ElUNIVERSOHOLOGRAMA

Exhibi&oncuratedbyLinaLopez&FrancoisBucher

SALAMARITZA

The sailors who sailed with Christopher Columbus were afraid of the abyss at the edge of the earth and of the monstrous creatures they expected to find there. Taking our point of departure in this image, we may consider that for at least 1,500 years prior to this voyage, experiments, such as those conducted by Eratosthenes in 200 BC, had successfully proved the roundness of the earth. But nevertheless, to Columbus’ men the world was still flat.

Our world today is made up of three dimensions, which places us firmly on a globe. This is the state of mind of our contemporary civilisation, even if higher dimensions are comprehended in mathematics and physics; and even if the collapse of space-time – as we understand it – has found a scientific expression in the field of quantum mechanics.

How does an idea take shape over time? How does the emergence of a technology – a means of transport, a means of navigation, a means of recording, for example – durably modify our consciousness and our relationship to space and time?

The exhibition presents a group of contemporary artists whose works open perspectives on these fundamental problems. The passage from a flat to a round world, and beyond, is marked by shifts in consciousness. This is the thread of the exhibition – which is laid out like a journey – where instruments of man play a major role.

Nicolas Consuegra, 1976, Colombia, Nadie sabe de la sed con que otro bebe 2012 Multi-channel video installation. Vasos de vidrio y cristal espejo Dimensiones variables

Nicolas Consuegra, 1976, Colombia, Nadie sabe de la sed con que otro bebe 2012 Multi-channel video installation. Vasos de vidrio y cristal espejo Dimensiones variables

Laurent Grasso 1972, France Soleil Double 2014 Video

Laurent Grasso 1972, France Soleil Double 2014 Video

The Magical Anarchism of Julia Rometti and Victor Costales seeks to negotiate apparently contradictory orders and to reveal the endless abyss that is behind any representation, or any projection. The literal and metaphoric presence of the “Necker cube” is set forth: a form that presents the indecision between two angles. This allows the artists to promote the idea of a state of consciousness that is, in itself, a liminal state – a bridge between two worlds. The ambiguous geometry indicates an unfixed state of being, combustible, volcanic, as the rocks that lie on the tiles of modular geometries. It suffices to perceive the grid from an alternate angle for its space to transform. The Necker cube reveals how, in an orthogonal projection, any reality remains “a work in progress” to be temporarily finished by the observer. It reminds us likewise that each moment in our lives has these same characteristics: the real world is also a work in progress, and our perception finishes the work temporarily at any given moment, collapses all possible realities into one.

Rometti / Costales Niza, Francia 1975/ Minsk, Bielorrusia, 1974

Roca | Azul | Jacinto | Marino | Errante 2013 Two rocks and ceramic tiles. Variable dimensions.

François Bucher’s installation The Second and a Half Dimension: An Expedition to the Photographic Plateau is an approach to the work of Daniel Ruzo, a Peruvian Nostradamus expert who studied the Marcahuasi Plateau in the 1950s. The installation’s centrepiece is a particular photograph and its negative, taken from the archive of Daniel Ruzo in Lima. The discovery of this double image was considered irrefutable proof of his thesis, by the Peruvian investigator, of the fact that a figurative game, involving the sun’s position and the observer’s position, had been created by a pre-cataclysmic civilisation for the initiate observer of the future. He claimed that the stone figures had been intentionally sculpted, and that their figuration was to be found somewhere between the second and the third dimension. Alongside photos, documents and magazines from Ruzo’s archive – dating back to the 1950s – the installation comprises a video in which Severiano Olivares, the keeper of the mountain, acts as a tour guide to the plateau’s sculpture park.

François Bucher Cali, Colombia 1972

The Second and a Half Dimension - An Expedition to the Photographic Plateau, 2010 Installation Variable dimensions

SalaSubterraneaHOLOGRAMA

The hologram references a stage where our space-time coordinates are no longer valid. The word hologram comes from the Greek word “holos”, which means complete, where “everything is represented”. It invokes the consciousness of fragments that contain the totality of everything.

