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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Malfunctioning streetlights blinking at night and a Sheryl Crow karaoke cover introduce a sense of emotional strangeness. Alternating iPhone footage and found videos, ”By the boundary” reveal a kind of affective threshold in which memories and personal attachments define our experience of time and space. A site originally filmed as police footage reveals its sinister atmosphere although the materials’ nature or context never really appear. Ambiguous and emotional, the film’s composition guides us through subtle mental–material continuums and the flows that exist between the two, opening space for ghostly presences with no specific shape or body to take central space.
Steve Bishop lives and works in London. He has had solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Osnabrück (2024); Carlos/Ishikawa, London (2022, 2015, 2013); The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2021); Galeria Jacqueline Martins, São Paulo (2020); Kunstverein Braunschweig (2019); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2018); and Supportico Lopez with 6817, Los Angeles (2016).
