We need not only to re-sow, but also to re-inoculate with all the partners that ferment, nurture and fix the nutrients that seeds need to thrive. Recovery is still possible, but only in multi-species alliances, across the killer divides of nature, culture and technology and organism, language and machine.

“Staying with the Trouble” Donna Haraway

In a saying of the UNIverse - that one-way place - we think ourselves and exist in a narrative that since the beginning of time names that human beings have sought to leave a mark and memory for generations to come, to make a mark in the Tzolkin, the ancient Maya would say. Today, like an ant in the vast universe of our mind, we realize brutally, with the current sanitary condition we inhabit, that the hegemonic vision built by some (many) past generations, of the importance of leaving a mark, is only a brushstroke of a reality marked by the current deterioration that houses us and affects each one of us.

The present exhibition “MET(à)LOGOS” by Luis Carrera-Maul is a question of qualitative entropy of itself, a possibility of reconsideration of this procedure of saying UNIverse. By rethinking his own artistic action deployed in this installation set, which from the space in its path, articulates in sets the different moments of his artistic practice of 25 years.

Far from a retrospective look, like driving a car and using the rearview mirror to move forward, the association of the works in this exhibition configures a retro-perspective. That points out its constants and sketches its here in horizons: to rethink painting in the post-pictorial action that from the use of materials dislocates the limits between the made and the constructed object, in order to transcend the UNIverse (inherited/learned) in the incarnation of thinking, doing and living in a single statement, everything is a process. Depending on the moment in which it is observed, the seed is a tree and the tree is a seed.

We try in this exhibition to dilute the edges of the pentagon towards the circle of the uroboron to thereby, in a MULTIverse, understand the detritus of the artist, as a work that flows between nature, subjectivity and system.

The “MET(à)LOGO”, that problematic dialogue that deals with the content and its structure, in Luis' exhibition, we can observe it, in one of the horizons, as the complex conversation of today (in society) and art (in subjectivity), between pandemic and aesthetics. It is perhaps a recognition of ourselves far from separation, as a proposal to place ourselves in union with what we have called nature, that cognitive of language made as a difference of what is human and its constructions. And in this principle it carries an uncertain understanding, the consideration and action as if the Earth was ours, as the only species that snatches, manipulates and devastates the home of so many and so many other species; we foolishly manifest the sense of dominion and gender. Foolishly speculating the territory, we act killing, devastating and in doing so we put ourselves in the tightrope, we attack ourselves.

With the threat of extinction, in another horizon of the retro perspective, the work of Luis in his aesthetic approach between the object he made and the object he found, shakes the fixed perception of UNIverse in two ways, by considering artistic action as the only way to make new things and humans as the most important life he conceives of the planet. The flow of time and space is with or without us, it is enough to enjoy the wire sculpture placed on the wall, or any of the cardboards, they are beautiful, they were made by the Earth and the becoming.

Luis and I are imagining the future, the almost immediate one, we do it with great desire and maybe with luck, it will happen that when observing-enjoying, thinking-appreciating the exhibition, the structure of his I AM dislocates and appears in his horizon, the LIVING I in flow with the species and the wonderful digital technological tools, that we have already grafted in our lives.

olgaMargarita dávila, curator.

Curated by : olgaMargarita dávila

Assistant : Ivonne Dubois

Photography : Guilen Errecalde

Documentation

- Lagos at ZⓢONA MACO - Artsy

Videos

- Lagos in Zona Maco’s Art Week

- OPEN Lagos teaser

Texts

- Curatorial text by olgaMargarita dávila