An example of this is the mycelium of fungus that may extend over a huge area underground, while above ground there appears to be individual mushrooms. The point is that all the mushrooms are linked to the same invisible constellation. Tim Ingold follows mycologist Alan Rayner in suggesting that the entire field of biology would be different had we taken the mycelium as the prototype for a living organism. Because from that point of view it would be unthinkable to assume that life is contained within the absolute boundaries of individual fixed forms.

Mycelium is therefore another expression of what is meant by the holographic. Furthermore, the underground mycelium meshwork appears identical to an abstract picture of the World Wide Web, which has created a new paradigm of space and time for us, a new expression of the networked metabolism that we were always already in.

A holographic consciousness is non-local, like the timeless description of God: a sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. Thus a new world without boundaries emerges, where the past is image and resemblance of the future, playing itself out in the present; and where space can be folded through and through, as in a wormhole. The holographic leads thought into a multi-dimensional universe where the distinction between the shaman’s jungle and our own cybersphere is no longer self-evident. A Cartesian world of fixed values and frontiers collapses from within.

Benoit Pype, Rouen, France, 1985

Géographie transitoire, 2011. Dimension variable Philodendron leaf, 6 months evolution. 21x15 cm

The map of a city is cut into the leaf of a common indoor plant. At first glance one might mistake the city plan for the natural veins of the leaf. The piece does not point towards bio mimicry, but rather makes a simple point: the human world and its articulations are a new expression of the natural world that it leaves behind; a zoom-out of the city shows us a new expression of a natural organic metabolism.

Leyla Cárdenas, 1975, Bogota, Colombia

Disolución 2015 Malla Dimension variable

the work of Leyla Cárdenas tries to capture the notion of space and time from an archaeological perspective. The artist uses building materials to create a minimalist and ethereal ruin. In this way, she proposes a metaphorical paradox that binds the future with the past and creates the mystery of whether what we see is a skeleton for a building under construction or a fragment of a collapsed structure.

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Pierre Huyghe, 1962, Paris, France

One Million Kingdoms 2001 Video

In Pierre Huyghe's One Million Kingdoms (2001), a voice maps out unexplored lunar terrain. The voice belongs to a Japanese Manga character named AnnLee, for which Huyghe, along with artists Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Philippe Parreno, purchased the copyright in 1999. Featured in previous works by the three artists, here this brooding young girl speaks in a voice that is an electronically altered version of the astronaut Neil Armstrong's communiqués from the first moon landing; the text she recites conflates Armstrong's historic utterances with excerpts from Jules Verne's 1895 novel Journey to the Center of the Earth. Armstrong's words prompt AnnLee as she moves from place to place on a constantly fluctuating landscape, in which mountains, craters, ridges, and outcroppings rise and fall according to the sound waves of his (her) voice.

Bernardo Ortiz, 1972, Cali, Colombia

Sin%tulo,2015

In several of his texts, Gilles Deleuze affirmed that thought is produced from a field of possibilities and is made visible through what he termed the “the image of thought”. In a similar way, Bernardo Ortiz seeks to reveal in his work the supports and resources that shape visual experience. In 180615, Ortiz’s most recent exhibition, the image—resulting from an amalgam of technical and material solutions or as a text made out of layers— is present in drawings, installations and onsite interventions. Outdated techniques such as the digitalization of images in TeX[1] and heliographies are present in particular ways. These obsolete methods not only emphasize the photographic quality of the image, but also allude to outmoded processes that reveal their own limits (photography, painting, drawing and projections are composed by minimum units). Hence, the reproduction, the copy, the drawing of the drawing, or the photo of the drawing converge, erasing the limits between techniques, discourses and concepts. Mindful of the fact that each era finds certain forms of producing an image, Ortiz creates snapshots that hint to their own mechanisms. After all, the visual experience — which often seems reduced to the image— is the byproduct of a complex, yet sometimes overlooked strata.

