Monoambiente

Curatorial text by Paula García-Masedo

One day, Martín Huberman called me from Buenos Aires inviting me to curate an exhibition there. For the show, two teams of Spanish artists would produce site-specific works. Sodimac, a multinational chain of hardware and home improvement stores, would sponsor the event and make its catalogue of products available to the artists.  From over 10,000 kilometers away, then, opportunity had come knocking.

The exhibition might be seen as a laboratory on today’s global world. It contemplated the conditions in which professionals and amateurs alike construct the environment.

It was decided to take this logistical challenge to the extreme, as if it were a playing field. No additional elements would be used.

We invited MAIO and Taller de Casquería to take part in the show. In their process, we saw technical creations that were treated like constructions full of potential meanings, constructions to be activated.

THE WAY THINGS GO is about how things circulate as well as how we can establish relationships between them.

The show connects, in a rather unorthodox manner, a set of objects and subjects in Argentina and Spain to explore the idea of distribution as contemporary context that provokes exchanges between the modern, the commercial, the counter-historical, and the popular. It signals the importance of and the opportunity offered by the arrangement of media and methods pertinent to management, strategy, negotiation, and other fields in the current economic framework.

The title makes reference to the Rube Goldberg machine that Fischli&Weiss constructed in 1987. Like the pieces in this exhibition, that machine activated a network of more or less unlikely relationships between a series of elements that normally work differently.

THE WAY THINGS GO is produced on the basis of a set of instructions for the construction of devices using products found at a “home center.” In it, MAIO and Taller de Casquería deploy the commercial archive of Sodimac, “La Casa de Latinoamérica,” modifying its symbolic order with ingenuity and wit. They intervene in the no-place of the hardware and home improvement store to signal the possibility of activating the products of the present for new futures by altering the networks of knowledge of which those products form part.

The invention is in the field of self-building.

In April 1966, Popular Science magazine published on pages 108-112 an article entitled “Amazing Sun Dome you can build” about a dome inspired by a geodesic structure patented by R. Buckminster Fuller.

The present invention consists in the interpretation and re-appropriation of generic assembly instructions. Unlike the previous patent from which it starts, its statement is: “our invention relates to an enclosing space for framing a structure”.

The invention challenges the linearity of the latter and visualises the existing dysfunction between the generic and the specific. To this end, the invention proposes the re-appropriation of the construction instructions for the Sun Dome of 25 feet in diameter – 7.62 metres – and its application in a smaller space. This dysfunction between the instructions and a specific need forces the person who implements the instructions to appropriate them and adapt them to a reality that does not fit. Invention forces improvisation in the face of instructions that do not provide a solution to a specific problem. The instructions are therefore necessarily completed by the user, making them permanently incomplete. The advantages of the present invention are clear: it encourages the re-appropriation of construction instructions, allowing their applicability in any context.

Productive cancellation strategy

What happens when the general message, the object, the subject, disappears and leaves a hole? The anonymous, the background, the placenta of the object are there alone. The punctum, the atopic, that which cannot be named exactly, emerges from the obscurity of that which we have overlooked. – Niklas Maak on the work of the artist Paul Pfeiffer.

The annulment or manipulation of the specific content of a system turns the system itself into the protagonist. The dematerialisation of one of the main objects turns the whole into an open productive system. This strategy of productive annulment makes it possible to develop new possibilities based on services offered by standardised systems, development and innovation projects with the aim of exploring the limits of the systems themselves by putting them in crisis.

VirtualFaith proposes to alter digital instructions through the manipulation of a series of specific videos. The final result is distorted by putting the system and the medium in the foreground. The materialisation of these alterations will take place in Latin American homes, executed by the followers of the broadcasting channel, as replicas of the model shown. It supposes the materialisation of modified virtual spaces. The aim is to open up the specific constructive systems through the variation of the elements that compose it, without modifying the process.
The exhibition space of the Monoambiente gallery is taken as an everyday space on which to develop a specific case-study based on the strategy of productive annulment. The installation is the first materialisation of one of the modified videos, implying that this same space will be replicated as the number of views of the manipulated audiovisual piece increases.