I work as an undisciplined artist, situating my practice on the shore between art and education. In my work I explore the logic of social and political power and its effects, focusing especially on processes of (in)visibility and (in)materiality; in language, visual culture, work, architecture, everyday life. Responding to my immediate context, I create installations, interventions, cultural platforms and ephemeral schools. Since 2010 I alternate between my individual practice and work in collaboration with the garage school and CARNE Gallery.
Before everything disappears. 2018. Sgr Gallery. Bogota. - Installation. Tattooed basket balls, other.
Spaces or urban infrastructures are usually thought of as a collection of static volumes and objects that do not act. This is especially true for art spaces that supposedly function as anonymous places that offer only a background structure that disappears in the light of the works it hosts. In spite of the efforts to neutralize the differential characteristics of these spaces to guarantee the “adequate” visibility (and sale) of the works, their organization is active. There, grammars, codes and distribution logics are articulated that, far from being neutral, imply dispositions that exert a power and determine a behavior.
These spaces are in themselves media or technologies that carry information, and that presuppose specific gestures and relationships between the bodies articulated therein. Pinyol refuses to maintain the idea of that supposed neutrality of the gallery that seeks to “disappear” to fulfill its function. Instead of occupying the space with objects, ready for sale, they carry out operations that emphasize that this space is not empty of meaning, and that from its volumes and distribution, information that has to do with its history can be made visible, on the one hand; and with its dynamics of power, institutionality and visibility on the other.
Pinyol intervenes minimally the space and, rather, activates it through game and the event, as a way to show the ways in which space hides its forms of power, in the same way that technology tries to become invisible inside of everyday life to be more effective. In the case of technology, its invisibility also generates the illusion of neutrality, which makes it easy to believe that its codes, algorithms and processes are not mediated and impartial. As if they were not connected with human and non-human bodies, and ecological, political and economic systems.
Through the exercise of emptying the space to transform it into a basketball court, and of inserting balls that are tattooed with theories and norms occupy the place of the body, those power relations that are established between the interface (the screen or the space) and bodies becomes more evident. The body that plays in space, which adapts to its conditions and rules, which is limited by borders and borders, as well as by the rules of sport itself, which is molded and transformed to accommodate technology and generate efficient choreography and productive between human and machine.
But, perhaps, by proposing this space as a place of visibility, play and encounter, and not as a space that focuses on the object and its fetishization, a crack is also opening for technology to fail, for subversion to appear and the indiscipline; and new corporalities, choreographies, and forms of contact are generated that confront the naturalization processes of the norms and instrumentalization of the bodies.
Throughout the exhibition there was a series of actions in which this basketball court was activated through games, classes and discussions.
Alejandra Sarria
3rd May 1808. 2017. The space and the time. Espacio Odeon. Bogota. - Iron bars, electrostatic paint. 268 x 347 cms
1 painting as living dead
There is an awkward relationship between reproduction and experience in art history and how it is taught in Latin America. It is a relation based on distance, reproductions in art books of masterpieces, works with which one never comes in contact beyond a discursive relationship, primordially textual. Curiously, we also witness a time when historical painting, and history in general, is being “revived” in an immersive experience through a “symphony of light and sound” from “a new way of experiencing art.” This fact can reveal both bureaucratic problems in the displacement of a historical work (permits, insurance, conservation, etc.) and an updating and mediation of the pictorial experience towards a contemporary, measured, calculated and, never better, spectacular phenomenology. This phenomenon can be seen represented in Van Gogh Alive, whose page can also read the following review “Gone are the days when the only way to appreciate art is by the work hanging on the wall of an art gallery … “
2 parenthesis (After “Critique and Experience” by Bernardo Ortiz)
John Baldessari’s The Best Way to Do Art reproduces a photograph of an airplane, a Boeing 747. Under the photograph a caption says: “A young artist at the arts faculty idolized Cézanne’s paintings. He looked and studied all the books he could find on Cézanne and copied all the reproductions of Cezanne he found in them. He visited a museum and for the first time saw a painting of Cézanne in real life. He hated it. It looked nothing like the Cézannes he had studied in books. From that day, he made all his paintings the size of the reproductions and painted them in black and white. He also painted the captions and the explanations that the books offered about his paintings. Many times he used only words. And then one day he realized that very few people, on the other hand, see books and magazines as he did, and also like them, they receive them by mail. The moral of this history: It is difficult to introduce a painting in a mailbox. “
(Lippard, Six Years 254)
3 distance and exclusion
Our relationship with art history as a discursive process can be deployed in terms of exclusion, as a distance that can not be salvaged, and at the same time as a starting point. The effects of this distance can be seen in how art education is structured in Colombia: an inherited idea of practice and academy that has little to do with our reality.
What has not been lost. 2019 Enrique Guerrero Gallery, México City. - Installation. Embroidered yoga mats, neon, screen printing on screen, other.
