"Throwing car parts from a cliff before sunrise"
Elena Bajo
GARCÍA GALERÍA
Doctor Fourquet 8 28012 Madrid España
Tel: +34 915 275 567 Fax: +34 915 275 567 e-mail:
Sept 15 > Nov 12, 2016
The ecological thought does, indeed, consist in the ramifications of the “truly wonderful fact” of the mesh. All life forms are the mesh, and so are all the dead ones, as are their habitats, which are also made up of living and nonliving beings. Timothy Morton
In July of 2013, a young male whale washed up on the shores of Terschelling, a northern island in the Netherlands. Rescuers were unable to save him. Researchers took a look inside of this unnaturally bloated whale to see what caused his premature death. Inside they found two small flowerpots, a plastic spray canister, nine meters of ropes, two hosepipes, and over 37 pounds of plastic. Intestinal blockage was the cause of death. This death by blockage constituted the limit where live organic matter and manufactured inanimate matter become assimilated. The ontology of plastic as a thing and as an idea and the whale’s own evolutionary path were not commensurate. The whales stomach did not evolve to eat and degrade manufactured petroleum products. Its death underscored the false continuities and unassimilable views between manmade and natural life cycles. Scientific propositions, embedded as they are in the very apparatus and machinery of capitalism, creates false ideas and relation s, “strange strangers”, in which epistemologies that are considered to be true are really interruptions of the actual way things are and which science, technology and the capitalism they perpetrate will not admit to. But the dead whale is a testament to its inaccuracy. The whale’s swallowing of the plastic which created its intestinal blockage serves as a metaphor for the condition of philosophical deadlock resulting from the inadequacy of transcendental idealism and its proofs no longer up to the task to solve the sublime conditions of cognitive dissonance that haunts are present condition. But what of the plastic once the whale’s body has decayed? Will it be set free again to roam the ocean and find itself in the stomach of another animal at a later time. Is the plastic a recurring pathogen; alive, in a sense, to create more and more destruction, to contaminate more and more living systems? Is there a dialectic materialism of corruption?
An object is much larger then the simple materials that constitute it. As political entities objects today are as much immaterial as material. They are part of a mesh which extends beyond their substance and enfold a multiplicity of relations. They are beyond our capacity to understand given our time/space coordinates and have become invisible in our moment of ecological crisis. Thus they constitute ‘hyperobjects’ in the words of Timothy Morton. Where the false relations set up in the sensory field can be teased apart and exposed in ways that emancipate underlying sets of conditionsOn the one hand the waste products like Styrofoam and plastic do not degrade and when they do are toxic. They are relatively non-degradable being broken down into smaller pieces that circulate in the food chain where they end up in the stomachs of small and large sea creatures alike. These compounds, like the events occurring in the Internet, are never forgotten. Virtual memories are endless and ne ver degrade. Like the contamination caused by petrochemical products, a result of the capacious desire for profit, these memories exuded by capitalism, contaminate the knowledge that now circulates in the global intelligences. This is the key to understanding global warming denial. These meet in the architecture of the Internet where they participate in a market place of ideas engaged a struggle for the survival of the fittest. As such all objects, material or immaterial, sign and signifier, real or unreal, natural and man made eventually become contaminated by their own conditions of incommensurability and by the conditions of the meshwork which does not distinguish its own pollution for the truth.
This is precisely where Elena Bajo’s thought experiments begin to speak in sonorous tones of deeply imbedded and assembled anthropocentric disability. For her caste concrete sculptures are riddled with the plastic and the fossil fuels that create them. They are folds incommensurably lodged in the very structure of the pure form of the cube and its nod to pure forms from which the cube emanates and which basic teleology emanates. That is to say that the lineage of objects to their Hellenic past has become a space of rupture folded upon itself in the way Deleuze and Leibnize understood it as a topological folding of the inside into the outside and vice versa. In doing so opposing differences and similarities become commensurate activating new conditions for truth and subjectivity. For the history of objects will never be the same in a world contaminated both objectively and linguistically. For contamination is exactly this condition of folding in which what was a pure form become s defiled, corrupted, filthy, foul, contagious, polluted, spoiled and rotten. Deformed in essential ways that require for us to look at these artistic work with a new language not yet formed or collectively engaged with.
