The air is heavy and the residues of life, endless. Energy is transmitted through chimneys, windmills, pipelines, radioactivity, engines and turbines. Our physical environments absorb the vibrations of all these combusting channels. Systems and structures are recipients of material efforts where immaterial desires are consumed, perpetually in flames. This heavy atmosphere is also where everything angelic resides. In the shape of whispers, fragrances, exhalations or dreams, immateriality dominates everything solid.
Energy is the field not only of the potential, but also the sacred: angels, spirits, dragonflies, ancestors, corpses, sunsets. Frequencies and scents of the unspeakable gather across immateriality. According to Anne Boyer, ‘‘Angels leave no artifacts. And the instant is always at risk of being strangled by a more contemporary unit called –the moment–, which is the present’s vacuum substitution for the deep immeasurability of the quasi–eternity, the instant once made possible inside of time.” In an inconsolable and compassionless present, the value of life has been reduced to nothing but a commodity. Embodied beings as material entities, can be subjected to transactions, murdered, dispossessed, burned alive. Condemned to move from one logistical moment to the next, we need to come up with an angelic transmission. If we are to die, let’s reinvent eternity. Let’s melt the foundations of this material world into an angelic sphere.
An angelic transmission, –the organizing principle for this series of films– considers the non–tangible, somatic and immaterial variables that guide a potential transformation of energy: one that is compassionate, transformative, ephemeral and powerful.
Alejandro Alonso Díaz is a curator and writer. Since 2017 he directs fluent, a non–profit organisation dedicated to contemporary art. His practice considers the semiotics of energy as a site of contestation and a way of thinking through. He has developed research and curated projects for Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Fundação Gulbenkian, Lisbon; dOCUMENTA 15, Kassel; Fundación Botín, Santander, and Foundation KADIST, Paris among other institutions and museums. His writing moves across genres, mostly from theory to poetry, and it has been published extensively by e–flux, Sternberg Press, Mousse Magazine, frieze, Concreta, or Terremoto.
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Collecting and showing excess(ive) elements previously cut out, removed or pushed to the edge in the pursuit of legibility, Possession Ring Road unfolds discarded materials as personal periphery (think brink). Holding the parts together is a labour of reparation. A nest hovers between an evacuated core (loop) and a container waiting to be filled up
The ring-road as a discarded costume
GPS as ‘the shepherd’
Thoughts masquerade as sheep
The camera is positioned at the intersection, ‘X’
Last year is draped
Camilla Wills is an artist and publisher from the UK. She has exhibited artwork at dépendance, Brussels (2021), Manifesta 13, Marseille (2020), Kantine, Brussels (2020), Camden Arts Centre, London (2019), Une une une, Perpignan (2019), Gaudel de Stampa, Paris (2018) and Montague, London (2017). In 2018 Wills set up Divided Publishing in Brussels with Eleanor Ivory Weber. They have published books by Irish- American poet Fanny Howe, East-German author Anna Zett, and have books forthcoming by Chinese-Australian legal scholar and poet Aurelia Guo, US-American psycho- analyst Jamieson Webster, Italian critic Carla Lonzi, and Greek artist and activist Georgia Sagri among others. They have also worked to distribute texts by Alenka Zupančič, Alexander Kluge, Bini Adamczak, Carolyn Lazard, Denis Ekpo, Feminist Judgments Project, Houria Bouteldja, Huw Lemmey, and Teflon. Divided’s impulse is to distribute writing that circulates in the art/theory realm to a broader audience. They work with mainstream distributors in UK, EU and US.
