and feel a true inspiration that, according to his tradition, has to do with this contact with something beyond the physical, and I respect that very much; but I think James Turrell is already doing that very well. I am interested in another type of light, for example, commercials, special effects; I am interested in all these more tragic aspects that light brings us. And on the other hand, I always answer that to be a visual artist you need to work with light because if there is no light, you might as well do radio.
MILB: Since when have you been playing with light?
RLH: I started working in theater and performance, and light was an element that we could change through sensors; I began my career developing a series of technologies that allowed actors or dancers to control their own set design. Using robotic lamps, those you find at concerts, you can control the characteristics of the light rays, their color, intensity, position, divergence, and what we did was create sensors that allowed actors to control those robotic lamps. That was one of the beginnings, and from there I started working a lot with light; I also worked with projections, as projection is light with shape and color, and we also manipulated them with these sensors. In 1991 and 1992, I stopped doing scenic art and started doing more visual art installations, which are still very theatrical but no longer have actors, actresses, or dancers. The audience itself activates the work.
MILB: From there, you began with this interaction of individuals with technology and light.
RLH: Exactly, that was the idea. Until computing enters the scene, light always follows a narrative, so, for example, you have all the machines that allow you to program a light show that follows a preprogrammed sequence, like a light and sound show you see in a pyramid in Mexico, which follows a preprogrammed and mechanically repeatable sequence. I am not interested in that; what interests me is that all the effects, all the creation of light, is in relation to the movements and interactions of the actors or the audience as actors.
MILB: They become multiple narratives.
RLH: Narratives that you cannot predict or control. I like to say that my shows, the large interventions I make in public space, come from the tradition of performance, where there is no script. Unlike theater, the event happens in real-time, outside the artist's control; when I do a presentation, I don’t know what the outcome will be; it depends on how people interact with the piece. That’s what I like and what attracts me about technologies, that they give us that freshness.
MILB: And can you observe the people's reaction in that context?
RLH: Obviously, there are all kinds of approaches. My works have many entry and starting points. Some people don’t see it as art, which I find fantastic; they see it as a special effect, no problem; some people see it as something fun, perfect; some people see it as something “Orwellian,” about surveillance, very gloomy, dark, and perverse, and I like that too. I like not to predetermine what people will think or feel. The idea is to seek a democratic moment, even if it sounds terrible, but that is the intention; the idea is that the artwork is realized at the point of interaction, without the audience's participation, the work does not exist, and then it becomes fundamental. In my case, what I try to do is create intimacy, the possibility that these rays of light are ephemeral, that in some way they represent a large group of people; that you have a sense of the ephemeral, that this happens only for a brief moment, like an interruption of totalitarian spectacles. I am interested in the personalization of space, making it relational.
MILB: When you arrive and expose yourself to a work of yours already set up, seeing it concretized and blending in as a spectator of your own work, how is it for you?
RLH: It is always fantastic because it is a moment of catharsis; when you finally see that the work functions, it is lovely because, once the piece is presented, you no longer have control over how people will react, and I really like the surprise. For example, I did a piece in England, where you see portraits of people inside your shadow on the floor; I thought it was going to be a very fun, theatrical piece, like a kind of virtual puppet, and yet it was well received but was very ominous, it made people uncomfortable, it was not pleasant; I liked that, I like how people have their own interpretation, and I am just another participant watching the piece.
MILB: Is there anything else you would like to add?
RLH: Yes, I would like to invite readers to visit my website. There is a new documentary about the most important light work I have ever done in my life, in my opinion, which is the memorial for the 40th anniversary of the Tlatelolco student massacre, called Voz alta, because it is a work that, unfortunately, the media, Televisa, and TV Azteca never covered. In Tlatelolco, it is the most important lighting piece I have done because of how people made that device of turning voice into light and radio their own; it seemed to me to be a very symbolic, very emotional intervention. So, I am interested in people knowing about that project because, of course, through established media, you don’t find out. They didn’t cover it, and I called them because I have had many interviews in Mexico, for many programs; I called them and said, “Hey, you need to come and see what is happening here.” Survivors of the massacre came; a guy came and said, “My name is such and such, and I am the son of one of the soldiers who did the massacre, and I am here to say that I am a new generation.” It was beautiful, and all in Voz alta, turning into light. Radio broadcasting the voices without censorship and moderation seemed very nice, very necessary to me, but the media in Mexico still fears this to this day, it intimidates them that people have a voice; they still want to control it as if we were in the Echeverría era.
Source: https://iluminet.com/la-luz-para-un-momento-democratico/
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Third Party Included or The Machine and Its Double by Alejandra Bastida
"That’s why there was nothing strange about what happened. My face was pressed against the glass of the aquarium, my eyes trying once again to penetrate the mystery of those gold eyes without iris or pupil. I saw very closely the face of an immobile axolotl next to the glass. Without transition, without surprise, I saw my face against the glass; instead of the axolotl, I saw my face against the glass, I saw it from the other side of the glass. Then my face moved away and I understood."
— Julio Cortázar, Axolotl
In its quest for new and more effective ways to recognize and catalog individuals, the biometric industry is developing technologies that, among other things, aim to recognize thought patterns based on brain mapping. The implications of this approach are severe; they reveal that the real power mechanism of the system, its ultimate goal and threat, is to predict behavior. In a recent interview — partially included in this publication — Lozano-Hemmer was asked about a piece he wished to create.
He spoke of a project he has been working on for some time, titled Immediate Future, which involves developing an algorithm that allows a platform to analyze a visitor's behavior quickly enough to extrapolate the data and predict their next action. This would represent a shift in the temporal conditions that produce most new media art practices — generally focused on the present — concerning the recording and play with the visitor's presence. As Lozano-Hemmer explains, the same technological strategies used always involve a degree of delay in that present based on the action of recording. Hence, the project not only points to the future of the biometric surveillance industry but also proposes itself as an exercise in resistance.
For him, the piece happens not in the possibility of prediction, nor in the technological success of his proposal, but in its failure, in the areas of indeterminacy it produces, that is, in the possibility of proving the machine's error and, with it, the irreducibility of human action.
In the late nineties, Édouard Glissant wrote a kind of manifesto in which he claimed the right to opacity, not as something obscure, but as that which cannot be reduced. Against the Western obsession with transparency — a civilization, apparently, ontologically biometric, built on its ability to produce systems of scales that allow it to compare, classify, judge, and, based on that, subjugate — Glissant postulates the right to opacity as the right to the difference of irreducible singularity. The limit of the biometric industry is precisely its inability to record singularity. Despite aspiring to be the great promise of the future, biometric technologies have a high error rate. The nature of these failures is quite revealing: basically, machines are unable to record certain differences with high racial and class connotations. For example, the fingerprints of manual laborers are often worn out enough that they cannot be read by machines, and the same happens with the much finer skin of Asians. Similarly, iris readers cannot register the eyes of people with visual disabilities, or simply the angle is not correct for people in wheelchairs or too tall, etc. This means that these technologies are calibrated for a type of average body (which is easy to recognize as a young, healthy white male) and any bodily deviation produces failures in the system.
The primary error of biometric logic is to assume the consistency of a fixed and culturally coded bodily identity. This is not an intrinsic error of technology, although it responds to a basic condition of its existence, but an inherited error: biometric machines have to be trained by the scientists who create them. The initial categories on which they base their algorithms are manually activated, and the cultural preconceptions of their creators are encoded into the biometric scanner.
Google's facial recognition program recently confused a couple of African Americans with orangutans; it is interesting to contrast the responses of company officials with the comments of the user who reported the error: the former attributed it to a flaw in the artificial intelligence responsible for learning to recognize places and faces; the latter stated that "improving diversity in the ranks of Silicon Valley engineers would probably help avoid such issues."
For the purposes of this text, I will set aside the severe racist implications of this situation because I am interested in highlighting the general implications of this original moment of calibration in all machines (not just biometric ones). I also set aside the obvious observation of how this data can be falsified within corrupt systems. I will only mention a local example, published in the newspaper Reforma: the attendance and voting registration system of the Legislative Assembly of the Federal District is operated by the Coordination of Parliamentary Services with a biometric team placed at each seat, which recognizes the fingerprints of the deputies (and, by the way, cost 1.9 million pesos). However, this system also depends on two employees who operate the equipment and deliver the attendance and voting lists at the end of each session. If a deputy is absent without justification, the penalty is to deduct the day’s pay. Reforma verified that these lists were falsified with the testimony of two deputies, who admitted to being absent on Thursday, April 9, 2015, while the lists showed them as present.
One of Lozano-Hemmer's great achievements is that, despite starting from a clearly critical stance towards the role of technology in control systems and the production of subjectivity in late capitalism, he acknowledges the complexity of the device and does not build his critique on purist calls to evade it. Precisely because Lozano-Hemmer conceives technology not as an external tool but as a second skin, he understands that our agency with it does not leave a neutral space. There is no longer an outside. In her lecture “Vulnerability and Resistance Revisited,” Judith Butler spoke about the need to understand the body in its relationship of vulnerability, not only with other bodies but with the infrastructure and technological realm that allows it to survive, while ensuring its possibility of action and resistance. Recognizing that vulnerability and dependence is not synonymous with passivity, alienation, or victimization; on the contrary, Butler urges us to free ourselves from the binary opposition between vulnerability and agency-action-resistance to recognize its mobilization power.
By acknowledging this dependence, the critical nature of Lozano-Hemmer's work does not call for a retreat to a virgin desert of technology but rather to become aware of the complexity of the technology-body relationship, which is never just a game of two but a triangle whose third edge is the calibrator/programmer encoded in the machine's programming. In Random Method, with a series of digital prints created from equations used by random number generators in computers, Lozano-Hemmer illustrates the impossibility of machines truly producing a random number, as they will always depend on a pre-programmed mathematical formula. The human eye can recognize patterns in the resulting images; random production and pattern recognition are two skills in which machines have not surpassed us. In this, as in all of Lozano-Hemmer's work, we know exactly who the calibrator/programmer was, the one who set the rules of the game. Hidden in the apparent illusion of control of the interaction — the repeated assertion that his works do not exist unless activated by the visitor — is the possibility of generating in the visitor an awareness of the machine's limits and its dependence on this original calibrating presence.
Any claim of automatism or randomness in the machine is a simulation created by the programmer's intention. The favorite prophecy of science fiction, where artificial intelligence machines become autonomous from their human creators, has not come true. It seems rather that we have not yet left the "Wizard of Oz" phase. Behind the digital smoke screen is the programmer. To commemorate the six months since the forced disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students, Lozano-Hemmer developed the project Confidence Level (2015), a facial recognition system programmed to search for the students. In front of any person, the system looks for biometric matches with the students' faces and selects the one with the most shared traits to then determine a confidence percentage in its finding.
Beyond the powerful and moving poetic transformation of a surveillance system that seeks suspects into one of tireless, though futile, search for the disappeared, I am interested in insisting on the premise of its training and conditioning. By continuing the artistic tradition of the avant-gardes in dismantling systems of perception — such as the frame and linear perspective — and making evident its role as calibrator/programmer in response to a transparent poetic intention, Lozano-Hemmer brings to the forefront the operation of the third party included in the system: the “great programmer,” who is not the invisible hand of the market but who undoubtedly sits at its table and looks after its interests. The triangle contains a second unfolding in addition to the machine and its programmer. The ultimate price to pay for having a place in the system — for the desire to be seen in the new narcissistic logic, where voyeurism and exhibitionism have been democratized and accepted as legitimate pleasures — is to surrender your digital double to the system. This double does not function as a true subject but as data used for the creation and evaluation of profiles. But, what is the alternative? What are the implications of remaining excluded from the republic of digital representation? What kind of citizenship can one aspire to outside it when one of the key indicators of precariousness is precisely the lack of access to this universe?
The recurrent use of shadows as platforms of visibility, interaction, and interpenetration in Lozano-Hemmer's installations (in his series Shadow Box, In the Air, Bifurcation, In Flight, Members of the Public, Sustained Coincidence, Under Recognition, Frequency and Volume, Body Movies, Re: Position of Fear, Two Principles, etc.) is quite eloquent in this context. The shadow is, as Peter Pan knows well, the most mischievous and elusive part of the body, with a certain tendency to escape. There are two dangers in the body-technology-programmer triangle: the first is losing control of our digital shadow and surrendering it completely to the system; the second concerns the impossibility of discerning between an inside and an outside, who is really trapped as data/spectrum: the digital double or the living body? Technological, consumption, work, and mobility changes have transformed our experience of time and space, becoming increasingly unstable and blurred.
Memory acquires a decisive role in this context. The obsession with creating and consuming devices with ever-increasing memory storage capacities is symptomatic of the paradox in which we live: the condition of almost instant obsolescence of these technologies, to which we entrust all our memories and information, places us in a constant threat of amnesia. In our obsession with being seen and recorded in this digital world, do we not risk suffering Cortázar's fate in his story Axolotl? I would propose that the lucidity of Lozano-Hemmer's work on these dangers moves his work from an initial playful register to an active critical register, which, although it leads us into a minefield of technological seductions, in a second-degree reflection, becomes a training ground for becoming aware of the third party included in the game.
Ultimately, the aesthetic experiences proposed by Lozano-Hemmer open the possibility of positioning ourselves against this covert agent, readjusting the balance of power and control in the triangle, and, at the very least, taking an active part in the sway between being a body or being data, being a subject or being an object, observing or being observed, being Cortázar or being Axolotl.
Cosmic Thing, 2002
Escarabajo, 2005
Damián Ortega
Cosmic Thing, 2002 Beetle, 2005 Courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto, Mexico City - New York
Stainless steel, wire, 1983 Beetle, and plexiglass
Dimensions variable
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA)
16 mm video transferred to digital file
16’
In the early professional days of Damián Ortega, he worked as a political cartoonist, a job that clearly influenced his ability to observe people and the zeitgeist. This analytical, almost surgical, ability would become a distinctive feature of his artistic production. His practice develops at the intersection of sculpture, installation, and film. In large-scale projects, he deconstructs and reconfigures every-day-objects to reveal the invisible structures that compose them, showing the complexity and interdependence of these systems. He uses fragmentation as a means to explore the whole, challenging traditional perceptions of utility and function. Each work thus becomes a field of study where individual components acquire new meanings and contexts.
In Cosmic Thing, one of his most well-known installations that catapulted the Mexican art scene onto the international stage, Ortega dissects a 1983 Volkswagen Beetle, suspending its parts in space. This act creates a sort of "frozen explosion," evoking both the deconstruction of the object and the fragmentation of the ideas it represents, "similar to the skeleton of a dinosaur in a science museum," according to the artist.
The German-origin vehicle produced at the Volkswagen factory in Puebla became the official taxi of what was then the Federal District (now Mexico City) in 1971. Millions of “vochos,” as the inhabitants of Mexico City call them, circulated through the streets of the vast capital, becoming true urban fetishes.
Alongside the main installation, preparatory sketches of the work and a video documenting performative actions around this installation are exhibited. In the video, Damián Ortega shows how he buried a 1983 Volkswagen Beetle, leaving only the tires visible, like a beetle with its legs up. This work explores themes of transformation and memory, while questioning the authenticity of visual representation.
TEXTS ABOUT THE ARTIST
Damian Ortega: Pulling the Donkey's Tail by Massimiliano Gioni
(Excerpts)
With the audacity of a magician, the obsessive detail of an engineer, and the humor of a sophisticated joker, Damian Ortega has spent much of his life visualizing the world around him, equipping himself with different sets of tools or testing various lenses, some with macro or microscopic focus on an object, others with an expanded awareness of politics and society, some sharpened with humor and sarcasm, and others ready to probe into a demanding critique.
