Sebastian Mahaluf @ Rufus Stone
Seventeen hours of travel from Chile... Sebastian Mahaluf is now in London. Brought several miles of elastic with him. His project, "Measure of Balance" will involve site-specific Interactive shape/space pieces, involving volunteer participants. http://www.mahaluf.net/
Here is an earlier project: The project AUTOTENSION consisted of an installation with 1000 meters of elastic white bands that went out from the inside of Gabriela Mistral Gallery towards the outside, tied to the waist of 48 volunteers.
From one of the walls of the interior of the gallery, 48 threads of silicone were tightened towards a pillar located in the center of the room. These silicone threads were attached to white elastic bands to roll up the pillar and out toward the outside of the gallery where they were tightened by 48 persons. After a while, people were entering the gallery, went up to the inside of the building, where tightened and tied the elastic bands again, ending the construction of the installation, through the performative act.
Simultaneously a video animation of an installation was projected, which was designed as a previous Project* for the whole building of the Ministerio de Education, where the gallery sits.
How long do we invest in constructing? Undoubtedly, more than in destroying. Consequently, the destruction acquires an irrefutable value. In a short time something happens, something related to the time, with a history, with a context. Now then, to be able to refer to the destruction, first we have to construct.
The pillar as a structural and sustaining part of the architecture of the gallery, was dressed in tension through a kind of bandage that altered his appearance, and at the same time it became a a point of friction, change and emptiness. People supported the structure from equidistant points, which made the wound in the support.
In other words, AUTOTENSION, pull out from the depths of the place all the tension from the inside, and back towards the origin. They are intersections of tension and displacement, trying to dig up and join part of a story, perhaps to understand what separates us from each other.
In AUTOTENSION the geometry is tacit, is a body, is past, is life. The action is the movement, the tension and the meeting. The construction is the exercise that takes more time. It needs analysis and measurement. It's almost like a meditative state in a ongoing process, that needs to verify the time. This will leave traces and marks in the space. It is time, finally, who builds and destroys.
AUTOTENSION
Video Installation / Performance48 volunteers / 1.000 meters of white elastic bands/ 1.000 meters of silicone thread / 48 gripper plates / video animationGabriela Mistral Gallery / Santiago, ChilePhotos: Ignacio KaempfeSeptember 2013
The project GRAVITATIONAL FIELD consisted of 50 people standing inside the Tajamar Gallery, where my body laid down marking with my head the central axis of the structure of the Gallery.
Later on the participants, one by one, took the elastic tapes that were arranged between the large windows, hooking them in my mouth in order to tighten the space with the symmetrically preconceived structure. Then they went outside and visualized my body bound and fused into the space.
Outside, a woven elastic bed made of residues of my previous works was extended,
in order that my body, at the minute that the action demanded, rested on it and it was moved outside the Tajamar Gallery.
GRAVITATIONAL FIELD suggests an order, a conjunction of forces that interpret the yearning of gravity. My body hangs of the structure like a mass, tightening and reconstructing the place thanks to the interaction with other bodies, as witnesses, at the same time, of an illusion that demonstrates the crisis of our reality. Thus the natural trend to the expansion is sustainable for the surrounding bodies, otherwise it is not possible to manage such forces.
GRAVITATIONAL FIELD
Happening / DurationalSilver Plated elastic / light / plastic stone shoe
Tajamar Gallery / Santiago, Chile
Photos: Matias Osorio
June 2012
