1+1+1…: ‘Artificialia: WunderChapel’ by Agustín Ortiz Herrera

Behold the object in all its splendor; an archive of queer bodies, an arsenal of dissident discoveries, a chapel of undermined entities, a cabinet of disobedient matter. The skepticism towards that which is called inanimate, –‘without a soul’-, artificial or immaterial is being revised in the age of agential realism; a field proposed by the physicist-theorist Karen Barad. Is digitality truely weightless? Do the object and the artificial not experience affect at all? Are they truly mute? According to physics, we are all beings subjected to the same fundamental forces, from elementary particles to elephants. The basic unit that existence —including solid/liquid/biological/gaseous/mineral— shares is vibration and, therefore, the malleability to mutate and to become. We constitute, therefore, a collective phenomenology cultivated by a common potentiality and affectivity, an incessant dialectical exchange, a frenzied and erratic latency. This dialogue is the friction, the incandescent rubbing between subjects, it is a choral phenomenon that occurs on levels that often go unnoticed. Notice how the neon caresses you, how the flashes strike you, how the object speaks to you.

The artist Agustín Ortiz Herrera and the curator Gabriel Virgilio Luciani invite you to a sensorial laboratory in which things communicate without being silenced. The exhibition hosts a newly produced audiovisual work accompanied by an installation composed of urban discoveries and other atmospheric elements that the artist has brought together. The installation also contains material contributions from the participants of the workshop Exanimate: Rethinking Objects organised by the Centre d’Art Maristany in Sant Cugat del Vallès in collaboration with the artist.