Monoambiente

Mud men. Synopsis

If the name is the archetype of the thing and mud is the archaic metaphor for the created and the duly imperfect, then the word “man” would imply both Adam and Golem.

Thus mud makes up a whole: the ground, the first man, his shelter, and the material that serves to bind head and hand.

Laden with all that, a small mud machine heads to its microscopic destination. The artisanal and the process of learning implicit to a relationship with the age-old tend toward construction in the most basic sense.

The Man and the Cat. Context

MAN (the acronym in Spanish for nomadic pottery unit) is one in a series of mobile artifacts and carriages for performance that make up the Gran Aula [Great Classroom] project. It forms part of research whose origin lies in CAT (Centro de Arqueología Tecnológica).

MAN moves around the city, facilitating in an array of social contexts collective experiences involving the use of clay modeling technique to make a range of items.

MAN began its path of experimentation at Monoambiente, sharing its productive tension in relation to the digital world by means of a series of events and activities that took place over the course of the exhibition.

The skillful Pedro Satorre drives the nomadic pottery unit.

The Tar Machine constructs sculptures in different materials on the basis of a digital archive. By means of 3D digital printing technology, different materials are used to make multiform organic sculptures that would be nearly impossible to mold without mechatronic resources.

The initial impetus for the project was a critical reaction to modern manufacturing, where everything is automatized and standardized.

“We are surrounded by pre-fabricated, pre-designed, and repeated objects and environments that conform to established standards of quality with no relationship whatsoever to our natural behavior, our drive towards beauty, fulfillment, pleasure which is benign only in relation to organic forms like trees, flowers, stones, the sea, and animals.”

The Tar Machine combines automated construction performed by robots and alike with craft-based methods that range from wax, tar, and clay casting to plaster modeling, techniques that have been used for over 10,000 years. These contradictions and combinations are essential to The Tar Machine and its meaning. As a work of art, it reflects the dichotomy of a world more and more advanced in terms of manufacturing but less and less in tune with the objects akin to our highly adaptable biological, vital, and reproductive nature.

A family-owned company that, since 1953, has manufactured design dishware, Colbo collaborated on the second phase of this project. Based near the Andes Mountains in Mendoza, Argentina, Colbo uses local red stoneware that comes from its own quarries. Matias Jannello and industrial designer Martín Endrizzi have been making use of Colbo’a knowhow since 2007 in a project based on new technologies. The collaboration on the tar project ensures the right consistency of the clay, the machine’s proper functioning, and the subsequent firing of the finished pieces. This means, then, collaboration between robotics and craft, art and design, to develop new forms of manufacturing, new objects in an ancient material, and innovation in technology.

The Taller Alfanumérico was the first manual and digital pottery workshop directed by Estudio A77 and José Huidobro; it was coordinated by the Monoambiente Gallery with the collaboration of Pedro Satorre.

The workshop aimed, on the one hand, to foster the ability to produce and to design on the basis of direct dialogue between manual and digital experimentation and, on the other, to formulate different models of design and production.

The workshop was production-oriented insofar as it used all the tools and materials available, including the Módulo de Alfarería Nómade (MAN), The Tar Machine 2, and a raku kiln.

The Taller Alfanumérico consisted of four days of laboratory work at the Monoambiente Gallery and a fifth day of firing the pieces in the raku kiln.