For her second show at García galería Elena Bajo will be presenting two related body of Works. The video work, The Land is a Mirror of the Stars investigates, through both real propositions and imaginary speculations, the articulation of negative spaces left/inherited by post-Fordist capitalism’s social forms and now executed by neoliberal strategies. Mixed historical and literary texts, ethereal participatory elements, anarchist secret codes, digital encounters, and indigenous cosmologies. It proposes an extended exploration on global environmental, social and political issues as the base to address local, ancient knowledge, mythology, ethnobotany and cosmology. Using the words of honduran activist Berta Cáceres the video points at the consecuences of the destuction of the natural hábitats in the Amazonian Forest when describing the cycle that goes from the star constelations to the yearly harvest.
Also in the exhibition Bajo will be showing related recent sculptures Works in which she mixes artificial materials such as plastic, urthane and aluminium in shapes and forms that break to show the interior. Perfect shapes appeard to be misfit and nature and artificial collide. Delicate surfaces constrast with misshapen cavities affecting the viwer perception and missguide and misslead the senses.
With Throwing car parts from a cliff before sunrise Bajo expands on her two previous projects include With Entheogenic Intent (Burn the Witch), LA 2014 which addressed the mythologies of american indigenous cultures and its global political resonance, and Isle of Innocence (After Fordlandia), Sao Paulo, Brazil 2015, a project that has as a point of departure the city of Fordlandia, built by Henry Ford in the middle of the Amazonian rain forest. These three projects constitute work of the Cosmic Distress Series, focused on the ecological impact of neoliberal economies.
Elena Bajo is an artist whose concept generated and search based practice explores the intersection of anarchist thought, social ecology, and metaphysics. She is co-initiator of the Los Angeles, CA collective D’CLUB (Divestment Club) engaged in fossil fuel divestment activities, and climate action. She received an MA in Fine Arts from Central Saint Martins School of Art, London (UK) in 2005 after obtaining a MA in Architecture from ESARQ, Barcelona in 2002. She has taught and lectured at Goldsmith’s College, London; Rhode Island School of Design, RISD, Providence; and Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield; Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Sao Paulo, Brazil. Recent group shows Mardin Biennial, Turkey and Trust, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark. Forthcoming exhibits ‘Aun: Yet, Still” the 44th Salon Nacional de Artistas, Pereira, Colombia, and “Take Up your Space”, at Kai 10 Arthena Foundation, Dusseldorf. She is a 2016-2017 recipient of the Botin Foundation Visual Arts Grant, for her project Urania’s Mirror, an interdisciplinary project that investigates environmental and social impact that economies of exploitation have on the land and communities, in several parts of Latin America. Bajo lives in Los Angeles and Berlin.
In July of 2013, a young male whale washed up on the shores of Terschelling, a northern island in the Netherlands. Rescuers were unable to save him. Researchers took a look inside of this unnaturally bloated whale to see what caused his premature death. Inside they found two small flowerpots, a plastic spray canister, nine meters of ropes, two hosepipes, and over 37 pounds of plastic. Intestinal blockage was the cause of death. This death by blockage constituted the limit where live organic matter and manufactured inanimate matter become assimilated. The ontology of plastic as a thing and as an idea and the whale’s own evolutionary path were not commensurate. The whales stomach did not evolve to eat and degrade manufactured petroleum products. Its death underscored the false continuities and unassimilable views between manmade and natural life cycles. Scientific propositions, embedded as they are in the very apparatus and machinery of capitalism, creates false ideas and relation s, “strange strangers”, in which epistemologies that are considered to be true are really interruptions of the actual way things are and which science, technology and the capitalism they perpetrate will not admit to. But the dead whale is a testament to its inaccuracy. The whale’s swallowing of the plastic which created its intestinal blockage serves as a metaphor for the condition of philosophical deadlock resulting from the inadequacy of transcendental idealism and its proofs no longer up to the task to solve the sublime conditions of cognitive dissonance that haunts are present condition. But what of the plastic once the whale’s body has decayed? Will it be set free again to roam the ocean and find itself in the stomach of another animal at a later time. Is the plastic a recurring pathogen; alive, in a sense, to create more and more destruction, to contaminate more and more living systems? Is there a dialectic materialism of corruption?
