Sara Pape Garcia

For the Fourth 'Haunt' Ghost, an artist initiative based in Rotterdam invited me to develop a work specifically for the site of a ship beached on the island of Katendrecht to serve as a public park. Over the course of one evening seven Artists presented work which responded specifically to the site. Programmed works had a focus on water, on aural traditions, gnostic mysticism and personal histories that scale from the oceanic to the minute. The result was a flag made by bird seeds, that during the course of a week was consumed by the weather and birds. This work gives the opportunity to research the validity of communication and ideology. Right now I am developping it further with my new developped interest in programming. How is the process of making a translation from seed to information. What information is already present in seeds . As every seed contains many selves and is pregnant with the future.

Gallerist and artist Jan Huijben lives in this art space in Rotterdam Zuid. He makes objects that one can hold in one hand. I perform over a runway out of the art space to present the objects that never see daylight. In collaboration with sound producer yEs!yEs! and spoken word by Fazle Shairmahomed of quotes of Boris Groys’ The Logic of Collecting.

“CAPITALOCEAN focused strongly on the socio-ideological side of histories. We continuously emerge at the question of how to orientate and organize ourselves in the present moment, which is always already saturated in established currents of capital. Excavating sand, we produce an undercurrent that tries to move towards an alternate direction but invariably points to the inexistence of future imaginations. As vacuous as waiting for sea sparkle. It is easier to imagine an apocalyptic end of the world than the end of capitalism.” CAPITALOCEAN evolved from a series of public events that took place in July and August 2016 at the beach of Scheveningen. The intervention is initiated by Sara Pape and unfolded with artists, musicians, scientists and dancers who joined her in a symbolic act of waiting for the arrival of sea sparkle, a natural and unpredictable phenomenon produced by bio-luminescent microorganisms whereby the sea acquires a fluorescent glow. The events were scheduled to coincide with the lunar cycle (in each full and new moon) where the group shared performances, workshops, and presentations. Without prescribed instructions as to how the group must engage with one another, CAPITALOCEAN evolved as its own form. This is how the group has investigated the potentiality of self-regulation: just as the tide reconfigures the structures upon which it cascades through gradual erosion and the redistribution of matter, the artists have paralleled this movement with economical and political shifts. In the exhibition space of W139 you were able to see works that departed from the process initiated during the events at the beach, but also works produced beforehand that are close to the concept of the project as a whole. Departing from predictability, some of the works appear as re-imaginings of form and futurity: how can we understand the most basic laws of nature or even those culturally accepted ones in a post-apocalyptic scenario where those previous constructs have been partially forgotten? Other works delved into the negotiation of bodies and capital, by physically reversing the human gaze and questioning the anthropocentric discourse, or by literally complicating the access of the viewer to the exhibition. Similarly, other works spring from the desire to locate narratives obliterated by the transit of time and power: When dealing with a time frame longer than the average human lifespan such as the life of a mountain, we are left with a linguistic incongruence. This has brought us to the misuse of natural phenomena such as the physics of equilibrium to legitimate certain theories about the self-regulated market.

We are sitting in a quarry, the stones were formed 270 million years ago. An outburst of a volcano in the supercontinent Pangae, brought the inner treasures of the earth to the surface. The pressure of the earth together with 270 million years cristallised the lava to granite: Beuchaer Granit Pyrophyr. The common witness of this process were the sun and the moon. They pass me this knowledge by waking me up and calming me down every day.

Commission for Fauna x REWIRE link - http://giphy.com/gifs/l41lZXLaWwvbtBovm/fullscreen

There is an ice pyramid - in the image already totally melted - between copper sticks, placed in front of a video projection. The ice pyramid contains a contact - hydrophone which captures the sound of melting ice. The sound is offered for the visitors through 1 pair of headphones.

“The characteristic feature of the savage mind is its timelessness; its object is to grasp the world as both a synchronic and a diachronic totality and the knowledge which it draws therefrom is like that afforded of a room by mirrors fixed on opposite walls, which reflect each other (as well as objects in the intervening space) although without being strictly parallel” Claude Levi-Strauss, “The Savage Mind” (1966)

There is no question that the meaning of material is in constant flux. For instance buildings, monuments or the context of the soil we live on changes through time, much faster than the development of crystals leaving the stones fiercely unbreakable doing it's job, being immortal for each generation's truth. This attempt of duplicating the representation of “diamond” according to Wikipedia, presented on a computer screen, that also has tiny crystal structures from our soil plays with the transformative qualities of material. And the exploration of the imperfections of all media that surrounds us, trying to find unintended knowledge systems inside them.

i.s.m. Paschalisschool en Art-S-Cool

The result of an extended research I did in 2006/2007. I undertook the challenge of recreating ge­odes out of base materials using quartz as the main in­gredient and hot air. I stumbled upon some recipes for crystal glaze, which were used a lot in the 70's to create a certain psychedelic ef­fect on bathroom or kitchen tiles. These recipes I developed to 3D formulas, which I used to make the filling of the sculptures. Some I opened af­terward, others remain closed. Crystals are not only beautiful because of their pure aesthetic, but also because they are the result of very long and slow development, revolving around transforma­tion and becoming. Eight years after its creation, I want to address the question of decay and its shift of aesthetic quality overtaken by the laws of nature.