Curadurías | Curatorial
2023 | Future Ancestors
Ars Electronica Festival
Matter is empowered in performative acts: objects exercise forms of power and intra-material actions produce different materializations of the world. The emergence of alternative paradigms for thinking about the problem of materiality has many expressions in contemporary art. This exhibition displays those that recuperate ancestral techniques from today’s poetic, scientific and technological imaginaries. Particularly, crossovers between technologies belonging to different temporal and spatial spheres entail a recurring practice in the electronic arts produced in Latin America.
The three works stage a series of transformation processes of matter from the natural world into new materials that intertwine ancestral ways of making and contemporary technologies. Their artists investigate the encounter of macro and micro worlds through combinations of scales, modular constructions and alternations of different views on objects, materials and processes: Fragments of the Jungle by Angel Salazar proposes the coexistence of satellite views of geoglyphs and volumetric data visualizations; in Holobiont, Diego Silva combines the general structure of the installation with the infinite details of the symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeasts on a large scale; in WEAVES, Vivian Vergara´s minimal repetitive gesture of weaving is materialized and multiplied, amplified from a machine that is located between the serial and the handicraft.
The study of our ancestral cultures presents itself as a respectful approach to our natural environment but is also a reminder of the challenges that we face in this new and hardly classifiable era that we often refer to as the Anthropocene, where almost every practice instantly becomes obsolete.
Artists: Angel Salazar, Diego Silva & Viviana Vergara
Idea and Production: PRISMA
