Installation view of Pilar Elgueta’s, “Language is language”. Temporary sound installation. Tree branch, horn speaker, amplifier, interface, microphones, Live sound transmission, variable measurements. Delfina Foundation, 2024. (Photo courtesy of the artist).
The studio visit that follows is a review of Pilar Elgueta’s work by researcher and editor Catalina Imizcoz. Imizcoz explores Elgueta’s research during her 2024 residency as well as additional work in discussion with the artist.
During her residency at Delfina Foundation in summer 2024, Pilar Elgueta recorded the sound made by running water as it flows through the house in which she and her fellow artists-in-residence live and work. The liquid going through the pipes carries a similar energy to the organisation and its building: always in motion and inevitably in flux, part of an extended network (of ideas, projects and people) in constant recycling and circulation. Pilar then amplified the trickling soundtrack towards the street – or more specifically towards that nook between street and front door where Delfina’s building is emplaced in Central London – to greet newcomers. Toying with the visible and the invisible, this work serves as an entry point to Pilar’s practice, which highlights systems, underlying structures and philosophical premises by resorting to small and delicate poetic gestures.
She invites audiences to consider with seriousness operations that, by virtue of being simple, might otherwise or elsewhere be dismissed as insignificant. Pilar presents herself as an “artist-explorer” and talks about her practice as one centred around the biggest of questions: “What is the human condition?” “Which is contemporaneity’s impossible?” Rather than using definite answers or finished objects, she responds to these eternal inquiries by “activating ideas and images” – acting like an observant rover that calls attention to wonders I might otherwise look past. With a clear positionality in what she calls “a post-anthropological perspective,” her explorations grapple with the human condition in dialogue and exchange with the landscape that moulds it. A recurring insight in her works is that one and the other, bodies and their surroundings, only take shape in interaction – or intra-action, I might posit.
Pilar keeps reminding me that the human condition can only be grasped through the ways in which it participates in the landscapes that forge it, no matter how hard Western society has tried to bend that relation, making it submissive rather than interactive. As the Californian physicist and philosopher Karen Barad offers with their concept of intra-action, things do not exist in ontological independence and isolation but rather configure themselves in the encounter, and only become fugitively defined in the sweet and short moment during which they are in dialogue with another. Everything, then, takes shape as it encounters something else, making change and transformation the only constant. The human condition, if we follow Barad’s intra-action principle, is only shaped by and together with the landscape, continuously shifting with it. Consequently, there are no “objects” and there are no “subjects” but rather two forces that meet and shape each other as they meet, only to re-dissolve and re-shape in the next encounter. This, I believe, is what Pilar and her relentless exploration seem to repeat to me, in the soft manner of trickling water whispering into my ears.
Bodies of Water: Prologue (2023), which was displayed inside when the sound piece reverberated outside, furthers this message. A video installation and action documentation, the piece tells stories of the transformation of fragments. Using a cast of her own arm, Pilar gathers water from a particular location and solidifies it until it becomes an “object,” a representation of a part of herself. In the video, I watch the artist interact with this element as it shifts status from liquid to solid and her struggle in handling water as a sculpting material. It shows her constructing a wooden cast sealed enough to hold the liquid, and render the solidification possible, and then opening this cast to find an object that replicates the arms that manipulate it. Those same arms then offer the object back to the body of water where the extraction took place in the first instance. In the taking and giving back, the liquid and the artist’s body dissolve into one another, shaping and re-shaping themselves as they meet and part.
“The time of existing is the shortest,” she quips. (The original in Spanish resounds poetically: el tiempo existiendo es cortísimo.) The sturdy ice arm, condensed and material and yet simultaneously fleeting, appears and dissolves together with the landscape that is its fount. Pilar invites me to ponder how they both configure one another – her body and the body of water intra-acting to become a defined “object,” an ice arm. She allows me to peek into the laborious process of transformation, all the while highlighting how such efforts only render the shortest moments of stability, as changes in state inevitably follow. In our conversation, she also opens a space to reflect on the opportunities afforded by failure, retelling how the casting of water required many attempts, and only produces partially successful results. Chapped and veined, the ice arm is both a “failed” replica and one that can hold as such for instants, for the melting will start to decompose the accomplishment almost as soon as we manage to take a first look at it. The piece speaks about transience, and invites me to consider the agency of human and landscape bodies in their own disappearance.
