experiments on stability

series of digital photographs of experiments on stability

series 1: house

in october 25 I saw Do Ho Suh‘s exhibition at the Tate modern in London. i had so many thoughts rushing through my mind while walking in the house he built. because it’s true, when you migrate you look for ways to take your house with u. but more than that, the house starts disappearing, the house you leave behind becomes lines and semi transparent thoughts, surfaces that are difficult to remember but also impossible to fully forget. i felt the memories of my house in chia and my childhood like if they were made of transparent fabric, or like graphite being washed away, or like soap bubbles slowly disappearing behind my eyes. all the images, the corners of my room, the wooden window that never really closed, the garden with the flowers and the drawings i made on the walls when my cat died, all started to seem translucent now, not quite material.

20 years ago, in that same house, camilo and me got together in my room to read poetry. and one of the poems i still know by heart (and hear it in camilos voice) talks about these types of memories „yo amo los mundos sutiles, ingrávidos y gentiles, como pompas de jabón” (i love the subtle worlds, weightless and gentle, like soap bubbles), Antonio Machado knew exactly how we felt, or better how we were about to feel. the poem is about the poet leaving his land, and creating the path he walks with the act of walking. we both left colombia shortly after that. the poem also says that the path that u have already walked has disappeared, that when you look back u see the path u will never step on again. in london, standing inside Do Ho Suh’s house, i felt the bubbles blasting in my brain, the walls of my room, the wooden door of my house, the araucaria, the fireplace, the shelves where i kept the poetry books. anyways, in machados poem the poet dies in exile in the foreign land, with his bubbles and walls made of transparent fabric in his suitcase.

and, i also remembered while i was there that i also made some graphite rubbing-drawings of my house for a drawing class by Dioscorides, (which are somewhere lost in the space between bogota and vienna) 

series 2: webs

524 seconds of stability

sculptures

spider webs are stable, or more stable than most of the other materials in this world. (the secret is in the stretchiness of their silk, and the complex forms and nods and spirals of the web). it is a mixture between pressure and surface that makes bubbles stable. i don’t really understand cosmic webs, but my friend ulli tells me they look similar to this sculpture, stable, like bubbles, with their nodes and filaments and voids. anyways, this sculpture was stable only for a definite amount of time. how much time does the thing need to be stable in order for it to be not considered unstable? 

instability is inherent to biology. alive means unstable. change is happening non stop. all the time. the cells are unstable. all chemical elements with an atomic number greater than 82 (after lead) are unstable. john ellis told me once he believes the universe is stable. believes. there is an instability in that sentence that makes me doubt it, the stability of the universe. there is something in human capacity to believe that makes me suspicious about stability. human language makes me doubt stability. houses are unstable, mountains are unstable, this planet gets squished every day by pulls and pushes from bigger, more stable planetary bodies. 

stability is for less material stuff. for webs.