Artist: Edmund Cook
Exhibition title: Camouflage, Stele
Venue: fluent, Santander, Spain
Date: October 26 – November 21, 2018
Photography: Gerardo Vela / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and fluent, Santander
fluent presents Camouflage, Stele, a new commissioned exhibition by Edmund Cook.
The exhibition takes the form of a soundtracked installation where a fictional group of individuals gather with the aim of creating new patterns of interaction between nature and technology in order to counteract unsustainable social systems. This conceit echoes two previous imaginative experiments: the first is Archizoom’s No-Stop City, a playful design proposal that outlined alternative forms of social inhabitation through a satirical dissolution of public-private boundaries. The second is Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home which imagines a people called the Kesh who live in a far future version of what we know as Northern California, in a considerate relationship with their environment.
In the space we stumble upon the group’s remnants, tools and furnishings. A post-human sensibility dominates. Ceremonial artefacts, memory cards, flora and fauna rest on tables with amorphous edges; from this entanglement of inert and living beings a material culture arises. Amongst accumulations of textural sound, the group recount experiences to each other. Starting from trivial observations, they interpret freely to decentralise their own agency in a web of morphological relations, moving to more hallucinatory and nonsensical modes.
The two words of the title have a signification in both a natural and technological sense. Camouflageis the effect of an object seemingly dissolving into its background through means of imitative patterning. Meanwhile, stele are engraved slabs that serve as an inscriptive monument, but can also refer to the central stem in a vascular plant. How do different realms become partitioned through language, and how does this reflect our sense of entitlement?
Despite its ludic address, Camouflage, Steleprods at the instrumentalisation of what-we-call nature, prevalent in the fields of interior design or contemporary art, amongst many others. It encompasses both a doubt in the hubris of heralding new ontologies and a pressing practical question: how could we perceive, inhabit and interrelate differently?
Edmund Cook is an English European artist living and working in London. Previous projects include: We Are Here To Inaugurate A Machine, Science Department of The University of Turin; Hoard Equivalents, Madrid; Mouthguards Com Mutation, Chisenhale Art Place, London; Enumerators, fig2 (ICA), London and They Unduloping, Parkour, Lisbon.
Edmund Cook, Camouflage, Stele, 2018, Installation view. Courtesy of the artist and fluent
Edmund Cook, A table for recounting, 2018 and A desert, a dwelling, a public square (sound piece), 2018. Courtesy of the artist and fluent. Audio can be found here
Edmund Cook, A table for recounting, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and fluent
Edmund Cook, A table for recounting, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and fluent
Edmund Cook, Notation for ‘A desert, a dwelling, a public square’ , 2018. Courtesy of the artist and fluent
Edmund Cook, Notation for ‘A desert, a dwelling, a public square (detail) ‘ , 2018. Courtesy of the artist and fluent
Edmund Cook, Notation for ‘A desert, a dwelling, a public square (detail) ‘ , 2018. Courtesy of the artist and fluent
Edmund Cook, Camouflage, Stele, 2018, Installation view. Courtesy of the artist and fluent
Edmund Cook, A table for non-hierarchical offerings, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and fluent
Edmund Cook, A table for non-hierarchical offerings, (detail) 2018. Courtesy of the artist and fluent
Edmund Cook, A table for non-hierarchical offerings, (detail) 2018. Courtesy of the artist and fluent
Edmund Cook, A table for non-hierarchical offerings, (detail) 2018. Courtesy of the artist and fluent
