Cristián Salineros: Absentee Landscape

13 september – November 30, 2012.
DKM Museum, Duisburg, Germany

This Project remits to a series of works I have been developing since 2006, which began with a Project titled “The Utopia of the Cage” and which explored thoughts about landscape, nature and the politics of space, both of our own personal space as well as social spaces.

Absentee Landscape proposes the “absence” as well as the “memory” of a presence; it plays with the ways in which this absence develops and with its spatial relationships with the place and the architecture of the place of exhibition.

I refer to absence insofar as we understand that the sculptural form that develops inside the room is in itself a cage that has been manufactured using the same systems and methods used to build bird cages. In fact, I have worked closely with the craftsmen who build cages (experts in the building of cages) in order to understand specific technical and also spatial factors that must be taken into account when conceiving a space that is habitable by birds. Thus, I have proposed a piece of work that deals with situations inherent to a cage.

Its absent utopia is given by the physical absence of the birds, insofar as what is installed as a complement to the work is only the memory of their habitation through the sound of birds singing. This sound has been developed in such a way that the boundaries of the work and the living experience of the same is given by the displacement of the sound inside it. That is, the birds are no longer there, only their memory, materialized through this auditory composition, reveals the possible presence of the birds, which is no more than a recollection.

The movement of sound allows us to measure the space of the work, both internally (inside the cage) as well as externally (the Museum Gallery).

The movements of the sound within the work generate the utopia of its habitability, and because all utopias play from the field of their own possibilities, it is in this sense that spatial politics become relevant, whether by their presence or their absence.

Practical Info
Güntherstr. 13 – 15 | Duisburg
200m vom Hbf., Dellviertel
T +49.203.9355547 0