Desierto, 2016
Solo Project
Galería Ignacio Liprandi, Buenos Aires
One of the most widespread contemporary discursive constructions, it suggests that everyday life is presented to us immersed in an absence of judgments regarding the facts, the way in which they happen and their consequences. It is proposed, then, that the constant inscription within the present that enables technology seems to make it impossible, to a great extent, to establish perspectives on the future of our societies.
However, it can be said with some certainty that it is precisely these ideas about the present that continually blur the readings that are interested in establishing a judgment about our past and our future. It is in this place where the work of Ishmael Randall Weeks is located. What IRW proposes, through the use of multiple resources taken from sciences such as archeology, is a perspective that seems to double points in history on themselves; establishing a contact between the most remote past and a future that does not end up presenting itself as definitive.
As it did in 2012 with its Tailing Museum in Cerro de Pasco, IRW builds devices that refer to natural history museums, site museums and their direct predecessors: 17th century cabinets of curiosities. However, it is not so much the construction of the museum as an institution that is aimed at, it is more about placing our present under the glass of archeology. The appearance of the museum functions as the instance that allows the viewer to access these views of the present / past.
The other essential axis of this exhibition is the material as a container for history, as a trigger for connections between its uses, abuses and symbolic dimensions. Thus, the copper that homogenizes the objects arranged on black error shelves refers both to the symbolic practices that metal has aroused and to its industrial uses. The eroded bricks, recovered from the desert itself, are testimony to the passage of time and the intrinsic precariousness of large-scale buildings. The flimsy constructions / collages made with architectural model material allude to the precarious housing of the Peruvian coast and its reflection, materialized in the huacas that cannibalizes in its wake.
These material links are inserted in the museum form, even following its constructive patterns, as in the display cases that resemble the huacas that they symbolically contain. Thus, this museum that IRW is building conceives an experience that blurs the illusion of permanence in which we live immersed, placing ourselves outside of our time.
Andrés Hare