“This pulsating figure of systems in formation, transformation, constellation, co-formation, or interaction is that of “fluid networks.” If we think about it, we realize that the network is not a thing, but a ceaseless process of constitution.” (1)

Denise Najmanovich 

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The body of work contained in this small solo exhibition is, in short, a reflection on the materiality of time. On the perceptible or imperceptible way in which it unfolds, on how it settles, fossilizes, and becomes memory, remembrance, and dispossession. On how time condenses into oblivion, and on how oblivion becomes the present.

 

The pieces presented in this exhibition were largely produced in the months immediately following the epidemic and amidst the global COVID-19 lockdown, and are linked to the idea proposed by Nicolas Bourriaud that “The epidemic reminds us that reality is formed by infinite vibrations and living interactions.” (2) This proposition emerged in that context as a seed that evolved into a central point of dialogue and exchange with a series of creative exercises carried out in an improvised workshop amidst the limitations of the time. Over time, they became a turning point in my artistic practice, since—forced to work outside the studio in dynamics completely different from the usual ones—led me to rethink my relationship with my materials and processes.

 

This turning point involved realizing that I had been working with procedures that revealed systems composed of many interrelated parts impossible to understand by analyzing only their components separately: biology, architecture, technology.

 

In this sense, this set of assemblages speaks to the direction and uncertain outcome of those interactions already present in the workshop, to which the author of “Inclusions” refers, framed within the intention—or necessity?—to reflect on life amidst a context of isolation and anguish. To think about life—paradoxically—when its invisible, microscopic, viral power was manifesting itself in a mortality of historical proportions.

 

Formae Viventium is the Latin translation of “the forms of life,” a title that refers to the language of science with which the natural sciences have cataloged species. This stems from the exercise of articulating the fictions of a biological naturalism affected by anachronistic technologies, in an attempt at (re)integration, of creative reinvention amidst widespread urgency, and of a personal and creative rebirth.

 

The notion of fossil appears here as a remnant stripped of its own time-space, perhaps attempting to configure one for itself. A vestige devoid of surface, of skin—intimacy revealed in the innermost recesses of its structure—questioning the enigmatic course of life as a flow of impermanent phenomena and the contingency inherent in the emergence of change, rupture; the continuity of becoming. It is, therefore, a group of works about the invisible aspects of everyday metamorphoses, those imperceptible ones that appear suddenly and force the need to see the living—and life itself—with different eyes.

 

The hybrid beings, territories, and landscapes proposed in this exhibition thus interrogate this notion of elliptical time as well as the experience of “suspended time” during confinement, from the unsettling identity that emerges in the paradoxical enunciation of “fossils of the future.” Thus conceived, they glimpse the possibility or impossibility of an uncertain becoming as potential remnants that traverse the uncertainty of “what might happen.”

 

In this sense, to paraphrase Bourriaud; “Pure form,” since its materiality and meaning shift precisely in that “space between trash and art,” completely outside the context of artistic validation in the city where they were exhibited.

 

These hybrid beings are an improbable “mashup” that operates within the empty spaces of the disjointed cartography of a silenced territory. Arthropods and vertebrates merge with each other with remnants of radio antennas and aerodynamic casings that contain only lost data and absences.

 

This group of assemblages continues the biological fictions already presented in Electrópico (2010) and in “The Secret Life of Electronic Beings” (2014), proposing in this case prostheses, exoskeletons, or artificial creatures that reveal the anxiety and “medicated” anguish of the time in which they were made.

 

Therefore, the question of life that is revisited in this project is essentially an inquiry into the unknowable, arising from a visual investigation framed within the aesthetics of complexity. These works focus on observing, through fictions, the possibility of a nature understood as movement-activity that creates reality by operating in a hybrid time: the organic time of nature and the computational time in which, for example, a computer processor operates.

 

Bern, 2025.

 

The works presented here are centered on this observation—this investigation—and on the dialogue with materials—the only means from which it is possible to elucidate time.

 

In my view, these organisms—systems—appear as evocations of the eternal silence that emerges as the only valid answer to the question at hand: What is life and how can it manifest itself? I can only say that I understand it as an inexplicable power. These "paradoxical beings" are what I can venture as an assertion at this moment.

 

Faced with a question about the very mystery of life, which precludes any attempt to resolve it, these works represent a mere scratch in the face of that which is inexplicable, unique, and unrepeatable: the very experience of being alive, that in which I perceive myself as a microscopic part of something boundless and timeless.

 

Life and death converge here as remnants of a future past that reconstitutes the notion of time in an elliptical function which, open and boundless, dissolves the very notion of time to affirm that, amidst such complexity, what I manage to perceive as "alive" are only small, transient, material phenomena; insignificant gestures in the face of that which is immeasurable. In this case, improbable fictions of the untold history of things that never happened.

 

Bogotá, 2022

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(1) 

AESTHETICS OF COMPLEX THOUGHT. Denise Najmanovich (In Spanish)

Najmanovich, Denise. Aesthetics of Complex Thought. Andamios. Journal of Social Research, vol. 1, no. 2, June, 2005, pp. 19-42. Autonomous University of Mexico City, Federal District, Mexico.

https://www.redalyc.org/pdf/628/62810202.pdf

 

(2)

"La sincronización de las especies" / Nicolas Bourriaud / Diario El País. 17 Abril 2020. Traducción de María Luisa Rodríguez Tapia.

https://elpais.com/cultura/2020/04/17/babelia/1587111787_386067.html