An object is much larger then the simple materials that constitute it. As political entities objects today are as much immaterial as material. They are part of a mesh which extends beyond their substance and enfold a multiplicity of relations. They are beyond our capacity to understand given our time/space coordinates and have become invisible in our moment of ecological crisis. Thus they constitute ‘hyperobjects’ in the words of Timothy Morton. Where the false relations set up in the sensory field can be teased apart and exposed in ways that emancipate underlying sets of conditionsOn the one hand the waste products like Styrofoam and plastic do not degrade and when they do are toxic. They are relatively non-degradable being broken down into smaller pieces that circulate in the food chain where they end up in the stomachs of small and large sea creatures alike. These compounds, like the events occurring in the Internet, are never forgotten. Virtual memories are endless and ne ver degrade. Like the contamination caused by petrochemical products, a result of the capacious desire for profit, these memories exuded by capitalism, contaminate the knowledge that now circulates in the global intelligences. This is the key to understanding global warming denial. These meet in the architecture of the Internet where they participate in a market place of ideas engaged a struggle for the survival of the fittest. As such all objects, material or immaterial, sign and signifier, real or unreal, natural and man made eventually become contaminated by their own conditions of incommensurability and by the conditions of the meshwork which does not distinguish its own pollution for the truth.
This is precisely where Elena Bajo’s thought experiments begin to speak in sonorous tones of deeply imbedded and assembled anthropocentric disability. For her caste concrete sculptures are riddled with the plastic and the fossil fuels that create them. They are folds incommensurably lodged in the very structure of the pure form of the cube and its nod to pure forms from which the cube emanates and which basic teleology emanates. That is to say that the lineage of objects to their Hellenic past has become a space of rupture folded upon itself in the way Deleuze and Leibnize understood it as a topological folding of the inside into the outside and vice versa. In doing so opposing differences and similarities become commensurate activating new conditions for truth and subjectivity. For the history of objects will never be the same in a world contaminated both objectively and linguistically. For contamination is exactly this condition of folding in which what was a pure form become s defiled, corrupted, filthy, foul, contagious, polluted, spoiled and rotten. Deformed in essential ways that require for us to look at these artistic work with a new language not yet formed or collectively engaged with.
For her second show at García galería Elena Bajo will be presenting two related body of Works. The video work, The Land is a Mirror of the Stars investigates, through both real propositions and imaginary speculations, the articulation of negative spaces left/inherited by post-Fordist capitalism’s social forms and now executed by neoliberal strategies. Mixed historical and literary texts, ethereal participatory elements, anarchist secret codes, digital encounters, and indigenous cosmologies. It proposes an extended exploration on global environmental, social and political issues as the base to address local, ancient knowledge, mythology, ethnobotany and cosmology. Using the words of honduran activist Berta Cáceres the video points at the consecuences of the destuction of the natural hábitats in the Amazonian Forest when describing the cycle that goes from the star constelations to the yearly harvest.
Also in the exhibition Bajo will be showing related recent sculptures Works in which she mixes artificial materials such as plastic, urthane and aluminium in shapes and forms that break to show the interior. Perfect shapes appeard to be misfit and nature and artificial collide. Delicate surfaces constrast with misshapen cavities affecting the viwer perception and missguide and misslead the senses.
With Throwing car parts from a cliff before sunrise Bajo expands on her two previous projects include With Entheogenic Intent (Burn the Witch), LA 2014 which addressed the mythologies of american indigenous cultures and its global political resonance, and Isle of Innocence (After Fordlandia), Sao Paulo, Brazil 2015, a project that has as a point of departure the city of Fordlandia, built by Henry Ford in the middle of the Amazonian rain forest. These three projects constitute work of the Cosmic Distress Series, focused on the ecological impact of neoliberal economies.
Elena Bajo is an artist whose concept generated and search based practice explores the intersection of anarchist thought, social ecology, and metaphysics. She is co-initiator of the Los Angeles, CA collective D’CLUB (Divestment Club) engaged in fossil fuel divestment activities, and climate action. She received an MA in Fine Arts from Central Saint Martins School of Art, London (UK) in 2005 after obtaining a MA in Architecture from ESARQ, Barcelona in 2002. She has taught and lectured at Goldsmith’s College, London; Rhode Island School of Design, RISD, Providence; and Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield; Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Sao Paulo, Brazil. Recent group shows Mardin Biennial, Turkey and Trust, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark. Forthcoming exhibits ‘Aun: Yet, Still” the 44th Salon Nacional de Artistas, Pereira, Colombia, and “Take Up your Space”, at Kai 10 Arthena Foundation, Dusseldorf. She is a 2016-2017 recipient of the Botin Foundation Visual Arts Grant, for her project Urania’s Mirror, an interdisciplinary project that investigates environmental and social impact that economies of exploitation have on the land and communities, in several parts of Latin America. Bajo lives in Los Angeles and Berlin.
Opening:
Thursday 15 September, 2016
From 5 pm to 10 pm
mpefm
SPAIN art press release
Gallery hours:
From Tuesday to Friday from 10 to 19 hours. Saturdays from 10 to 14 hours..