Often, Ortega’s sculptures seem to chase the superstructure of everyday things or present visual descriptions of the molecular world underlying materials, materiality, or objecthood. "Atoms are in constant stimulation, spinning and forming a field of tension," Ortega reminds us. And somehow, the molecular world that the discipline of physics attempts to describe, a humming and incomprehensible realm of activity, may seem strangely similar to the social and political world we live in and its competing forces, frenetic individuals, and chaos amidst order, amidst a greater chaos. It is also composed of parts that function in relation to one another, that react to each other, or that seek mutually beneficial connections. Even if this dynamism is imperceptible, the logic of interrelation and transformation is familiar. This "constant stimulation" and "field of tension" arises from both common materials and everyday events. Stacks of bricks, a not uncommon sight on the streets of Mexico City, compose the work Materia en reposo (2004). More than raw material for a possible sculpture or a modest found object, in Ortega’s imagination, the bricks are a collection of mass that translates into "an accumulation of energy at rest." However, if one were to zoom in on a molecular level, the bricks would be vibrating and frenetic, hyperactive with atoms.
This kind of energetic paradox saturates the common objects that occupy space in our lives, and Ortega often uses sculpture as a way to visualize an object "from its totality to its atomic structure," whether capturing the dynamic tension of its forces or magnifying its basic structures, visualizing the space within the matter of the object. However, within the same stack of bricks brimming with mechanical potential, Ortega recognizes interrelated economic forces: not only the labor of making bricks and their market value but also the potential value of what they can build or become. The stack is "a mountain of possibilities," and for Ortega, the bricks have a "vastness," partly due to the multitude of ways in which imagination can transform them.
Although Ortega’s mode of experimentation resembles more that of a self-taught scientist than a studied engineer, few of his works assume such unstructured or underdeveloped scenarios as Materia en reposo. More frequently, he captures metamorphoses in action: improbable events or states of being that he has conjured, whether through a kind of fanciful dissection, an open-ended process of unceremonious trials, or a radical change in scale.
Ortega's early works emerged from improvisation by necessity, a sort of DIY art povera. "When I was at home, without a penny, and had a lot of free time," he recalls, "I felt I had to use whatever was available and try to transform it, a very basic operation but sometimes the notion of how things should be becomes a surrealist means of expression." Cosmic Thing (2002), one of Ortega’s best-known works, is precisely this kind of hallucinatory three-dimensional scheme. A meticulously dissected Volkswagen Beetle confronts the viewer with the aerial stature of a mammoth skeleton hanging in a natural history museum, each part delicately suspended from the ceiling in an impressive spatialization of the car's mechanical anatomy.
For Ortega, this is a simple but imposing illustration of balanced forces and reciprocal relationships, "a system where each object, even if it functions separately and independently, maintains a relationship with the rest of the elements." And yet, for Ortega, this arrangement is not only material but political. It is "equivalent to a social system," he proposes, implying a specific functionality and interdependence of various components of society, a field of tension in human relations that reflects the mechanical tension in the world of matter and things. Historically, Cosmic Thing traces back to Nazi-era Germany, where Volkswagen was founded to become the "people's car." Transplanted to Mexico, the discourse and values embodied by Volkswagen enjoyed a notably different popularity. In a progressive move to make car owners more independent, Volkswagen promoted a "do-it-yourself" ethos with the VW Beetle’s diagrammatic owner's manual and a car with parts that were easy to remove and replace. The potential allowed owners gave it a populist appeal worldwide but also made it a favorite of the "chop shops" in the Mexican black market. For many Beetle owners in Mexico, parts sold by thieves were regularly repurchased on the black market in an illicit yet vital mode of recycling, making a single Beetle less a uniform thing and more a rotating constellation of parts, each with its own story over the lifespan of a given car.
