As above so below - Raquel Baustista Useros & Alba Mayol Curci

About

The second hermetic law of alchemy, as above so below, seeks to evidence a dialectical, choral and polyphonic exchange between various potential states that any entity can have. There are material, esoteric, and mesoteric semblances, echoes and mirrorings that resonate just as metaphors resonate with their subject of interest. Thousands of mutants and cyborgs reside between the upper and lower strata of existence and perception; products of fiction and fusion. This in-between is constituted by a simulacrum that seems like but is not, that disobeys any fixed anchorage in veracity. Either but neither. This seemingly paradoxical phenomenon is what generates a very peculiar dizziness: an existential horror towards the ambiguous, indeterminate, inverted, what it reminds us of but is not.

We are thus faced with what is called Postmodern Vertigo, a panic, a dislocation of the senses and of the very structure that sustains our reality. It is not a rejection of reality or its existence, nor a denial of our existence as subjects. It is, rather, a questioning of the substratum we understand as truth and of the adjacent simulacrum that develops in the mind while perceiving and grasping what surrounds us. In this attack of vertigo, of Sartrean nausea, everything seems a fabrication to fill a perceptual and structural void in a reality too perfect to be true. In this way we propose an unfolding, a transfer of strata, perception and vision; a vertigo that turns things upside down, generating an altered, mutated and strange familiarity.