Non-Organic Life

About

Non-Organic Life brings together artists addressing creative processes which denature the origin of the materials used or contradict the properties of its constituent references.

GCP’s architecture requires artists to establish a dialogue between space and their procedures, therefore the works displayed at this exhibition project were generated in situ. This gesture not only includes an appropriation of site-specific intervention concept, it also becomes a fundamental aspect of the artworks exhibited in here, which also allows artists to text experimenting methods towards spatial interaction, this initiative aims to propose a waiver against figuration.

“All life on Earth is based on organic biology; e.g. carbon as amino acids "instead Non-Organic Life, considers the inorganic world as a nurturing playground of configurations, we do believe that residual materials and inert substrates can express content regardless their original sources. Non-Organic Life exhibition brings together a group of art practitioners, who by their works explore the possibilities of inanimate life, using both installation resources and non-monumental materials. “

The residual material found in a city generates a vast range of clusters. Looking at these masses as isolated segments, we can understand them as assemblages of microenvironments, that were determined from the accumulation of different volumes that coalesce forming Substratum, that in the majority of cases are incompatible materials, but due to the corrosive effect of weathering and neglect are compacted as solids. In turn, these clusters delocalized from its urban context, resemble Terran formations, for this reason, in some of these installations we can distinguish surfaces that by their morphological structure, approach to images captured by satellite photographic devices.

The way we propose -site-specific intervention in this project to the artists give them a chance to perform an action of dissection and removing non-organic forms. This becomes a feature that provides a set of possibilities to explore the physical properties of each of these segments and configure a new cartography of inert landscapes.

Working with non-organic materials for experimentation was an early initiative during the second world war, known as the Manhattan Project (Los Alamos laboratories, New Mexico, USA,1942). These facilities at the beginning were devoted to research and development of nuclear weapons. The laboratory work culminated in the creation of different atomic devices, for instance, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the result of collaborative work of several scientists into this center of research and innovation. After the Cold War the Laboratory changed its orientation and diversified into new policy needs, requiring no more the creation of mass destruction weapons, consequently their efforts migrated towards the research of anti-war technologies. Nuclear research was reduced to computer simulations, nevertheless the atmosphere and the memories of the experiments developed in this area, aroused various activists initiatives, claiming over the environmental damages executed and side effects caused to the population living there.

Non-Organic Life observes the accumulation of non-organic materials thrown in different coordinates of our urban landscape as an environmental setback. The damages caused by these materials deposited along the streets, can not be compared with the nuclear experiments performed at Los Alamos Laboratories, however, each cluster of non-recyclable substances and non-biological cumulus contributes to the environmental imbalance of the urban environment. 

The artists gathered inside this exhibition rescue, backed out and sometimes denatured the origin of these materials, some do from the syntactic poetics of matter and others hope to revitalize these substrates by configuring immersive installations.

Invited artists:

Verónica Lehner

Carlos Bonil

Juan Melo

Federico Ovalles-Ar

Víctor David Garces

Laura Ceballos

Nicolás Cardenas 

Luz Angela Lizarazo 

Gabriel Zea + Camilo Martinez 

Rafael Gómez Barros

Angélica Teuta

Andrés Matías Pinilla

Caroline Bray 

Andrés Londoño

Curator: John Angel Rodriguez