
Gallery Facade. September 2018

Exhibition view.

FWD. 2016 - 2018. Variable dimensions. Original mold from the cave of Chauvet, positive in silicone and fiberglass on galvanized steel.

Exhibition view.

Gowanus. 2018. 25 x 35 x 7 cm. UV printing on aluminum block.

Gowanus. 2018. 50 x 70 cm. UV printing on aluminum block.

Pahoehoe. 2018. 155 x 228 x 5 cm. Pigmented ink printing and anodized aluminum frame.

Muscle Memory. 2016 - 2018. Variable dimensions. Modified motorcycle cushion. Metal foam alloy.

Muscle Memory. 2016 - 2018. Variable dimensions. Modified motorcycle cushion. Metal foam alloy.

Muscle Memory. 2016 - 2018. Variable dimensions. Modified motorcycle cushion. Metal foam alloy.

Sin título. 2018. Variable dimensions. Single-channel video without sound, 18 min in loop.

Pahoehoe. 2018. 155 x 228 x 5 cm. Pigmented ink printing and anodized aluminum frame.

Strange Stranger. 2018. Variable dimensions. Modified stainless steel engine manifold.

Strange Stranger. 2018. Variable dimensions. Modified stainless steel engine manifold.
Information
”A beaver’s DNA doesn’t stop expressing itself at the end of its whiskers, but at the edge of its dam,” writes the ecological theorist Timothy Morton. What if the physics of entropy was sliding between humans and objects through pure inertia? What if an engine’s exhaust pipe- the piece that directs the smoke from the inside of the car to the outside- as a piece of engineering owes its nature to an organic order imprinted on the entrails of its creator? What is the relationship between a glottis and a ramble, between a city and a puddle?
In the context of this second exhibition by Carlos Irijalba in the gallery, the endotic points to the interrelations of the human being and his environment. There is no difference between the human being and nature, between inside and outside. Language separates us but the exotic is within ourselves.
Like the objects and structures that we produce, an important part of our constitution, as with all multicellular mammals, is formed by carbon. These objects carry with them biological designs that we can interpret as a secretion that isn’t always conscious, an unformed trace, fluid, open to an unforeseen evolution. Genetic material duplicates and mutates not only at the biological level, but also in the strategies and tools with which, consciously, we give form to a new landscape.
These dynamic parallels are not obvious; they happen at different rhythms and scales. This exhibitions highlights the convergence of those dissonances as a means to approach the transitory states of matter. We observe the solid, liquid, and gaseous states as relative and symptomatic of the heterogeneous interrelations between what is tangible and intangible, fertile and sterile, and the blurry lines between what is animate and inert.
Strange stranger explores biomimetic patterns visible in the industrial processes that replicate structures inscribed in our evolutionary trace.
We witness phenomenological echoes in the objects that we fabricate, but how far is a cell from the tissue that it makes up? We label these qualities inert, but in reality they pertain to our own nature, even if we are not conscious of it. To call this relationship biomimesis proves to be limited and reductionist. The reference is not exogenous, but endogenous. Our actions and productions appeal to the endotic, and this makes us responsible for the spaces that these objects occupy, the functions that they perform, the time that they last and for the trace that they leave behind.
FFWD>> presents a study on human intervention, a kind of pole vault in time between locus and technè. The Chauvet cave paintings were made 32.000 years ago in the Monts d’Ardeche region in France and discovered by speleologists in 1994. The cave was closed to the public shortly afterwards for preservation and study. The only material contribution that modern humans made to this environment is a scaffolding footbridge to protect the interior of the cave from germs and bacteria.
In collaboration with Atelier Phenomenes in Paris (the company commissioned by the French government in 2016 to make a replica of the natural dynamics of the Chauvet Cave), Irijalba created a projection of what will happen to this footbridge in 32.000 years, when rimstone dams (stalagmite-like horizontal calcareous deposits) have assimilated the structure, in turn becoming a time continuum.
Muscle memory. Metal foam has the same structure as human bone and was invented for its use in human prosthetics. At first, the medical sector tried to apply this new material to improve the quality of human life, but before that could happen the automotive and aerospace industries adapted it for their own use. This serves to underline how these industries, which are configured as aggressive commercial vectors, assimilate a material initially created from humanist ideals.
The appearance of a new material provokes a reaction within the industrial organism, a kind of catalyst. Here, a metabolism that pursues economic benefit synthesizes material applications in the same way that our body processes sugar.
“Muscle Memory” studies the idea of industrial prosthesis and the socioeconomic structures that give it form. In this process of appropriation of nature, technology is re-digested by culture.
Pahoehoe. The Hawaiian term pahoehoe means “smooth lava” in its solid state, and it entails the most abstract and visually explicit manifestation of the Earth’s core’s material reaction in the face of a sudden contrast in temperature.
Pahohoe is matter’s most spontaneous expression and the most immediate visualization of the chemical reactions that comprise it. The characteristic behavior of lava illustrates, at a smaller and larger scale, processes that pertain to fields like meteorology, linguistics, economy, and genetics, where properties that are equally creative and destructive are made visible. When pahoehoe finally cools and crystallizes, it displays a strange quality of frozen time. As the philosopher Reza Negarestani says, lava makes evident “decomposition as a constructive process.” The simultaneous destruction and creation of territory in Hawaii and its repetitive pattern reveal the grammatology of our planet and how the surface of this system that we inhabit is codified.