Exhibitions

Liquid ground Enar de Dios Rodríguez From March 17 to May 19 Santiago

Liquid ground is born at the same time as the Patania II mining robot crawls on the seabed and sucks metals from it, while the fallen skeleton of a whale enables the construction of complex submarine ecosystems, while a sonar determines the depth of the ocean, while we continue, day after day, swallowing saliva. A time we call present, a moment that is being written, thought and represented in this very moment. Here. Right now, while you read these lines and everything is happening at the same time.

Liquid ground is an exhibition project that suggests a place to embark, but it could be also thought as a letter. In the first paragraph of this letter there are hands. They present incomplete portraits of cartographers throughout history. They imply that gestures matter. They demand that we pay attention to how the world has been grasped, how lines have been arbitrarily drawn in order to mark the boundaries of space. As if it was possible to stop the tides at a fixed point, as if it made sense to separate one place from another. In reality, it may all have just been a specific kind of yearning, but we are in time to establish different desires. Always.

The body of this letter takes time. It is a video that lasts 30 minutes. It talks about how we learned to see the bottom of the ocean: through the first illustrations that depicted the beings that were extracted from the deep sea, through the museum gaze that came afterwards, when the sea became an aquarium spectacle in the cities, and through the future visions and digital representations that are being constructed nowadays for these underwater spaces. This video is rather an essay that understands looking and thinking as a poem without end. Like all forms of knowledge, this is also a set of riddles.

This letter, or this project, says goodbye with a gift: an object that hopes to disappear from the gallery and to be taken with your hands. It is a map of the Pacific Ocean, in case one day you decide to visit the Clarion-Clipperton zone, so that you know that, until recently, those seabed areas belonged to you, to us, but now they have become keys for nations opening doors to the extractivism of this century.

At the end of the letter there is an erased postscript, but if you look against the light you could read a call to boycott the imposed future, a future rooted in a past that was written by a few hands. Or it could be read something else, since it no longer depends on what is written here, but on what has been lived.

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