The death of God as the sole observer and regulator of the body, through the notion of soul or second body, has involved the construction of other places of validation and social construction of the body. The eye is now precisely in society itself, whose gaze validates or rejects, codifies and regulates. This validation is no longer ethical but erotic, it is not a must be because the body wants the validation and acceptance of the desire of others, wants to be desired, which does not cease to have a deep anguish in the face of mortality and safe extinction of the species that also stimulate desire. In the background there is also a technological framework for the production of validation images, codes of behavior that regulate the spaces and moments of production of subjectivity. Sport is one of those spaces.
Sport is first and foremost an idle activity, the temple of self-design and the factory of desire, it is the space where there is the time necessary for the formation of subjectivities. Idleness is precisely the time necessary for the formation of the subject as a civic, observant and critical being, not only operative and functional according to the Kantian distinction in which selfless contemplation in the contemplative life was the highest expression of the spirit.
In the work of Santiago Pinyol, poetic intervention actions go beyond physical spaces to really intervene in their codes and in the invisible mechanisms of subjectivity production. The invisibility becomes evident precisely by pointing out the limit that separates the codes of the bodies. That limit is identified on the screen on which symbols of a waiting state or throbbers appear: the throbber is the previous symbol in the production of recognizable images, throb is pulpit, but more than a constant rhythm is an acceleration as a result of a stimulation. Precisely in place with sport, the moment of acceleration in the production of stimulating images.
Pointing out the limit is a well-known resource of sacred architecture, composed of places that symbolize boundaries and thresholds between chaos and order. A sacred place is where you can see the divine or cosmic order that regulates us. The spaces for the sport fulfill a similar function, they are spaces of construction of subjectivities from codes of regulation and validation, perhaps the sport has always been a sacred space, Delphi testifies.
Finally, the body is also constructed by overcoming it, not insisting on its corporality but on the opposite, on a condition of post-humanity or transhumanity. This path was opened by Lyotard when he asked if thought could exist without a body. The body exists before and after in language, it is part of a code or a technique, and the place of concrete poetry in the intervened objects is relevant here: poetry is an indirect way of accessing knowledge, even if it seems otherwise Due to the apparent deformation of conventional language, poetry, like the sphere, hides but does not deform.
Alejandro Piñol
A Naked Palace. Growing Space. Rotterdam. 2020 - Public art installation. Vinyl cut "Vogelstickers" of parakeet silhouettes. Dimensions variable.
When I arrived in the Netherlands two years ago one of the things that immediately caught my attention were some little green flying aliens. Soon it became clear to me that they represented how I felt. A little bit like the Bororos, the indigenous people of Brazil that fascinated european anthropologists and ethnographers, who proclaim “we are red parakeets”. And no, they don’t mean it metaphorically. But rather in a way of being in the world in a way in which the instruments of Western reason are lacking.
At the same time in asking questions to others about them I realized that most narratives surrounding the parakeets are informed by a combination of urban myths and colonial tropes, complicit with exoticist world-views throughout history, revealing the connections between ecology, coloniality, and representation.
The response to the growing numbers of parakeets in Europe has been uneven and contradictory; some governments and municipalities have gone as far as total eradication, laws to forbid feeding them, while some are “still studying the situation”. But they are also considered an example of successful synurbanisation; an evolutionary process whereby animals adapt to living in urban areas, a process that could, in turn, be applied to endangered species according to dutch ornithologist Roelant Jonker. Parakeets went from pets to pests, as some articles describe, leaving them trapped in a dichotomy that only allows for domesticación or erradicación mirroring extrativists view of nature.
This discourse has normalized into one of politized ecology and of natural purism, which understand ecosystems as closed systems that fit into notions of landscape mired in the anthropocentrism characteristic of the nation state model. These new cases of non-human migration into urban centers have given way to the concept of ‘Eco-xenophobia’, which designates ill informed judgments and segregation of non-human actors marked by cultural ideas of what is native, what is alien, what is welcome and what is not.
This view is historically linked to the colonial practice of classifying nature and everything in it, a fundamental part of processes of expansion and domination. When a species is categorized as exotic, it automatically creates a center and a periphery, and inside and an outside, that configures colonial power relations. The construction of the exotic is also exemplified in the history of institutions such as the Zoos, Botanical Gardens, and incipient Museum collections.
In addition to these large ideological configurations, non-human animals lost their voice and political rights through this categorization. Perhaps now is a unique moment to act from “the importance of listening to animal voices, introducing ways to help us bridge the divide between the human and non-human world (...)” as Eva Meijer proposes in her groundbreaking work When animals speak: Toward an interspecies democracy.
ultradependentpublicschool. (Fellowship, group show. BAK, Utrecht. 2023) - The ultrahospitality node was a temporary cultural platform for diasporic affects and practice exchanges around the kitchen as a site of study. A place for those interested in working and learning with food activists and agri-cultural workers, in preparing and serving food as a way to gather community and enact communal forms of study. It is convened by escuela de garaje (Garage School), under the ministration of undisciplined artist Santiago Pinyol. The goal of the ultrahospitality node is to exchange, smuggle or try to translate recipes for survival, by making connections between the ongoing research of the escuela de garaje in Utrecht and its previous affects in other places. Its curriculum unravels informally in the experience of walking, sharing, and cooking together.