Disturbing an idea, focusing on a detail, inverting a thought, or dissecting and reconfiguring the components of a system is a skill that Ortega has been perfecting since he began working, at sixteen years old, as a political cartoonist for the magazine La Jornada. With firm irreverence, young Ortega exposed paradoxes and ironies in popular culture, distorting images and twisting language to satirize Mexican society and politics, looking beneath the surface of facts and figures, people and things to capture a different antagonism of forces. Growing up in a politically liberal family, it was no surprise that Ortega initially wanted to be a muralist and take on Mexico’s leftist tradition. But his interest in muralism faded as he became more drawn to the history of Mexican political cartoons and began thinking of paintings as objects. When he became friends with Gabriel Orozco in 1987, they established informal meetings known as the "Friday Workshop," involving other young artists of their generation who were similarly disenchanted with the direction of conventional Mexican art of the time, which they felt was often too nationalist or folkloric. Encouraged by the group’s discussions, Ortega began to work almost exclusively in sculpture, multiplying the scale of his incisive illustrations beyond the page and bringing a third dimension to his political cartoons through everyday materials.
Certainly, many of Ortega’s works have the acidic quality of a good joke, which, as he says, "can change your way of seeing an object" by bringing you to a new perspective, evoking an improbable image, testing the capacity of words or languages, offering a moment of intellectual stimulation. Often, Ortega’s visual experiments flirt with allegory, as in Nueve Tipos de Terreno (2007), which takes its title from the battlefield conditions identified by Sun Tzu in his 6th-century B.C. treatise The Art of War. Ortega revisits the use of bricks in this work, dramatizing their "vastness," with black humor and wit and sharpness worthy of Rube Goldberg….
A significant number of Ortega’s works function as animated political cartoons beyond the page, visual confrontations sketched in a three-dimensional absurdity. And some of Ortega’s early sculptures from the 1990s took direct inspiration from satirical illustrations. Among them, Prometeo (1992), where a candle replaces the filament of a light bulb, is a work that shaped cartoonist Manuel Ahumada’s interpretation of the energy crisis in early 1990s Mexico. Another work, the humorously flaccid tool Pico cansado (1997), is presented as if it were a political cartoon: the exhausting tool that is itself paralyzed. To make this work, Ortega carefully incised the handle of an axe at regular intervals, cutting from both sides to make the handle curve and tilt like a wooden toy snake, suggesting exhaustion, surrender, failure, or perhaps ironic defeat. And yet, the pickaxe not only becomes useless, its mechanical energy completely spent, but it also becomes expressive, anthropomorphic, further enhancing its cartoon qualities. Regretful, as if on the verge of an apology, the pickaxe solicits our sympathy with its lamentable plight.
Ortega finds another maritime reference of even more epic, if fictitious, proportions in Moby Dick (2004), the second element of the Beetle Trilogy that began with Cosmic Thing and presents the VW Beetle as both a legendary object and a mythical character. The Beetle in the performance Moby Dick inevitably evokes a scaled-down whale, white as the beast that is the object of Ahab's monomaniacal projections in Herman Melville’s 1851 American literary classic. In a vaudeville show, a live band plays Led Zeppelin’s Moby Dick while Ortega struggles with the VW Beetle as if it were a harpooned whale, pulling from the rear while a driver accelerates, though the car’s bald tires are generously greased (with a lubricant that until a few decades ago would have probably been whale oil). Although the work revolves around a series of romantic allusions, Ortega adheres to its comedic qualities, insisting on the humor underlying this farce of competitive forces: "I would describe it more as a poorly rehearsed magic trick or pulling the donkey's tail as a practical joke," he insists. He also enjoys the cartoonish quality of the car as an animal reflecting "the power and vastness of nature."
This vastness, like the whiteness of Moby Dick and Ortega’s stacks of bricks, also allows for ambiguity and openness, a range of interpretations that Ortega values as central to mythology, but it also occurs the more precisely one focuses on a specific tension or material. In Moby Dick, Ortega maintains many elements in a delicate yet playful balance. As with many other works, there is a narrative of rival forces building suspense, and no matter how much critique might be inferred, Ortega’s allegories are also comedies. If Ortega is "pulling the donkey’s tail," it’s because the donkey is revealing not only the microscopic relationships that bind the most disparate objects but also the humor of an artifice we would otherwise take for granted.
Source: Damian Ortega Casino (Mousse Publishing, Milan)