Poetic license functions like a hiatus in the atrophy of a social, political, military or economic crisis. Through the gratuity or the absurdity of the poetic act, art provokes a moment of suspension of meaning, a brief sensation of senselessness that reveals the absurd of the situation and, through this act of transgression, makes you step back or step out and revise your prior assumptions about this reality. And when the poetic operation manages to provoke that sudden loss of self that itself allows a distancing from the immediate situation, then poetics might have the potential to open up a political thought.
Francis Alys
An iceberg is a mountain of ice that, after breaking loose from a glacier, wanders around the oceans and seas until it disappears. Islands, even continents adrift, the icebergs are fascinating, fragile and powerful; beautiful and daunting. They are ephemeral and elegantly materialize nature in its course.
The image of the iceberg raises countless thoughts in my mind, but what really awakens my curiosity and my imagination is the fact that the largest part of an iceberg remains hidden, dormant, and invisible to our eyes. This aspect led me to elaborate a series of allegories - for example, that the unconscious was the invisible part of an iceberg called consciousness. We know that our senses are able to assess a limited portion of the environment's information. What we can access is necessarily smaller than what we could actually know. Thus, provoking the curiosity to search for the occult side of things and phenomena would be an essential strategy for our survival and expansion.
It is based on suppositions such as these that, in this new series, I wish to reflect on the historical time in which we live in, a time ruled by the critical conflict between men and technology. The organic, intuitive and anthropophagic research process allows me to establish a dialogue with my previous production. It is possible to recognize ideas, concepts, quotes and reconfigurations of works from the series in between, Mindscapes and Reconhecimento de Padrões (Pattern recognition).
The non-linear narrative proposed by this body of works suggests an iceberg that opposes the "natural intelligence" developed by Homo sapiens during millennia to the artificial, synthetic, exponential and singular intelligence of current computers.
coda:
Human beings are basically water and, like icebergs, we break loose from our matrix to escape the frictions in life until our bodies succumb.
I have never seen an iceberg, though I am one.
Fernando Velázquez