The learning object proposed for the ⚡️ultradependentpublicschool⚡️ was a batch of 80 liters of wild fermented mead honey wine made from honey from Rotterdam harvested by Rauke (who I met in the fermentation school in 2020) and honey from Utrecht by Bijnkasten. 🐝
The process started it during the opening of the UPS, “culturing” that moment, a simple ceremony to capture who’s in the room and what was on the air that day. After that it was 🐝 happily stirred two times a day by many hands, sharing updates and signing in to keep track of who did it.
🐝 But, the fermentation became stuck at some point following the whole telenovela of the exhibition space being closed for one month, (half the running time of the UPS) and awoke again once the exhibition opened 🐝 to the public again (and when we balanced the Ph with Potassium bicarbonate).
This mead was really a learning object in many ways, pushing us to look closely at the honey as a the unique substance 🐝 that it is, as a snapshot full of life of a moment and a place, to know more about the process of wild fermentation, about the history of mead (oldest alcoholic drink) geeking 🐝 by looking at ph, working with a hydrometer.
All in all it connected us to the Utrecht and to each other, grounding us (why is grounding a synonym of punishment?) while reminding us 🐝of the climate crisis we are in, and the delicate state of the bee population at this moment.🐝
the shadow of the plum tree. (group show, próximamente, Barranquilla, Colombia) - "La sombra del ciruelo" is a trailer for a feature film that does not exist. A work made in a couple of days that starts from talking to Maria Isabel about the unbearable heat right now, and how the plum tree in her garden - which normally works "like clockwork" - has not yet borne fruit this year. The trailer shows glimpses of the conversation with her over a couple of days, touching on theories about photography, about the visible and the invisible, about the change we are living through and how the non-human registers it. Looking for the invisible and listening to this register, the images document the ultraviolet spectrum, made with a multispectral camera. In the trailer, Maria Isabel reads a dream that translates and communicates with the feeling of this moment of the end of a world.
a river plus a river are not two rivers: a temporary support office for those who fear closed envelopes - Dear Rotterdam,
After many office days with countless conversations and all sorts of contributions, the envelope collage was carefully wrapped in the company of Marika, Linnea, Darly and Anke to be mailed back upstream to the "Ideas and suggestions" department of Gemeente Rotterdam.
The temporary support office for those who fear closed envelopes thanks everyone who trusted the project and joined their rivers, brought their envelopes, share stories or opinions, wrote messages, bureaucratic poetry, insults, suggestions, made drawings, origami, hearts, monsters, architectures, middle fingers, and in general improvised from their muscle memory of doing something with paper. In the end, the collage is a sum of many feelings, from love to anger, and went from trying to do something big to a very detailed landscape.
And no, I do not expect a response (but I am open to it), and the conversations about the imaginaries of power, violence of bureaucracy, state theory, the personality of the state, design and power, the feelings we have about institutions (and hopefully how to reverse them) were kind of the point.
Of course, the team acknowledgments: cannot thank enough Marika, we edited, read, archived, had fun and felt like a collaboration. Special thanks to the teams of mediators Simon, Tracy, Floor. And to all the teams at Tent: Judith, Esther, Aletta, Jordy, Menno, Raquel, Darly, Dico, Eden…
And of course to my partner Kari @firmlarvae for having the patience and supporting all the extra-time that the office demanded…
Thank you all,
*This project was part of exhibition There is no party so noisy as the one you're not invited to, curated by Linnea Semmerling.
what there is of others in us (solo show. Sgr Gallery. Bogota) - In 2017, a swarm of bees colonized the statue of George Washington (Carrera 10 con calle 26). Made by Luis Pinto Maldonado in 1963 to commemorate John F. Kennedy's visit to Bogotá as part of his Alliance for Progress tour, a program designed to contain communism in Latin America.
It was the bees that entered and left the crotch of the statue that revealed the Washington Monument to me. As Robert Musil stated: "The extraordinary thing about monuments is that you don't look at them. There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument."
With this research I am interested in understanding the action of occupying the statue by the swarm as a form of non-human deliberation within the open debate on monumentality and memory at this time. What effects can this occupation have? Can this process affect the materiality of history? Open history to other gestures and languages?
Ideas City Festival, Bell ArtSpace Campus, New Orleans. - IdeasCity New Orleans culminated in a public program on April 20, 2019, featuring conversations, artist talks, prototypes, and demos by an array of local and internationally acclaimed cultural agents.
The best way to teach art. 2018. - Single channel video. 12:33.
