Abyssal Creatures (Gallery text)

Entrance

With an interest in capturing the state of the public in contemporary societies, Damián Linossi builds model spaces and highlights the symbols that organise the places in the city intended to be communally inhabited. This way, his works point out the expansive transformations —subtle yet drastic— to which the increasingly fast alterations of contemporary capitalism subdue us. In order to reveal these changes, he proposes paths in which the perceptive and bodily impulses emerge from a certain ordering of space and its things, of architecture and its lighting. His inner spaces are always in a conflict between protecting and abandoning. The spaces expose the strangeness that habitability and comfort adopt when the immateriality of light and sound transform shelter into neglect. These works express the utopian need to sustain the agora, that can take us out of the narrow corridor in which we are locked by the sensations of coming from a past without responses and moving towards an uncertain future. This new project further complicates the oppositions between home and the street, shelter and danger, the public and the expropriated —since it is developed in two different spaces that could be the same.

Home

In the depths, in the dark ocean trenches where almost nothing looks like life on the surface, something has survived the darkness, the low levels of nutrients, and the most extreme weather conditions in this world. As the cut-off of survival, abyssal creatures seem to be beyond what we can imagine. These beings develop the most diverse physical forms, usually monstrous —from a rocky, cold, or almost geometric figuration to forms of a purity similar to innocence. Sometimes these beings proliferate when crisis situations accelerate. As if under the most extreme life conditions that spread, the induced response was precarious protection, housing informality, provisional shelter. Is that minimum protection enough to overcome the catastrophe? Does overcoming really mean recovering from? Is freedom the current euphemism for the overadaptation to the effects of crises?

These creatures develop specific abilities to overcome the hostility of the catastrophe. Extremely big openings, unfolded limbs, extendable flexible inner cavities and, in some cases, mutations. Luminescence is their most peculiar ability. They produce light, which not only allows them to endure extreme darkness and the opacity of the environment —or to call attention to a possible press— but also to reveal the presence of a precarious life that hides a luminous hole inside. In these beings, though, the state of fragility corresponds to even, pristine, and smooth surfaces, with a curved and polished finish. As if the monstrosity of the catastrophe resembled more a uniform soft figure than something aberrant and shapeless. The smoothness of the surfaces may lead us to a misconception about its abominable nature. Perhaps, this misunderstanding might even be the cause of an overadaptation to terror, a kind of amnesia through slow and silent drainage that leads us to quietness and demands to forget the ability of movement, transformation, and metamorphosis. Is the leaden surface the evidence of an endemic crisis?

Home, our sense of safety and shelter from the hostile outdoors, is imploding. In the crash, the abyss opens up towards the bottomless or the incomprehensible —like the idea once held about God, the mystery of existence, or the unpredictable future. The abyssal is also the impressive depth, a dimension that foreshadows a deep crack that appears. In the deep, an illuminated metallic violet space emerges —or a leaden red one, a colour at the limit of human perception. We can peep into that space through the windows or we may enter it and wander around. Inside, there are replicas of some recognizable architectural elements, typical of an imprecise historical time of the public space. Squares are resistance spaces par excellence. They were created as debate and gathering places. Even though some may conceive them as commodities that speculation could not get rid of yet. However, in this square lie the remains of a recognizable ruin, that turns the monumental into something insignificant amid the tempest.

Threshold

From that zone of conflict and crisis, we move into a threshold. The exact area that represents a passage, a transit zone. The threshold element allows to move from one place to the other just with a slight change. In this case, besides the change of scale, we are disrupted by seeing that, when we believed we were inside, we were actually further inside. Getting out does not mean —neither truly nor necessarily— getting out. There are probably hundreds of successive caverns that we would never cross. The initial truth we believed to have seen is nothing but the passage through the first of the gloomy veils. A certain kind of obstinacy would be required to try to corrupt the next layers of the apparently pristine and comfortable infinite container.

Two elements could be marked as thresholds: a lamp in the public outdoors of a square in ruins and the old shabby glass panes on the grey buildings. These are the only surfaces that are not smooth and even. The threshold is, then, less a stage in the succession of crises than a place that rehearses an imperious pause. The worn and ramshackle glass panes —signs of irregularity against the formalist norm— are the only material in a state of resistance. Their ruined condition implies the need to be intermittently out in the open to, really or finally, meet. In a double appeal, those windows invite us both to lean out to see the leaden red abyss inside and to pay attention to the stains on its surface, that divert us from perceptive linearity. In this seemingly binary movement, the urgent political exercise of the present in the observation of the abyssal creatures is to enquire about their ways of life, as to the place where they live, if they build community, if they devour each other, if they ever tried to rise to the surface.

Clarisa Appendino