An Angelic Transmission
Curated by Alejandro Alonso Díaz
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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March 25 – April 24, 2025
Mona Varichon
No, I Was Thinking Of Life, 2018
Video, sound, 12:40 min
Mona Varichon’s No, I Was Thinking Of Life introduces us to a conversation between the artist and her mother across a mediating distance, loss, bilingualism and emotional transmission. Each tie in as evasive subjects that find family resemblance in their total lack of control, risk of miscommunication, existentialism and death. Varichon’s take on death is not literal, but rather implies a more daily rite of phone calls clicking to an end, or the ends we encounter in the uncertain realm of foreclosed alternatives, missed connections, and close encounters in our little lives.
Mona Varichon is an artist based in Paris. Her work uses advertisement, social media, art history and popular art forms to both chronicle and infiltrate our present moment. Her photographs, films and performances archive, pay homage to or contextualize major cultural events as well as intimate experiences, with a focus on making them shareable. Her pieces circulate on YouTube, in various stores, mailboxes, interiors, publications, cinemas and art spaces.
↳ Screen Archives
- An Angelic Transmission
- Curated by Alejandro Alonso Díaz
- What the Olive Branch Has Seen
- Curated by Àngels Miralda