Muestra 11
Electric Avenue curated by Patricio Pozo ● Constellations / Place by David Scognamiglio ● 3B4g36-M (2015) by Sergio Recabarren

08/05/2015 - 05/06/2015

Curator

Curatorial text by Martin Huberman

I declare myself a fan of those words that are loaded with meanings that allow me to look for personal ways of appropriating them, I like the projective exercise of looking for new meanings in the dictionary every time I fall in love with a word. Curate, without a doubt, is not one of them. During these three years as “curator” of Monoambiente I felt invaded not only by the discomfort of the self-imposed title, but also by the annoying and predominant healing character that the dictionary confers on the word “cure”. For me, the meaning acquired by it in the world of art, of which I still don’t know the rules and systems, but which has undoubtedly managed to unfold definitions to make it its own, even outside the dictionary, is very strange.
I find it difficult to adopt such terms across disciplines when the notions of work and artist are so different. It feels wrong to make it one’s own without first having tested it in the vast experimental field of design disciplines.
That is why this year, Monoambiente, worships this search by summoning different ways of making this word one’s own by offering a field of action to curators, those agents who project, among designers and experiences, the way of looking at our discipline.
Through this simple gesture Monoambiente tries to expand the horizons of its own language as a first step in the transformation of the gallery into a cultural institution.

Monoambiente opens the new season of exhibitions whose main theme is Curators.

Exhibition #11 curated by Patricio Pozo entitled, Electric Avenue, presents the work of architect David Scognamiglio and designer Sergio Recabarren as an exploration around notions of the technological unconscious, resistance and entropy in an artificial electrical circuit arranged to project the relationships between energy and architectural space.

This exhibition is co-produced with Área, a Chilean content production unit in the areas of design, architecture, arts and culture in general, based on design. Área’s field of action is contemporary cultural production, from an integrating, multidisciplinary and transversal perspective. Its activity combines critical reflection, conceptual development and creative action, materialising in concrete and incisive interventions in the city. Área is a platform for innovation-oriented work and discussion, open to new challenges and contributions, and sees culture as an integral part of the sustainable development of contemporary society.

Electric Avenue

I sing the body electric,

The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,

They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,

And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge

of the soul.

—Walt Whitman

Oh no

We gonna rock down to Electric Avenue

And then we’ll take it higher

—Eddy Grant

In the Buenos Aires gallery Monoambiente, the first exhibition by ÁREA outside of Chile presents the work of architect David Scognamiglio and designer Sergio Recabarren as an exploration around notions of technological unconscious, resistance and entropy in an artificial electrical circuit arranged to project the relationship between energy and architectural space.

Part of a generation of artists who grew up with the Internet and for whom a digital mindset comes completely natural, Scognamiglio and Recabarren are also experimenting with ways in which the concept of their work can be translated into works where the invisible becomes physical. At first glance, their works may seem abstract and connected to something immaterial, but they unfailingly suggest associations that extend far beyond the concrete reality. Both voices are combined to form architecture and signs that favor the decompartmentalisation of the senses.

In line with his work on architectural reformulation through energy, Italian architect David Scognamiglio creates a customize —site-specific— installation offering a special situation of gallery inhabiting. Its multidirectional and illuminated structure defies the horizontal and vertical forces of the exhibition room, giving visitors the experience of creating a path of their own, catering both for drifting and being on the alert. It offers a new experience of the place, which main measures were translated into the volume of wires holding them and by the electricity travelling through them and propagating through the space.

Sergio Recabarren is known for the interventions and re-functionalization of languagesand codes inherent to the communications design culture into objects and experiences of digital visual representation. His work presents powerful images in turmoil, hypnotic, organic and unpredictable electronic moments that send a powerful signal that we are subject to the forces of nature and the influence of the media. Actively researching the possibilities that the Internet and technology have to offer, Recabarren stages a vocabulary of mediated images, many of which offer the spectator the opportunity to participate in the sequence or pulse of the electronically generated images. It can be understood as something where the meaning or the ending is still undefined. The visual representation of his work relates to many things at once, both to dreams and shamanic states of altered consciousness, where results and visual variations based on algorithms provide endless possibilities, as well as to a kind of electronic abstract expressionism that establishes problematic relationships between reality and fiction.

ELECTRIC AVENUE (also the first street in Brixton Market, London, to be lit by electricity) examines the forces that influence our lives but often remain intangible for us. Electric power plays a key role in the creation of economic, political, social, organic and synthetic processes, both within and outside the structures that sustain life and culture. It makes up the base of the wireless and constantly illuminated society we live in. However, being presented as isolated objects, fragments without a context, they seem absurdly mute, dysfunctional, like prehistoric relics. In this exhibition, these electric circuits explore power as a metaphor for the technological unconscious, and trigger associations that encourage us to think of it as something that can be shared, altered or guided in an unexpected direction, not devoid of sensuality, progress, melancholy and danger.

Patricio Pozo

Curator, Electric Avenue

ent_3B4g36-M by Sergio Recabarren

Digital animation

1080p, 420 seconds, loop.

2015

Communication

Flyers & Trípticos by Ariel Di Lisio

Exhibition 11 opening event

B Side

Montajes [Production and installation of the exhibition] is a series of videos on the processes of constructing the space; it tracks the efforts made in the production of the pieces that have intervened in the Monoambiente gallery space.

Dismantling

Exhibit #11 concludes by endorsing the play of crossed realities generated by the simple handling of electricity, in which digital amoebas float in the void, light is a solid that divides volume and liquid is nothing other than a solid. Monoambiente as a caricature of itself.