For the exhibition 'Todo será trenza', the artists Felipe Arturo and Ramón Laserna proposed to intervene in the universe of the domestic, confabulating the space of La Balsa, Medellin, by delving into the vestiges of the concept ‘house’. To this end, they have designed a series of sculptures and objects in caña flecha, a plant that has been used for centuries by the Zenú community in Colombia to build houses, fishing rods and countless everyday items. It is today an intangible heritage of the nation.

This plant embodies a cultural tradition whose primary use, familiar and communitarian, differs radically from the domesticity created by images of modernity, where the house is transformed into a model/machine of consumption and happiness (Beatriz Colomina), in addition to serving as a “refuge from the ugliness of savage competition in the city” (Guiomar Vargas). Both artists share their interest in manual traditions, the use of natural elements and the relationship between 'cultured' art, ancestral knowledge and different forms of knowledge on the margins of modernity.

Felipe Arturo, an architect by training, has developed an artistic practice based on the narrative associated with different material cultures, natural and extractive in order to develop different proposals that incorporate structures and geometric patterns as historical and cultural references. In his work, architecture and time are linked with the traces of a colonial-vernacular past, always in tension with the contemporary.

Ramón Laserna, artist and industrial designer, departs from a review of geometric abstraction in Latin America, emphasizing the game between algorithm and chance; from sets of instructions, he builds an operative form whose effect transcends illusion, implying a critique of automation and artificial intelligence.

In 'Todo será trenza', both approaches invite us to explore the tensions between modernity, domesticity and tradition, since the proposed elements allude to a set of ideas that overflow the 'familiar', bordering on the sinister or 'unheimlich', which for Shelling is a manifestation of what lies hidden, showing the other side of the familiar and friendly becoming a sinister, surprising and disturbing experience. As an example, a concentric wave of horizontal surface appears frozen in the unfolding of a circle from its center, produced by a drop falling into a resting body of water (Laserna). It reminds us of electromagnetic and acoustic states as well as the slow decay of frozen waves behind which lies Death -the death by caloric deficiency of the universe-, evoking, not an after, but a static and suspended eternity.

On the other hand, in Felipe Arturo's pieces, we read that 'space is just noise'; a game between bats, saddle-stands and spirals that rotate, or remain static in the manner of Marcel Duchamp's 'anemic cinema' (anémic cinéma). A record player spins; some spirals carry a text, others are inscribed with the DNA code of the caña flecha. The genome can be modified with extreme precision, mutating DNA, adding genes or deactivating them. The weaves take on different meanings as they rotate, creating the optical illusion of infinity. These roto-reliefs are language, sculpture and science fiction.

Anxiety springs from these works, without a specific object, recalling Kierkegaard's idea: anxiety, which makes its sudden appearance, is the axis on which 'everything' revolves. On this existential axis, the family home becomes a threatening and sinister experience.

For Heidegger, Dasein (being-in-the-world), is always an existential relation to one's own being that is always projecting itself into the possibilities of being. “It does not show itself as an individualized subject that represents objects mentally, on the contrary, it loses itself in the impersonality of the world shared with others and establishes functional relations with the environment. Individualization goes through the fundamental affective disposition, anguish"[1].

We are then faced with a question about the experiences of life, about the hostility of the world, where meaning seems to vanish leaving us with the experience of an alienating positivity. This in-between-zone of overlapping narratives entails a distortion of mental states, an alteration of the sense of place and identity, a blind street. These assemblages are a marker of the present times, of a going backward and a going forward, a dialectic of escape that eludes a stable, symbolic or illustrative narrative. Such is our time.

Ana Patricia Gómez - Directora

[1] Van Roehe, M,Dutra, M. Dasein, la concepción Heideggeriana sobre el modo de ser humano , Avances en psicología latinoamericana, ISSN-e 2145-4515, ISSN 1794-4724, Vol. 32, Nº. 1, 2014, págs. 105-113