I build my language with rocks.
I build my language with gems.
I build my language with abstractions.
I build my language with people
Some call it the language that was left behind.
Some call it the language that will be left behind.
Some call it the language that no one will ever speak again.
Some call it the language that will speak to no one again.
In your tongue, in my mother tongue,
In another language and another mother tongue
Is a child who speaks both of them
A half-native.
I build my language with rocks.
I build my language with gems.
I build my language with abstractions.
I build my language with people
With my tongue I am half native to you;
With my mouth I am a half-native to you;
With my fingers I am a half-native to you;
With my ear I am a half-native to you.
I will be a half-native to you;
And you will be a half-native to me;
And my sister will be a half-native to you.
A half-native to you, you will be a half-native to me.
You call it the language that was left behind,
You call it the language that will be left behind,
You call it the language that no one will ever speak again,
You call it the language that will speak to no one again.
You call my people lost in time,
You call our time past,
You call your speech and your mind lost forever,
You call my speech and my mind lost
Are you there behind the screen?
Text generated using the GPT-J algorithm, a language prediction model trained by EleutherAI. Special thanks to James Carney.
Skin of a rock
2020, acrylic painting, 1.50mx1.50m
Through programming codes, it is possible to render virtual objects from scratch not related to a Cartesian representational system of the world. However, these renders lack a total sensory experience and behave as mere information so the relationship we have with them is only understandable but not perceivable. By using polygons to make a three-dimensional modeling of a possible rock in the virtual in order to paint by hand a Hyperrealist painting of its surface, this work speaks about dialectical correspondences between imagination and creation: the unfolding of the objectiveness experience on its surface; the skin as contact interface between objects and people; the nowadays preponderance of the superficial in its worldliness; the existing relationships between new technologies and traditional crafts; the transition from the sculptural to the pictorial; the marked ambiguity amidst the representational and the presentational; the doubt about creating art with the machine (technology) and the values of craftsmanship (tecnne); the figuration and the abstraction; and of how in an timeless intersection of tradition and innovation, that which can be imagined may have a place in the world, in contrast to the imagination of things that already exist in the world.
This work was shown in “Entropic Symbiosis” Modern Art Museum of Pereira, 2020
#cardio
2019, HD video, iPhone dimensions
In an infinite scroll with the tongue, the muscle of language becomes the mediator for images to appear. Those images are from the hashtag cardio, where sculptural shapes of humans show up as time moves along. In a metaphorical gesture, the tongue exercises, while relating to the technological object.
This work involves haptics, touching with tase or seeing with the tongue. The phone is an extension of ourselves since it extends the self.
Through the agency of a prosthetic touch screen, our presence in the scrolling interface of the world is reduced to finger gestures anxious of corporeity that are eagerly searching for socially accepted ways of semblance. Thus, hashtags, like virtual index fingers, addresses taxonomies of desirable taste in lack of a tongue. By scrolling cardio with tongue, our relationship of self and opposition makes another sense, and the muscle of language is capable of working out that tasteless dichotomy.
This work was shown in “Santiago Pinyol, Lo que no se ha perdido", Galería Enrique Guerrero, Mexico City, 2019
Camouflage for Surveillance
From magical thinking to pragmatic ornaments that emphasize existing but no visible daily behaviours of the self; masks have been present since early days in collective practices around the world. Masks allow belonging in Halloween or Carnival by dissolving uniqueness of the private into the communal of the public. Like most technologies, masks are prosthetics of a body that wants to be present anonymously. On the other hand, there are facial detection technologies that under the promise of protecting us from bots accessing private information from mobile devices; end up turning into forms of control and supervision of people in the public domain. “Camouflage for surveillance” addresses those paradoxes in which the form of resistance is found in the same technology, which controls us for the sake of protecting us, and in which the only way to highlight humanity is by manipulating intelligence algorithms that strip us precisely of our recognition as human beings.
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Shown at “Facing Time”, Surrey Art Gallery, Canada, 2021
That Which...
This installation is composed by 33 videos of 3D modeling sculptures with aphorisms of abstract concepts borrowed from psychoanalysis. Taking language as a sculptural device, it reflects on our virtual condition and its relationship with concepts such as the monstrous, denial, and confrontation.
Language, besides an unfinished and evolving cultural construction, is our polluted communication technology that structures the set of our social relations with our contextual environment. It is also the way to stand, understand and imagine the surrounding by means of signs, signals and symbols. Through these B&W animations that allude to psychoanalytic concepts, language embodies its anima in a non context required, floating immaculate oddness of isolated objects that remind us that language it is not only a way to recreate but to create a world.
That which…, 2020, HD video, variable size
This work was shown in “Entropic Symbiosis” Modern Art Museum of Pereira, 2020 and in “9:16” El Campín Stadium screen, Nmenos1, Bogota, 2020