— Hail she who holds my tongue.
2022
Generaciones Prize, La Casa Encendida Madrid.
Bioplastic sculptures (made from gelatine, seaweed, tea, turmeric, paprika, garlic, sugar, eggshells, willow, and bamboo), repurposed panelling, open-source electronics with custom programming to control lighting, in relation to mouvement.
What could be more hopeful than an empty eye that fills itself with seeing as it sleeps?
Anne Carson Every Entrance Is an Exit, 2005
Hail She Who Holds My Tongue (the title is taken from Nisha Ramayya’s book States of the Body Produced by Love, Ignota, 2019) consists of a collection of suspended, semi-translucent sculptural forms, and a variable, atmospheric lighting structure that surrounds them, built in the form of a small room or enclosure, which responds to the motion of visitors in the space.
The sculptures are suspended between the banks of lights. Beneath their gentle radiance no shadows are cast. The bulbs react to movement in the gallery, as if the light itself possessed elasticity - their programming is modelled on formulas that describe the movements of springs. They shine with colder or warmer light depending on the flow, distance, and velocity of bodies moving in the space. Walls turn bright when you approach and darken as you walk away. The changes are subtle and progressive, and they alter the colouration of the bioplastics, blending the differences between the sculptures and their surroundings, and making it difficult to see them with clarity. Also on display are the sensors, mechanisms, and processors that allow the room and lights to function.
The work is most active and visible across its many surfaces, where the elements collide to produce unpredictable and jumbled-together landscapes, forms, and sensations. Light finds purchase on the curved skins of the sculptures and their long, thin armatures - it bounces, penetrates, and refracts. There are direct correspondences between the shadowless sculptures that hang inside the enclosure and your own body as it moves through the installation. You find that you can modulate the illumination in the room, but exact calibration is difficult and ambiguous, and the rules can only be sensed indirectly, or uncovered by active experimentation. Within this system the sculptures emerge as highly sensitised bodies; they are acted on and echo with their shifting/mercurial environment.
If the sculptures are sensitised, then they allow an entrance into a similar state of sensitivity. When you move through the space you open yourself to their changing conditions, beneath light that is stretched or compressed. The room responds to you when it changes, permeates, and refracts, and when it reveals the multiplying colours of the bioplastic skins and the bamboo substrate. These are states of closeness, of non-discrimination, of love; of all the concrete truths of relation.
Printed catalogue available. Bilingual Spanish-English
Installation shots by Roberto Ruiz and Galerna
Tests on the functioning of the lighting installation:
