Patricia Domínguez at CentroCentro

Artist: Patricia Domínguez

Exhibition title: Madre Drone

Curated by: Rafa Barber Cortell

Venue: CentroCentro, Madrid, Spain

Date: February 21 – May 24, 2020

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and CentroCentro, Madrid

Multiple energies come together in this exhibition, all hoping to connect with yours; multiple encounters that form a dense world, a world that extracts meanings to unite and braid them, trying to create a new myth to narrate a different present. Mother Drone, by Chilean artist Patricia Domínguez, orbits around the idea of cultural fusion to create a universe built from the encounters that intersect her life and that build a reality in which a drone weeps as it watches you, in which a robot dreams of luminous snakes.

The project was born from an investigation that the artist has been carrying out for years and that had a first episode in the exhibition Green Irises held in 2019 at Gasworks London. Myths, symbols and rituals are intertwined with ideas of extraction, cultural appropriation and the destruction of natural heritage due to wild industrialisation. All this element coexists within the of colonial encounters that mark her context. In the exhibition, energy crystals coexist with healing plants and business shirts whose prints remind us of the shapes of indigenous vessels in a sort of coincidence that, in Domínguez’hands, become a kind of amulet that tries to capture the spirit of the contemporary.

Mother Drone orbits around two audiovisual installations in the shape of cybernetic altars in which we see two videos: In one of them, Eyes of Plants, different cosmologies come together in a narrative that speaks of healing and the magical presence of roses, the fruit of colonial influence in Latin America. On either side, the artist’s digitally scanned eyes are filled with forms that cover them, that interfere between her gaze and yours. In the second video, Mother Drone, produced especially for this exhibition during her residency in Kiosko in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, the same dreamlike aesthetic draws us into something akin to a mirage in which a woman–serpent has a luminous encounter with a robot that might well be human, a kind of cosmic annunciation in which the lights produced by this character connect with the laser lights used by the protesters in Chilean student riots to blind spy drones. The eyes of a toucan blinded the Amazon fire are witnesses to this bastard reality traverses by a thousand stories.

Groups of vessels, watercolours representing neoliberal dreams, and a series of totems composed of abundant objects in an accumulation that is by no means easy to describe, add even more content to this series of meanings and try to exorcise a reality that is impossible to grasp and overwhelms us with its thousands of signs, with its bombardment of objects. Faced with this blockage, the artist proposes that you look at it in a different way, that you use these objects that she thinks up with her hands, as antidotes to enter the world she creates, as strategies to inhabit this space of energy in which plants have eyes, in which drones weep, in which blind toucans can no longer see fire.

Patricia Domínguez, Madre Drone, 2020, exhibition view, CentroCentro, Madrid