Artist: Nicolás Lamas
Exhibition title: Umbral
Curated by: Peter Bencze
Venue: Longtermhandstand, Budapest, Hungary
Date: June 25 – August 14, 2022
Photography: All images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Longtermhandstand, Budapest
Nothing is really stable or permanent. Things transform and decay at different rates despite their apparent inactivity. Energy is always being transmitted and released as matter changes form and physical state. Everything is in transition to another state or material level. In that sense, the boundaries between the living and the inert, the organic and the synthetic, nature and culture, the material and the virtual, the unique and the collective or the human and the non-human become blurred. Animals, people, plants, insects, bacteria, digital information and goods of all kinds, are constantly circulating around the world, affecting the world and leaving different types of traces in their path throughout their existence. Although we can’t perceive certain changes and movements, everything is on the move in a great flow of energy and information within a large holistic system, like a large organism, swarm or assemblage where everything seems to be interconnected to some extent.
The human body is not the axis by which things should be perceived and measured. We must try to think in a more geological and cosmological sense, at a larger scale where a human being is not the center, but one more agent among many others within a very complex system that is impossible to quantify.
We are matter, and – like it happens with other objects – our fragments scatter and merge with space when we die. To break and scatter implies to be recovered by the territory of which we were part, to become space again, where other bodies are mobilized, to then become dust as well and be part of something else in the future; it’s an endless cycle.
Everything moves with different rhythms and magnitudes; this incessant activity of micro and macro events is present in life and death, organic and industrial, material and virtual. Everything is part of a great mesh that builds a changing reality on multiple levels that we are not able to perceive in all its magnitude.
Excerpt from interview between Nicolas Lamas and Anna Karpenko.