Controlling our own disappearance is something that Pilar identifies as central to our contemporary human condition. She posits that understanding what the world will be like after we, humans of the West, cease to exist on it, is one of our strongest obsessions. “Our contemporary culture’s impossible,” she ventures, “is seeking to keep stable that which isn’t, through acts of preservation.” During her residency at Delfina, Pilar engaged with this premise using another seeping material: voices. As the initial stage of what she identifies as a long-term research project – “one that might take me into years of exploration, because it’s always the projects that dictate their length rather than me” – she composed a choir. Preservation agents working in institutions of the likes of Tate and Kew Gardens were recorded answering questions that try to identify who is the “subject” of efforts in conserving things as they are. What is it that is ultimately being preserved? Is it really the objects that continue to exist as they were after the preservation machinery is applied to them? Or is preservation obliquely targeted at ourselves and our human constructions? Who does preservation serve? By composing a sound piece in which the voices of those at the helm of this cultural mandate only appear fleetingly and commingled, her research sets out to unbalance the linear historical quality and the obvious, taken-for-granted value of this institutional practice.
One of her first explorations into such cultural constructs took place in 2015, with an installation and action documentation titled For the Whole. The work comprised an oil on linen, an iron structure and a digital video projection when it was shown at the Museum of Visual Arts (MAVI) in Santiago, Chile in 2017; but it also required all sorts of apparatuses – rafts, floats and a dingy – when the action took place. Pilar often taps into such portable architectures, either finding them or constructing them herself. They perform an important role in a practice where human bodies and landscape bodies inter- (or intra-) act with one another constantly. For example, for the piece I Go in Thinness of Fog (2022), skeletal micro-houses surrounded performers carrying a poem (of which the title is extracted) across a desert. The temporary architectures that come up often in Pilar’s works are porous membranes that extend from the human bodies into their surroundings, or can likewise be regarded as parts of landscape, coming into place as appendixes to those bodies in an effort to reach them.
(Video still courtesy of the artist).
In the case of For the Whole, the architectures convened around a body that was non-human. An unstretched oil on canvas depicting the tip of an iceberg is the agent body of the piece. It departs on an exploration trip, to seek the huge mass of which it is but the summit. A sort of non-human odyssey, the action is centred around the dynamics of representation – a central cultural construct – and the ways in which its object of desire is attained or unattainable. The pictorial object travels the length of the Chilean landscape to find its referent, to join its depiction in a search for completion. The video piece shows the oil on canvas perched on a rocky end before a lake, transported on a steel structure through icy waters, drenched and trembling as it nears the imposing glacier that descends the mountains. Full of obstacles, failure and transformation, the journey of this part in search for its whole exposes the absurd tenets of pictorial representation and the kind of experiences of the so-called real they afford.
If the contemporary impossible is anchored in trying to fix a world-after-our-world (in other words, in trying to figure out what the world will be without humanity at the centre of it), Pilar offers poetic and fleeting moments that confirm worlds’ impermanence. In intra-active ones – where things have no set shapes but rather emerge, dissolve and re-emerge as they encounter one another, only shaping themselves through and in that encounter, to then transform towards the next one – representation is a futile exercise. Like the oil on canvas, the human condition appears to have to go through the toughest of journeys, to arrive fragile and unprotected at the point where it meets, not with the whole it was hoping for, but rather with the impossibility of completion in a world that is in constant change. This, it turns out, can be a promising and even joyful prospect, in Pilar’s worlds.
Catalina Imizcoz is a researcher and editor. She is associate lecturer in the Exhibition Studies MRes at Central Saint Martins, London. Her PhD (2020–24, AHRC) posits that the subject-object binary was not invented in an exhibition space, but the exhibition and its design have been a vehicle through which it has settled into social culture. Her work has been published by Parse, Third Text, OnCurating, and others. At Phaidon Press (2015–19), she edited Adrián Villar Rojas first monograph, as well as surveys on queer art, Korean art, women artists and many more. She is founding editor of Pina magazine, a commissioning platform and portable exhibition space, and director of Cthulhu Books.