ongoing project (since 2013), exhibition series and publications
stereo for headphone listening, durations and dimensions variable
mesh (earthworks) is a long-term body of work originating from phonographic explorations in diverse territories. The project ramifies into different public manifestations as an open-ended, exploratory and mutable framework.
The exhibitions feature selections of pieces from the series. Without a predetermined listening order, listeners-participants are invited to enjoy the works in one or multiple visits. It is an exhibition where you are invited to sit and listen, and if you want, perhaps, to close your eyes. The installation proposes active, profound and durational listening experiences, cultivating intimate sensory encounters.
The ‘mesh’ and the ‘meshwork’, two conceptual metaphors resonating in the writings of Timothy Morton and Tim Ingold, respectively, are powerful poetic means to express the eco-aesthetic framework of relations manifested in this artistic trajectory through the intermingling of materials, forms, processes, encounters and feelings. Morton describes a vast and unthinkable mesh: the “interconnectedness of all living and non-living things”, a “flowing, shifting, entangled mess of ambiguous entities”. For Ingold, “the meshwork of entangled lines of life, growth and movement” is at the core of his notion of the environment as a fluid space. These renewed expressions of ecology refer to the unimaginable, gigantic, mysterious and profound intertwining of life forms, materials, energies, phenomena and technologies.
The phenomenal (sonic-material-spatial) explorations involved in this project (in the field, in the studio, and in-between); the appreciation of creativity and vitality beyond the human intrinsic to the works; the series as entanglement with no centre and no hierarchy; and the manifold social (human-nonhuman) encounters of the listener-participants as a form of experiential communication and knowledge; are all different manifestations of the mesh and the meshwork as infinity, model, playfield, and as a possibility space.
mesh (earthworks) suggests a sensory ecological art that investigates the affective power of listening beyond language, representation and signification. The project approaches sound recording as a producer of reality that goes beyond a strictly documentary interest and questions idealizations associated with canonical ideas about the “soundscape” and the very notion of nature and the environment as domains outside the human and culture.
EXHIBITIONS
mesh (earthworks), solo exhibition
DMencia XXI Muestra de Arte Contemporáneo, Doña Mencía, Córdoba, Spain,
7-22.05.2022, curated by Moises Bedmar
Znějící, Rezonující, Vibrující (Sounding, Resonating, Vibrating) / Ostrava Days Festival
Gallery Sokolská 26, Ostrava, Czech Republic
14.08 – 15.09.2017, curated by Bludný Kámen (Martin Klimes, Jakub Frank, Matěj Frank)
mesh, Framewerk Gallery, Belfast, Northern Ireland
2–6.06.2015, BASS, curated by Dawn Richardson
mesh (earthworks) ~ CAAMSonora, online, video, stereo for headphone listening, 53 min.
commission Atlantic Center of Modern Art (CAAM), Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain
2021, curated by Paco Rossique