Julien Prévieux, Grenoble, Paris 1974

Patterns of life video 2015

Julien Prévieux’s recent work is like a series of concentric circles, wide and narrow, approaching a most intangible concept, gesture. Prévieux uses performers and dancers to stage the many aspects of a culture’s relationship with gesture. In his research he has visited many facets of the problem that concerns him, one of them being the concept of “patented gestures”.

According to Prévieux, the famous gestures that Tom Cruise used in the film Minority Report were being patented at the same time as the film was premiered: a kind of precognitive forecast of a branded gesture that will define a civilisational profile. His research goes further to reveal a future where the new ground of all-encompassing, post-objective social control has become as uncertain as in Donald Rumsfeld’s renowned phrase: “There are known unknowns, and yet there are unknown unknowns”.

Prévieux is engaged in a detournement of sorts in which this very intention of social control – whose cutting edge is the supervision and management of gesture – is rendered an aesthetic potentiality; where a civilisation’s hologram of gestures turns into the inauguration of a novel immaterial reality that may still hold a poetic emancipatory promise. This may take place once the ethos of apparent commercial and governmental omnipotence is alchemised into a new proposal for thought, something that is achieved precisely through the artist’s gaze. .

Lina Lopez / François Bucher Bogota, Colombia, 1977 / Cali, Colombia, 1972

Le temps qui reste, 2014 Flying seeds, fan, metal and wood base, LED lights. Base: 120 x 20 x 20cm

The work consists of seeds that are literally animated so that they resemble moths or butterflies. The flying seeds deny a linear time where a flying seed naturally flies from A to B, eventually reaching the ground. The flying seeds invoke a time that remains in the present tense, a magical transformation; as in a Kogi myth where a “rainbow tree” is described: it is said to be the most sacred of all trees and its leaves turn into butterflies when the wind touches them. Mythology always tells a supernatural story that is related to origin. It contains an amalgam of all times, or rather “a time that remains”. It is like the élan vital (vital force) that is always at work in the present tense.

Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni 1980 et 1981 ,Paris, France

THE UNMANNED - 2045 - THE DEATH OF RAY KURZWEIL SEASON 1, EPISODE 1, 26 MIN, 2014

WHERE GENEALOGY IS BROKEN AND THE FATHER SON OF A SON FATHER DRIFTS IN AN EMERGING NEW WORLD - FIRST EPISODE OF THE SERIES, “THE DEATH OF RAY KURZWEIL” SHOWS THE WANDERING OF RAY KURZWEIL ALONG WITH HIS FATHER-SON, FRIEDRICH, IN THE VASTNESS OF A TROPICAL FOREST. THIS FILM OF ANTICIPATION, ENTIRELY FILMED BY DRONES, TAKES PLACE IN 2045, AT THE CRITICAL THRESHOLD OF TECHNOLOGICAL SINGULARITY.

François Bucher (Colombia 1972) Nationality: French-Colombian

Bucher is an artist from Cali, Colombia living and working in Berlin and Paris. He graduated with a Masters in Film from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was awarded a fellowship at the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York. His work and research span a wide range of interests and media.

Bucher has been active as writer for theory books and journals - Saving the Image, Art after Film, In The Poem About Love you Don't Write The Word Love, The Journal of Visual Culture, Estudios Visuales, E-flux Journal, Valdez Magazine (founding editor) amongst others - over the past years as well as being invited to give lectures in seminars and symposia: LABoral, Gijón, CENDEAC, Murcia, University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Nations Plaza, Berlin, Universidad Nacional, Bogotá, Tromso Fine Arts Academy, Art History Department, Umea University.

