LAST DAYS OF “TRANSVERSAL” AT CASA HOFFMANN BOGOTÁ

Artists: Atractor, Karen Aune, Juan Cortés, Iván Herrera, Andrés Moreno Hoffmann, Sandra Rengifo, Carlos Manuel Rivera, Leonel Vásquez, Alba Triana.

Since its inception, Casa Hoffman has had a permanent interest in artists who work creatively using technological supports. In this systematic exploration, various curators have been given room to investigate the fertile field of experimentation of the artist-researchers active today. Thus, in the last six years this space has taught pioneers in this genre, recognized artists, of intermediate trajectory and those who have recently been trained in what, it should be mentioned, is a vital trend in Colombian art today.

Beyond being interested in the scientific or in technology itself, what is essential in this specific exhibition are the intersections between poetics, science and phenomenology, the encounter between the perceptual and the philosophical, beyond the purely technical.

Taking the visual or sound landscape as an example, we find a correspondence in which the forms of digital capture are used to explore "the natural", a notion that allows places as different as black holes or the course and life of the rivers. Following nature and its possible universes as a clue (Cortés), we find that artists are inevitably attracted to botany, to be deciphered into digital images that return to be painted (Aune).

The pictorial representation also helps us to approach an impalpable idea such as the theory of superstrings -which states that there are ten, eleven or twenty-six dimensions, where thin strings vibrate, impossible to distinguish- that sustains the work of Moreno Hoffmann and that connects with the suspended spheres of Alba Triana, activated by variable electromagnetic fields, which visually and audibly explore the universal laws of chance and the interaction between the tangible and the intangible.

In this sense, the artists remind us that technology, like the poetic act, overcome programmed obsolescence, and that artistic creation both teaches paths and borrows others to try to define concepts such as antimatter (Rivera).

Although technology is the obvious global language, and we think of it as something mediated entirely by digitization, we forget that it is present in something as simple and obvious as a spoon or a shovel, and that we need precisely to return to the material to understand the present. An example where "the natural" helps us to explain this idea: Agriculture, ancestral wisdom that has been ‘technified’ to the extreme, leading to overproduction, waste and environmental poisoning, which paradoxically makes us retrace our own steps and value today more than ever, the previous, traditional, organic, diverse and non-invasive uses of the Earth. Leonel Vásquez, in this idea’s field, uses sound in Transversal to reflect the echoes of the oceanic landscape.

This relationship between the natural and the cultural is promoted by art, which is capable of moving between the past, tradition and innovation, which becomes manifest in a photographer who in this case uses the microscope to go beyond what is normally evident (Herrera), in the use of video to retake the tradition of the nineteenth-century landscape (Rengifo) and in the transversal sum of sculptural landscapes and the interactive mediated by algorithms (Atractor).

Transversal, in short, calls for an awakening of creativity, it is the tip of the iceberg not only of the experience accumulated by Casa Hoffman in its six years of history, but also of the interests and creative ethics of Colombian artists today.

TRANSVERSAL | Casa Hoffmann from Casa Hoffmann on Vimeo.

Casa Hoffmann

Carrera 2A # 70 – 25

Bogotá, Colombia