ENAR DE DIOS RODRÍGUEZ. Liquid Ground

From 17 March to 28 April, 2023

NORDÉS Gallery

Rúa da Algalia de Abaixo, 39, Baixo, Santiago de Compostela, Spain

Liquid ground is an exhibition project that suggests a place to embark, but it could be also thought as a letter. In the first paragraph of this letter there are hands. They present incomplete portraits of cartographers throughout history. They imply that gestures matter. They demand that we pay attention to how the world has been grasped, how lines have been arbitrarily drawn in order to mark the boundaries of space. As if it was possible to stop the tides at a fixed point, as if it made sense to separate one place from another. In reality, it may all have just been a specific kind of yearning, but we are in time to establish different desires. Always.

The body of this letter takes time. It is a video that lasts 30 minutes. It talks about how we learned to see the bottom of the ocean: through the first illustrations that depicted the beings that were extracted from the deep sea, through the museum gaze that came afterwards, when the sea became an aquarium spectacle in the cities, and through the future visions and digital representations that are being constructed nowadays for these underwater spaces. This video is rather an essay that understands looking and thinking as a poem without end. Like all forms of knowledge, this is also a set of riddles.

This letter, or this project, says goodbye with a gift: an object that hopes to disappear from the gallery and to be taken with your hands. It is a map of the Pacific Ocean, in case one day you decide to visit the Clarion-Clipperton zone, so that you know that, until recently, those seabed areas belonged to you, to us, but now they have become keys for nations opening doors to the extractivism of this century.

At the end of the letter there is an erased postscript, but if you look against the light you could read a call to boycott the imposed future, a future rooted in a past that was written by a few hands. Or it could be read something else, since it no longer depends on what is written here, but on what has been lived.

Enar de Dios Rodríguez is a visual artist who advocates for a free and open circulation of culture. In her artistic practice the selective process of existing visual and textual material serves as a starting point for an exploration of the poetic and its political applicability. Her last research-based projects reflect upon the production of space and its socio-political and environmental consequences. She is the founder of the Bay Area Online Exhibitions Archive, founding collaborator of the science-art project SEEC Photography and member of The Golden Pixel Cooperative.

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