Bucher's work has been exhibited and screened internationally in venues including, Cuenca Biennial 13, Cartagena Biennial 13, Venice Biennale 12, Lyon Biennale 11, Momentum, Nordic Biennial,00 Prague Biennial 03, 05, Werkleitz Biennial, 06, Tessaloniki Biennial 07, Mercosul Biennial 09, Lofoten Arts Festival, Fundación Proa, Tate Britain, Oberhausen Film Festival, Whitney Museum ISP, New Museum, New York, New York Video Festival at Lincoln Center, Rotterdam Film Festival, Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies, Argos Arts, Brussels, Film Museum, Brussels, Arsenal, Berlin, Kunsthalle, Budapest, Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt, Documenta, XII Magazine Project, Documenta XIII AND AND AND Project, Museo Reina Sofia, Santa Monica Art Museum, LA, Stanton Museum, Houston, MUSAC - Museo Contemporáneo de Castilla y León.

His work has been awarded several prizes, amongst them, the first prize at VideoEx, 2003, Zurich; The Prize of the Jury in Videolisboa, Lisbon, 2003, First prize at Premio a la Videocreación Iberoamericana, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y Leon, MUSAC, 2004, the Werkleitz Award 2004 in Transmediale, Berlin, a Director’s Citation at the Black Maria Film Festival, 2004 and the second prize at Fair Play, Berlin, 2007. He was twice nominated for the New Media Fellowship of the Rockefeller Foundation, 2005 and 2007. He is a recipient of The New York City Media Arts Grant of The Jerome Foundation, 2000. In 2009 he was awarded the Cajasol Grant in Andalucía. In 2011 he became a PhD candidate at the Art Academy at Umeä University, Sweden, where he is currently also a Guest Professor.

Curators

Lina Lopez ( Colombia 1977) Nationality: French-Colombian

Lives and works between Paris y Berlin

Lina Lopez holds an Industrial Design degree from La Universidad de los Andes in Bogota. She went on to focus on museology, and was awarded an Art History degree and a Masters in Contemporary Art and Exhibition at La Sorbonne, Paris 4 in 2007.

Her trajectory in art focuses on the interdisciplinary universe of Museology: Since 2001 she works as a museographer at Musée du Luxembourg in exhibitions such as Modigliani, Botticelli, Gauguin, Véronèse and Tiziano. From 2006 onward she works as an independent curator realising exhibitions at Galerie Vallois (Gao Brothers) , at La Monnaie de Paris (Zavborov) , and at l'orangerie of the Luxembourg (Mai Mao). Apart from this she organises the first auction at Palais de tokyo in 2007 and Le Chalet de Tokyo"Midi/Minuit" in Argentina.

In 2008 she founds a company for the organisation and production of exhibitions, Lin'art, conceiving exhibitions that mix contemporary and ancient art : Trésors du Budisme au pays de Gengis Khan, L' Or de la toison d' Or, Trésors des cavaliers de l'Islam, Wang Keping, sculpture contemporaine and David Lachapelle.

Between 2010 et 2013 she focuses on museology and archeology. Commissioned by the government of Georgia she redesigns and modernises the National Museum of Georgia and three other regional museums.

Since 2013 she collaborates with François Bucher on artistic projects that seek to deconstruct a hierarchy of knowledge set in place by contemporary scientific materialism. They seek to open an understanding of man and nature within a millenary cycle, in order to sidestep a unidimensional perspective, and to offer entrances to a multidimensional kind of thinking.

Their collaborations have been shown, amongst others at the Bienal de Cartagena, Colombia ("Radio Amazonas"), CICUS, SEVILLA ( “The Duration of the Present"), at the Musée d'Histoire Naturelle de Paris (the installation: “Le temps qui reste” ), Cristin Tierney gallery à NY (Wormhole, solo exhibition) , Flora ARS+Natura , Colombia (“The Duration of the Present”, July, 2015), Galeria Alarcon Criado, Sevilla, (Horizonte de sucesos, 2016)