ESTATE LEAK
Ongoing project
I absolutely enjoy zombie movies and their simple plots, macabre humor, flying arms, blackish blood, juicy guts… In short, I savor this pastische of Susan Sontag’s “ruins of the flesh”concept. Some say the zombie movie proliferation is a portrayal of social discomfort caused by our capitalist economic system, others call it a reflection of the belittling impression we have facing technology.
However, what captivates me is the fascination we have with our ideas of a violent extinction coming from within. We are terrified and motivated by the thought of disappering, because we actually already know we eventually will, and we secretely delight in this idea.
“We become aware of our own existence, our own subjectivity, when we are endangered by another subjectivity –through struggle, in conflict, in the situation of existential risk taking that could lead us to death.”
Such a precept would correspond to the amplification of Boris Groys’ above quoted summary of Hegel, but taken to the scale of our whole species.
It is not without certain sense of sinister humor that our presence is virtually or really banned from the spaces we inhabited in the Estate Leak project, owing to the expanding power of polyurethane foam’s chemical reactions. Most interventions were carried out in countryhouses in Colombia, abandoned due to rural migration caused by war related displacement or fostered by land ownership inequality. I imagined our spaces invaded by these moving lumps of matter and color, as the empty spaces where we sheltered our bodies become impenetrable and solid.