Museu
Geológico, Lisboa
05.04 to 03.05.2014
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© Sérgio Costa
“Strata”: Ungrounding and Virtualisation in Sergio Costa´s
‘Wunderkammer’
“In
Exhumation the distribution of surfaces is thoroughly undermined and the
movements associated with them are derailed; the edge no longer belongs to the
periphery; anterior surfaces come after all other surfaces, layers of strata
are displaced and perforated, peripheries and the last protecting surfaces
become the very conductors of invasion. Exhumation is defined as a collapse and
trauma introduced to the solid part by vermiculate activities; it is the body
of solidity replaced by the full body of trauma. As in disinterment — scarring
the hot and cold surfaces of a grave — exhumation proliferates surfaces through
each other. Exhumation transmutes architectures into excessive scarring
processes, fibroses of tissues, membranes and surfaces of the solid body.”
Negarestani, R. (2008).
Cyclonopedia. complicity with anonymous materials. Melbourne: re.press
By following a Minerva´s flight
of wonder in Costa’s experimental strata series, we follow a form of artistic
experimentation given in a new diagramming strategy not only by the means of
painting but as well by changes of dimension in new strata experiments as
introduced by the anaglyphic principle in this new strata Series of Costa.
There is, however, a way more important new
dimension in this series of strata from 2013-2014 starting with underdetermined
proto-amorphous things: The forming of mesh of clay and the drying of the wet
mesh through which its porosity appears in Strata #20 and #21, exhibited in a
showcase before we enter the exhibition space. And even after transporting
these frail underdetermined things into the realm of painting, in which we can
see them as paradoxes (simultaneously a proto-brain slice or/and a slice of
petrified toasted bread) our imagination while observing these things is
unlimited in a trivial matching game of similiarity. The concreteness of these
sub(jectival) objects brings us further due to its contextual embeddings and
transport into the realm of a museum space, the geological museum, in the
building of the Portuguese Academy of Sciences. Strata of Sergio Costa turn
into a “real counterpart”, a virtual syncope of the petrified objects exhibited
in the museum, an artistic principle of ungrounding
and virtualization of the
museological material space and its displayed objects.
In Strata #20 and #21 the
porosity that is an openness of craters and valleys unlike its geological
counterpart of sedimentation can be put into perspective as artistic strategy
opposed to an geological sedimentation principle of stratification. The most
easily observable change in this new experimental strata series of Costa in
2014 is the introduction of another perceptual dimension, the anaglyphic two
color outlines that create a 3D effect of a 2D painting, a diagram based on the
interplay of two colors added to the actual painting, virtualizing the
stratification.
#Ungrounding
Strata#
Costa´s Strata exhume the fixity of our habitual perception of things
and thus strata as rock layers start decomposing, while not even the most hard
rock on which religions belief to be build, escapes this virtualizing principle
of de-stratification or ungrounding. By the introduction of new anaglypyic
works of strata, Sergio Costa can now be seen in 3D, without any need to go to
a multiplex cinema- the cinematic anaglyphic mode in 2014 reached the
geological museum, it catapults the observer to a nature 2.0. The more the
observer seems to recover in this optical illusion the “original” 3D structure
of the object in study, in a “regrounding” of reality, the more he tries to
root them on a platonic plane the more strata virtualize and ungrounds.
„If
geology, or the ‘mining process,’opens onto an ungroundedness at the core of
any object,
this is precisely because there is no ‘primal layer of the world’, no ‘ultimate
substrate’ or substance on which everything ultimately rests. The lines of
serial dependency, stratum upon stratum, that geology uncovers do not rest on
anything at all,
but are the records of actions antecedent in the production of consequents “Iain Hamilton Grant
(2010) “Mining Conditions”. In: The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism
and Realism, eds. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (Melbourne:
re.press, 2010), 41–46 here: 44
#Strata
Wunderkammer#
The exhibition of Sérgio Costa transposes the Geological Museum
intirely on the plane of his Strata. While presenting a transition of the
scientific plane of geologic objects shows an artistic strategy of
virtualization of a discrete and historical-material structured geological collection-
that in itself still preserved by the influence of a Baroque intention of the
Wunderkammer. Costa´s exhibition transports the entire museum onto the plane of
his strata. Thus by showing a transition of the scientific plane of actuality
of geological objects in a space-fold of the Museum space officially dedicated
to art, Costa allows us to grasp the strategy of virtualization of
stratification by the artistic diagrammatic machine of his paintings. This
principle of virtualization becomes actualized by a showcase that displays
Costa’s Strata three-dimensional Strata studies made of a demiurgic claylike
material always already in decay, in rupture: material strata syncope. The
interest of these strange object is exactly located in their fragility, their
porosity exhuming strata in decay, a
poromechanics of strata: A place where “[t]he cosmogenesis of decay unfolds
within solidity, [and] spreads from interior to outer surfaces.” Negarestani, Cyclonopedia, 181–182
Alexander Gerner
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