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Alchemy of Aches

Vibeke Mascini - solo show





    
    






The water that will be light has blood memory





Art is the presence of a mind in front of something that is already established. That mind searches for a loose thread, the hidden hole, that mind listens with the other senses, not with the ears; it sees with the other senses, not with the eyes; it touches with the other senses, not with the hands and like that, like someone that lifts a mantle, and reveals. And it is that which is already established that shows another state of its existence. It counts, thinks out loud, a voice which the artist listens to and must translate to its own language, one that can make that other reality of things a bit more tangible.





We enter home, we turn on the light. Just like that. We take of a wrapping, peel the fruit, break an egg, we throw it in the bin. Just like that. But where does the light come from. Where does the trash go.





These works are inversed travel instructions. The light goes onand we would say that the journey back is initiated, an intra-mural voyage through the energy cables that every so often reach light posts and continue being cables until they reach large energy repositories that move and go back in search of their origin. Until they reach a dam, and from that dam streams the peaceful trajectory of a river that one day was born from the bowels of the earth.





But these works are also the resurrection of other things, a trash dump that offers light, that activates movement. Waste that is capable of illuminating and revealing that there is no possible death, that in matter the energy moves with the very willpower of existence which transforms it all.





Vibeke captures the energy, contemplates it in her hands, changes its form, reorganizes it and with that makes that strand of willpower that pierces through everything a little more eloquent: what is alive and what is dead, the immense and the tiny, the beautiful and the terrible. She came to Guatemala and her search to find that well of eloquence took her to two places: the Chixoy hydroelectric dam in the Río Negro (Black River) and the basurero (dump) of zone 3. Disturbing. How much of the story of Guatemala can we tell from these two points. 





Let’s imagine the map. One point in Guatemala City, another point in the place where the Verapaces and Quiché meet. One produces energy. The other one is a corpse of corpses, remain of remains, debris which are accumulated and are converted into the deity of waste, of what we no longer need, and in which, despite it all, there are flying butterflies.





I imagine Vibeke arriving at Río Negro, gobbling with her eyes that place that we would say is peaceful, but which little by little, start to talk to her, starts to thrust voices towards her, how are the voices at el Río Negro? Are they trapped screams at the riviera, are they claims and pleading? The echo of a massacre. The water which will be light has blood memory, and still that water turned into art illuminates once more the greens of the sleeping plants. 





I imagine Vibeke arriving at the basurero of zone 3, perceiving the energy that parts from the waste of millions of people, where does that energy go?, does it rest eternally and sleep? could that energy once again become light? A city on top of which a city of trash grows. Trash which is now light and illuminates the miracle of a live plant. 





The energy, of the body, of the earth, of the objects; that strange will that gave way to a far larger and more enigmatic road: the  existence. Much is spoken about the spirit, the soul, or even about thought, but that pulse, that willpower which is repeated in cosmic and microscopic levels doesn’t have a correspondence with understanding, with the world of explanations in the end. Where does it come from? Why does it exist? And when it is turned off, where does it go? How does it transform? Which is its transit and metamorphosis?





From the organic to the inorganic the energy seems to be the language of everything, the word of the universe. Invisible like the thought and the matter, the job of the artist is the reorganization of the world in order to make tangible the intangible.





– Carmen Lucía Alvarado





Guatemala, October 20th, 2023





Proyectos Ultravioleta presents:





Vibeke Mascini





The Alchemy of Aches
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Using fluid media including video, installation, sound and text, Vibeke Mascini explores the sensorial scaling of abstract phenomena, with the intention to seek agency from intimacy. In long-term collaboration with scientists, engineers, government employees, and musicians she proposes the development of a conscious understanding of electric energy as a statement of interconnectedness and entanglement – between species, media and nature, matter and energy. By exploring the complex relationship between source and user, and focusing on the material implications of unlikely sources from which electricity is derived, Vibeke proposes installations where memories and mysterious sensorial experiences meet the newest technology of the rapidly growing field of energy storage systems. 





Her unlikely sources of electricity include a whale carcass, a melting glacier, confiscated cocaine, and human remains, which she then shapes around associations with these electric agents, and their implication and tension of their destruction in the process of becoming fuel. 





For her first exhibition at Proyectos Ultravioleta, Vibeke delves into the rippling presence of suffering peoples and ecologies that linger within the electric grid of Guatemala.





Alchemy of Aches is a research oriented presentation that combines site specific alterations of existing works and context specific collaborations. Oriented towards two new performative installations – which involve the energetically harnessing of methane fumes at the largest Basurero (waste disposal) site of Guatemala City, and the currents of the Chixoy hydraulic power station that was built after the caused a massacre of the Q’eqchi indigenous communities of the Río Negro (Black River) only a few decades ago – the show is an important new chapter in her ongoing interest into the fiction of a ‘neutral electricity’, by paying attention to signals of material and emotional distress. 





In it, Vibeke aims to make a conscious proposal for the complex generative capacities of sites of destruction: one that acknowledges the importance of commemoration and justice.

            

            

                                    Other exhibitions by these artists at Proyectos Ultravioleta: