For every word an emergence of entropy and a call for reconstruction
Curated by Sergi Rusca
This exhibition is articulated as an ontological opening, that is, a proposal where artistic practices enact a multiplicity of aesthetic and conceptual overlaps around language. The displayed artworks allow for a conversation on representation, speculation, and wording, while insinuating both its material limits and its open-ended semantic qualities. Considering the exhibition as a device capable of producing objects and subjects by placing them in an emergence of meanings and correlations, the artists involved explore liminal thresholds of language as the central medium of creative articulation.
Transposing from anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena’s explanation on the concept of not only – in the context of translation practices in Western-based historical readings of Andean Indigenous spiritualities – it indicates plurality in meaning, so what can be defined as one thing (for example, a painting) is not only that, as it is subject to more meanings insomuch as both its definition and its form are never settled, and it is likely that we would not know what it (a painting) not only is. “Not only indicates a potential emergence that could challenge what we know, the ways we know it, and even suggest the impossibility of our knowing, without such impossibility cancelling the emergence”, De la Cadena argues. Not only, thus, works as a tool for ontological exploration, as it allows for singularity to become ambiguous. Used in this exhibition, it sets the artistic object as a most powerful means for speculation, in an ongoing process of signification in art in and out of itself.