A NOTE FROM THE CURATORS

Process-based exhibitions often show the result of process-oriented work, complete and on display. Building on EFA Project Space’s history of innovative exhibition making through process-based conceits and constructions, we sought to reverse engineer this strategy, and endeavored to open up our collaborators’ processes, illustrating how they engage with our key themes and questions, as well as the connecting lines between these artists’ manifold practices. In [Move Semantics], The visitor / audience is understood as collaborator, invited to not only consider these works but offered frameworks via which they might embark on their own investigations and explorations, both via the works on site, a published Field Guide co-produced with exhibition artists, and via virtual programs and the exhibition archive.

[Move Semantics]: Rules of Unfolding connects through three main themes: allies, bodies, and sites. Demonstrating speculative thinking across media and discipline, these practitioners deftly eschew easy labels, exemplifying the kind of plasticity of mind and praxis that is and will be essential as we break down and rebuild our ways of thinking, making, and doing towards post-capitalocene futures.

When we speak of “allies,” we nod to the nonhuman creatures (and things) with which we share the planet—plants, fungi, animals, and machines. We also include here “media,” and “materials’; these are things offering other intelligences, strategies of their own, and we seek to negotiate and interpolate with questions of their agency now and in the future. Almost every one of our artists could be understood as being in conversation with allies in some way, but exemplifying explorations of their future role are the work of Mafe Izaguirre, Constanza Piña, Scarlet Dame, and Quimera Rosa.

Mafe Izaguirre’s Sensitive Machine explores a speculative, hybrid spirituality, opening up channels for post-human communication across human and machine intelligence. Her cybernetic sculpture mimics human consciousness, responsive to the viewer. For [MS]:RU, Izaguirre offers a new, site-specific hybrid spiritual system, premiering in conjunction with two livestreamed performance pieces, The Mirror,” a deep meditation led by the artist on April 9th, and Talking Bird, a collaboration with New York based Venezuelan Poet Enrique Enriquez, on April 11th.

Constanza Piña offers R&D media and installation documentation from her ongoing Khipu Prehispanic Electrotextile Computer project, which is installed in Mexico City and livestreamed into [MS]:RU, at once collapsing and expanding the way we understand the immediacy or locality of exhibition “space.” Pages from an expanded edition of project text, documentation, and research materials scroll as a durational component in the gallery space. KHIPU’s handspun copper and alpaca fibers use an inca coding system to encode information about the classification of the main stars of Bootes, a moon phase calendar, a total solar eclipse, two earthquakes, and the sun and moon’s position in relation to the artists’ births.

Also mining the possibilities for the post-human are Scarlet Dame’s ongoing experiments with synthetic identity. Using the development of AI as fulcrum, Dame explores algorithms functioning as “a form of collective unconscious that condenses a space of big data previously relegated to massive distributed processing systems into cogent and succinct symbolic output through the production of a form of human readable thought,” working with learning models based on recurrent neural networks. Dame links these processes to her own evolution, using journal entries made during her gender transition as input language for training.

Pushing the boundaries of gender identity and collaborative intermediation with plant and machine allies, the artists behind Quimera Rosa share work from their Trans*Plant project, where they seek to produce non-natural cyborg identities from a transdisciplinary perspective. Particularly interested in the articulation between art, science and technology and their functions in the production of subjectivities, Quimera Rosa focuses on the creation of transdisciplinary projects and performances, the elaboration of electronic devices that work with body practices, and biohacking experiments. They assume Donna Haraway’s notion of cyborg, defining it as: “chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism.”

Other artists in the exhibition trouble our understanding and approach to inhabiting and performing human bodies: bringing together investigations around disability and illness, queer, trans, and nonbinary gender, and the performance of identity within and against normative formations.

Sky Cubacub, a non-binary Filipinx artist, brings us a selection of works from their queercrip, radical visibility oriented Rebirth Garments wearables project, alongside portraits of intersectional bodies dressed in these pieces. Rebirth Garments exist in the world at the intersection of craft, social justice, and commerce, “resisting society’s desire to render [certain bodies] invisible,” collectively refusing to assimilate. The pieces selected for [MS]:RU demonstrate this line’s speculative approach to identity and presentation.

Calling attention to the “powerful, messy, non-innocent, contradictory, and nevertheless crucial work... of critique, alteration, and reinvention of our material-discursive world” necessary to bring disabled people into the designer role for future-building are Kelly Fritsch and Aimi Hamraie, whose Crip Technoscience Manifesto is presented across accessible media: in Braille, scrolling video, in audio, and in accessible text, both sited in the gallery and online.

Afro-Indigenous poet and installation artist Alán Peláez López offers us Historia Futura / Future Story, a new text written for [MS]:RU in Spanish and English, envisioning the creation stories of a world without borders: perhaps these words themselves hold within their lines the “[q]uiet, quiet tunes with instructions of how to offer and accept care.” 

Shaina Garfield’s Leaves With You makes our transition from bodies into sites (in collaboration with allies) a literal one: Garfield’s biodegradable macrame coffin marks the center of the project space, documenting and confronting death and dying as passage, ritual and a vital part of our ecosystem’s life cycle. Visitors are invited to engage with the macrame memorial project on site, through a workshop on April 25th, and via virtual extension, holding durational space throughout the exhibit for public healing and ceremony around collective grief, so omnipresent at this time.

Scholar and artist Sunaura Taylor’s new project investigating Disabled Ecologies, posited as “the webs of disability that are created, spatially, temporally, and across species boundaries, when ecosystems are contaminated, depleted, and profoundly altered” is presented in [MS]:RU as project text, research documentation, and drawings by Taylor. 

Research and speculative design proposals from Martin Byrne explore the scenario spaces at the intersection of modern infrastructure, emerging technology, and novel forms of wilderness. The artist-architect considers his work a process of examination, exploring “how deviance, novelty, and malfunction may lead to techno-social change.” Installed are selections from Byrne’s Feral Architecture, The Geryon Matter, Another Danse Macabre, and The Death of Architecture. **For the Patternist project, originally developed at the Strelka Institute, Byrne and team proposed a “shifting alter-landscape, transposing and transmutating everyday city passageways,” superimposing augmented urban reality landforms via mobile gameplay, where users interface in real space-time with an imagined speculative future narrative around cryptographic transmissions from the “Patternist Observation Mission.”

In collaboration with the Reversible Destiny Foundation, [MS]:RU invites visitors into the working environment of Arakawa & Gins, with an installation of posters, texts, schematics, renderings, photos, and other documentation of their many years of visionary practice that makes reference to their studio (and home) at 124 West Houston Street. Together, Arakawa & Gins developed the philosophy of “procedural architecture,” famously proclaiming “we have decided not to die,” and proposing myriad ways in which the built environment might help the human organism that persons escape being lulled into complacency by architecture’s banal and predatory forms.

Shots of Arakawa & Gins’ studio show us the world from which dynamic minds drew inspiration: floor to ceiling bookcases, work surfaces and walls overflow with books, papers, work, art, and all types of materials in conversation with their practice. In the [MS]:RU laboratory, the same is true: the studio wall abuts our Archive, where local fungi specimens from the New York Mycological Society, texts, plant matter, and other media from our collaborating artists invite visitors both to the project space and online to engage with document as ally, within and beyond the exhibition’s bounds.