Liberty is a practice… liberty is what we must exercise.
Céline Condorelli.

Distributing the value of bodies as such more generously is an ethical aim. Understanding matter as something living, as something capable of action, will not solve problems like human exploitation, but will make us realise that we live submerged in a dense network of relationships that suppresses any attempt to achieve autonomy in the world. In her interest in studying “how matter acquires importance or how matter makes itself felt”, Karen Barad emphasises the importance of feminism. Indeed, the New Materialism is sometimes presented as a political project that also reconfigures our conception of feminism by deliberately making it non-anthropocentric. Taking away the central role of the subject means that the protagonism of women and men gives way to matter, leading to a transfeminism in which “matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers”.

Torrent Echidna Attractor. A metal structure passes through space, occupying it, cutting into it. An almost epidermic deformation takes place: the structure is destabilised, its parts are attracted to each other. A body in space is one of the possible ways in which matter can exist. It is also a semantic field, a cohesive chain, a torrent of significant elements placed in relationship to each other: metal, plastic, latex, methacrylate and light.

Torrent Echidna Attractor is the second of the exhibitions in the annual cycle The more we know about them, the stranger they become. Through 4 individual projects and a series of related activities, this cycle investigates the agency of the object - the system of relationships that it makes possible or includes - and the role of matter within a new paradigm shift in which the subject is displaced from the centre of the forces of knowledge and makes room for other entities. It is not so much a question of allowing objects and things to talk for themselves as of understanding and putting into practice other relationship systems in which the distribution of value between subjects and objects is more equitable and, as a result, political.

The work of Lucia C. Pino (Valencia, 1977) makes sculpture the focal point, understood in a broad sense: via the study of materials, context and surrounding space. In her research the observation, evaluation, allocation and superposition of different layers of time and consistency all overlap.

Curator
Sonia Fernández Pan

Organises and produces
Arts Santa Mònica - Departament de Cultura