MATER: Barcelona

The question about the nature, history and status of materials is directly related to evolution and survival. The brilliant book by Laura Tripaldi, a materials researcher, begins as follows: “If I had to choose a single thing that I have learnt, from among all the surprising things that I have had the opportunity to discover on studying chemistry, it would undoubtedly be this: that the interface is not an imaginary line which divides some bodies from others, but rather a material region, a marginal zone with its own mass and thickness, characterized by properties which make it radically different from the bodies whose encounter produces it.”

 

That is, all the contacts that take place in the world are a form of interaction between materials. Skin materials, biological materials of all kinds and materials that man has invented and continuously invents to clothe himself, to work or to shelter from the elements.  In this respect, it can be said that artisans and technological engineers —also artisans— have shown a more sincere interest in and less prejudice for how materials function than art academies. Here I mention art academies and not artists because the latter have often challenged the established definitions and unwritten rules which included some materials and the uses of these materials, but not others.

 

Female artists have undoubtedly been the most daring. Why? Their closeness to traditions and ways of working which did not arise from the fine arts. Their interest in understanding that the skin —through which everything is felt— has a lightness similar to the silk used by spiders to weave their web. Do spiders feel in their web? Do they feel the anguish of those they trap in it, their fight to free themselves from this mortal trap? Do spiders think through these threads, which emerge from their own body? We now know that spiders dream. But many of the artists who have worked with fibres, with threads, with looms, with fabrics, already knew. After the pandemic, Daniela Rößler, a researcher at the University of Konstanz, established that some species of spider move their eyes while sleeping, like humans. So-called REM sleep, also characterized by muscle relaxation and changes in the brain’s electric activity, is important for the consolidation of memory and could play a role in the development of important survival skills.

That is to say that spiders have memory and recall what they did during the day. The hands of those who work endlessly with materials also recall each of their features, and remember this with touch through experiences accumulated over the years of relations with these materials.

 

This exhibition brings together the work of artists whose research with materials bears witness to the fact that materials are the bridges which connect us to the natural world and also the paths which separate us from it. From fibres to plastics, understanding the origin of materials involves understanding the shapes to which they can or cannot adapt, and understanding their values of permanence or disappearance in our world. Eternal materials are indigestible for the Earth. Perishable materials are co-creators of life. Historically art has been considered from and for eternity, to remain incorrupt, equal to itself, timeless. Exhibitions such as this one demonstrate the adaptive ineptitude represented by thinking and doing in this direction. Changeable materials do not perish, but rather remain in our senses, in our dreams which never forget. Who apart from artists can make us see the world and everything that makes it up in another way? Making artistic practice come into line with organic life does not mean ceasing to contribute to the heritage of future humanity, but rather transforming the very meaning of transmission between generations, the transmission between the natural world and all the other worlds. In this exhibition, materials and shapes create an entity to begin to think along these lines.

 

- Chus Martínez