Common Substrate. A New Archaeology of Matter

Matter is what lies beneath change, what anticipates transformation and movement. Matter precedes form and representation, it articulates time and what comes after, making possible what is yet to come. The questioning of matter is common in many processes and debates about current art, often from a thematic viewpoint. However, it is also possible to approach materiality as a method. This exhibition brings together the work of the finalists of the Miquel Casablancas Award 2024 and the three projects developed during 2023 as part of the SAC-FiC residencies. Even though a variety of concerns are considered, methodological affinities can be found among them. Through sculpture, installations and audiovisual pieces, these artworks invite us to explore their construction processes and carry out an archaeology of the substrate they share.

Reflection on the concept of matter is something that has been going on since ancient times, particularly when a thought arose, that, in contrast to the metaphysics of ideas, proclaimed that all reality is based on what is material. Within the political struggles of modernity, historical materiality already emerged as a method for imagining the passage of time in a complex way, discrediting a linear view of history and opting for the conviction that matter is the cause of all transformation, in other words, the fundamental structure of all possibility. Today, focused on the search for other possibilities of life, speculation about a kind of “new materiality” has multiplied, which directly invokes artistic processes whose main focus is matter and its transformation.

At Sant Andreu Contemporani the Miquel Casablancas Award is considered a thermometer for concerns regarding the emerging context of art. Having observed an emphasis in many of the projects in this and recent editions on developing processes from the material, it is worth taking a moment to reflect, harnessing the complicities that we have found in the selection of finalists made by the jury of this edition (curators Bendetta Casini, Margot Cuevas and Blanca del Río). The emerging context could, in fact, be considered the substrate, based on which the artistic ecosystem is developed, the place where its raw material is generated. Instead of horizontal cartography, this common substance encourages us to delve into the vertical dimension of geology in search of its construction principles.

That said, one might wonder how, in this digital age, accustomed to navigating in electronic fluxes, storing our data in the virtual “cloud” and dealing with cyber organisations, it is still possible to have a material consciousness. Several projects in this exhibition confront this paradox. In the case of the video for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world (2024) by the artist Gala Hernández López who, from a speculative viewpoint, articulates a non-linear narrative using archive images and animations on the enthusiasm for the financial phenomenon of cryptocurrencies and cryonics. The questioning of a supposed intangible culture also comes to mind with the installation by Natalia Domínguez (Lack of - Ambient soundtrack, 2024) that is the result of her SAC-FiC residency in 2023, in which we can hear exhaling, shortness of breath and suffocation in a situation of oppression, evoking a well-known critical catchphrase loaded with materiality: all that is solid melts into air.

Using 3D scanning technology, photogrammetry and digital editing, in Portable Landscape (2022), Lola Zoido reproduces a fragment of land, printed on leatherette that hangs in the exhibition room. This contradiction between the digital and the terrestrial, between what is suspended in the air and the ground we walk on, allows us to question the myth of a virtual technology that depends on physical materiality — such as data farms and natural resources — to come into being. De lado a lado (2016) by Marc Anglès also places us in this conjuncture. In his research on the transition from analogue to digital cinema and the technological changes that this has led to, he also carries out archaeology of the media, like the one Jussi Parikka proposes when it comes to dealing with radical changes in the material conditions of life on the planet.

Thinking of culture as an activity linked to a territory therefore results in a materialistic vision of the world, just as questioning certain myths does. Both are present in the research El miracle del Sol that Albert Gironès developed during 2023 as part of the SAC-FiC residencies, materialised in this exhibition through a video. This project suggests that, beyond beliefs and without discrediting them, the construction of reality is necessarily mediated by our own perception and sensory experience. Similarly, Isabel Bonafé questions the limits between the material and the intangible in her installation (Sin título). Desde fuera, la percepción resbala sobre las cosas sin tocarlas (2024), which asserts our own experience and movement around light and objects.

Donna Haraway and Paul B. Preciado focused on a queer transhumanism, which led to dreams about cyborgs and the incorporation of prosthetics as a way of life. Visions fed by digital imaginaries that have not, however, implied a detachment from material consciousness, as in the work Reconstruir lo blando (2023) by Lucas Marcos Barquilla, where the prosthetic elements refer to the processes of construction, articulation and movement of materials from a palaeontological or even forensic archaeology. Donna Haraway based her The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (2016) on the importance of a grain of rice and it is precisely rice, among other materials, that Marina González Guerreiro showcases in her totemic sculpture Un deseo (2021). Perhaps desire, although intangible, could also be considered a material that dwells within us. It appears that Hodei Herreros Rodríguez also asks this question in À mon seul désir (2023), through a scenographic device that becomes meaningful through its materials and, specifically, through the eye shadow that gives colour to the base of the piece, alluding to the tapestry that inspired its title.

In recent years, there has been an important review of the Basque sculptural tradition towards new ways of understanding objecthood and matter, and it is no coincidence that this exhibition has a notable presence of artists from this context. Among them, is Claudia Rebeca Lorenzo with her piece Alrededor de una cabeza (2023), which reflects on this rethinking that has taken place concerning sculpture and its relationship with the experience of spatiality that our own bodies undergo. Mikel Escobales also reflects on this in Untitled, in a holding pattern (2024), which considers a dialectic between the society of the image and the narrative typical of the aforementioned intangible culture and the material culture of the object.

Reconsidering matter also implies reconsidering its movement because, from the perspective of present-day physics, matter is nothing but atoms in motion. Laia Ventayol has explored this vitality through balances and equilibriums in the project Balancí, developed during her SAC-FiC residency in 2023. For the artist, these dynamic relationships between the bodies are the paradigm of the circulation of affections. Exploration of movement also materialises in the video by Jara Roset dobleembrague (2022), in which the scene of a skidding vehicle is made dynamic by a vertiginous montage of successive shots that sends us back to the construction of the audiovisual device itself. An audiovisual device that, far from attesting to something that has already happened, articulates something that is yet to come. This is how Abel Jaramillo sees it in Los fuegos (2023), a video that is the result of his residency at the Real Academia de España in Rome, which works more like a “foundation stone” for something that still has no images. A would-be matter or a “common substrate”, if we refer to Carl Jung’s definition of collective unconscious. Walter Benjamin also thought that matter had something to do with dreaming because it is something that does not yet have a clear form, has not been clarified but can be found in a substrate that we all share.

Diana Padrón

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​Artists: Marc Anglès, Isabel Bonafé, Natalia Domínguez, Mikel Escobales, Albert Gironès, Marina González Guerreiro, Gala Hernández López, Hodei Herreros Rodríguez, Abel Jaramillo, Claudia Rebeca Lorenzo, Lucas Marcos Barquilla, Jara Roset, Laia Ventayol García, Lola Zoido

Dossiers
Project: Raquel G. Ibáñez, Sergio Monje, Leo Pum, Laura San Segundo and Alejandría Cinque
​Mediation: Antonella Medici, Fabiana Vinagre and Camilo Mutis, Massa Salvatge (Teresa Mata Ferrer and Alba Oller Benítez)
Graphic Communication: Josep Lozano Añon, Clara Pessanha, Belén Soria