de montañas submarinas el fuego hace islas
[from the underwater mountains fires makes islands]ENG
The project de montañas submarinas el fuego hace islas [from the underwater mountains fire makes islands] forms part of a broader research titled la historia de las montañas [the history
of the mountains] (2019-ongoing), exploring the construction of imaginations, as well contemporary emancipatory processes and reconciliation with constant movement.
de montañas submarinas el fuego hace islas has focused on the study of the perceptual system of the human species and its expansion through aesthetic thought, based on the premise that if we continue to perceive the planet in the same stable and binary way, the imaginations generated will end up being very similar to the structures that we have created so far. The expansion of the perceptual system of humans is necessary —as the psychoanalyst
Suely Rolnik points out— to touch desire, the “vital potency”.
The project brings together a variety of reflections developed by artists, neuroscientists, writers, philosophers, psychoanalysts, and geologists whose practices are linked to aesthetic tools and strategies. These two concepts evolved through the research refers to different forms of sensory knowledge created across different parts of the world and temporalities by living beings, in relation to other living beings and entities with the intention of touching desire.
The intent of this project is to trace the presence of such strategies and tools in contemporary practices and put them in relation. Considering, how do these works or thoughts affect our
perceptual system.
The exhibition taking place between San Francisco, London and Manila is organised around three strategies and tools: repetition, fugue, and transmutation. Repetition is understood as the performance of a certain action several times with the intention that there will be a slight change each time. Fugue is based on the reflections of of the thinker Dénètem Touam Bona, For whom to fugue isn’t the escape itself, but chasing away what is real and making infinite variations to evade any kind of capture. Finally, transmutation is understood as a long-exposure process that creates a disruption in subjectivity.
The artists and the works in the exhibition use and reflect on these three strategies and tools, with a particularity: employing them to catalyse the displacement of the visual in our perceptual system and to make it collapse into the sonic and its embodiment.
It is said that to be near an erupting volcano is to be exposed to a sonic experience. It can’t be denied that this statement might come as a surprise to most people. The human species’ predilection towards the visual as its primary sensory system
for understanding and navigating the world has meant that the other senses—particularly hearing— have gone unfavoured. Perhaps for this reason, being in situations that allow us to experience the displacement of our visual predilection as a way of
understanding the world is vital in contemporary aesthetic thought.
The artistic practice of biarritzzz is characterised by inserting epistemological conversations through mass communication codes, specifically on and from the computer and the internet, using the visual as a vehicle for narrative and sound experimentation. The oral story presented in the work A história da pedra [The history of the stone] (2021) insists on sound as a central aspect not only as an indicator of moments of change, from which everything that exists on the planet undergoes a profound transformation, but also in sound as a trace to follow the processes that make these transformations possible and sound as evidence of the materialisation of profound changes, as is the case of the emergence of several musical genres during the 20th century.
To follow the path of the stone is to be part of slow, constant, and unpredictable processes that involve the establishment of a relationship both on an individual scale and in collective terms. The stones that appear in the video, as well as the stone mentioned in the narration, never fall, therefore the story keeps us in a kind of suspense and alertness.
Humans are accustomed to understanding and projecting onto volcanic eruptions from a visual lens—through texts and descriptive images, graphs measuring volcanic activity, and documentation of lava flows, smoke columns, and pyroclastic clouds. The curious fact of the matter is that even with such a vast repertoire of visual data, our relationship to volcanoes gives little attention to sound.
Adjoa Armah, interested through her practice in black ontology and spatial consciousness, describes her work untitled (esiedze) (2024) as “a meditation on life and value from the consciousness of gold.” The commodification of gold in the imagination which we inhabit has resulted not only in processes of geopolitical colonisation, enslavement, and cooptation of human subjectivities and other living beings, but also the use and resignification of gold’s spiritual role to ‘naturalise’ some of the pillars of capitalism.
Through a wrapping spiral, the artist allows us to attend a conversation between entities in which gold is positioned as its spiritual becoming. The installation activates a sort of ritual in which we participate, as Professor Leda Martins would say, in a spiral time performance that seeks to transcreate the relationship we have established with gold as an entity.
The sonorous atmosphere is often the first observation from those who have experienced a volcanic eruption. The sound is indescribable, but its closest approximation might be located in the sound of crushing rocks, a dry sound, capable of transporting us to an unknown, nebulous space, potentially frightening in its foreignness. This sensory tangle that surpasses the conventions of the senses is brought about by the bursting plumes of lava (and the ecstasy which accompanies it).
Just as in the work of Adjoa Armah, where sound activates a process of transformation, and in the work of biarritzzz ,where sound is a multidirectional evidence of this transformation, in the work Cápsulas desde el espejo [Capsues from the mirror] (2018-2023) the artist Thaís Espaillat Ureña, whose practice is closely linked to writing as a catalyst for (con)fabulations, makes use of poetry as a literary genre container of biogeographically situated sonorities to weave a story that transports us to a nebulous space in which they themselves personify and narrate the biological and psychic transit of subjectivities, including their own.
The work uses a language typical of the visual culture in the continent of Abya Yala at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of this century, which came to manifest itself in a significant way through television programmes such as that of
the renowned astrologer Walter Mercado. In the particular case of this work, the artist takes as a reference a programme conducted by Juan Jiménez Coll broadcasted more than two decades ago. Thaís Espaillat Ureña revisits this language to point out the processes of the commodification of subjectivity and the desire as a vital potency that has characterised our contemporaneity, seeking to perpetuate the logic of production and consumption.
According to earth scientists, those who study the planet (and by this term I refer not only to those who practice science as it is understood from the Western perspective), volcanic mountains are always active although much of that activity goes unnoticed by the sensory capabilities we have today and by the measuring instruments we have developed. In the same way, many of the micro-political processes and articulations that push other ideas of the possible tend to go initially undetected: they take place underground, until from time to time they burst to the surface and affect the planet at various scales.
Perhaps the disorientation that the sound of Vitória Cribb’s BUGs (2023) provokes in us testifies to possible ways of accessing the expansion of our perceptual system to expand, for example, the possibilities of sensing sound registers that until recently were ‘noise’. Vitória Cribb, whose work manifests through film and video installations, proposes a reflection in a somewhat literary narrative format in a work whose main character is a visual trope that personifies at times as a cyborg, as a human, as technology, or as the categorical relationship system that the culture-nature-technology-human separations imply.
The artist presents us with a central character that seems to be developing (by errors of the world in which they live) new sensorial capacities to fugue from the reality in which it exists. It also shows
contradictions: in one moment the character shows affection towards another living being, only then to appear in the next frame eating them; could it be that their body full of eyes will contribute to their objective fugue? The space they inhabit is actually constituted by the textures of the sound component of the work, likewise a volcanic experience requires the operation of our sound perception capabilities in a particular way.