Samuel Guerrero at Cordova

There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up.[1]

Obsesionados con encontrar señales is a solo exhibition by Samuel Guerrero. It is composed of four pieces: curtains that open and close every fifteen minutes controlled by hidden robots; a fallen tree found on Montjuic, the mountain next to Cordova; an installation on the floor composed of cracked concrete that emits light and from which plants emerge; and an audio work that plays intermittently. The artist’s interest in bringing these elements together was to create the optimal conditions for the audience to have a heightened perceptual experience. Here we find ourselves in an exchange between the timeless and our exact moment, where we are surrounded by universal elements such as the sunlight that enters when the curtains are opened, and the tree that decays over time, which is punctuated by contemporary technology, robots that do simple tasks and LED lights that are only visible in the darkness that comes when the curtains are closed.

The work was created in response to contemporary conditions, which is to say in a moment of ecological deterioration and political and territorial inequality. Guerrero analyzes this moment and the possible apathy that it can generate, writing “all that was meant to last and that we planned to preserve, now is being consumed, we are exhausting it, burning it away and there is nothing left to do except watch it disappear.” Nevertheless, the installation attempts to create a conception of reality where we can speculate about alternative futures and where we can receive messages from beyond ourselves, signals that can guide us forward. Guerrero asks how we can interpret signs from within our reality, where superstition and intuition are undervalued. We are met with a space for searching, where we can seek illumination and transcendence from the ordinary and where we can be, like the title says, obsessed with finding signs.