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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Thomas Pellerey Grogan’ Ojo Rojo is a journey through the making of an artwork which serves as the backdrop for a conversation between two protagonists discussing their personal connections to the horizon. The video may be considered a kind of road movie, traveling from the roads of the Spanish Basque Country to the coast of Cantabria. It portrays scenes of motion and conception, depicting the processes of creating a sculpture soon to be born. This sculpture is conceived to produce mirages, acting as a horizon target on this journey. It moves different kinds of reflective surfaces in a looping motion, superimposing these objects onto the landscapes it encounters as they reflect it back. The work seeks to explore the co-existence of cyclical rituals of grounding and emancipation, suggesting a subtle interplay between the two.
Thomas Pellerey Grogan is an artist based in London whose practice examines the relationship between sensory perception and belonging. By focusing on the residual traces of movement, he explores how certain cues ground human experience within both tangible and intangible places.
