Four guidelines for a landscape without time

The exhibition Cuatro pautas para un paisaje sin tempo is based on the theme of giant cages that Chilean artist Cristián Salineros has been working on for several years. It is a series of living sculptures that explore metaphors around displacement, space and the links that are generated with it once we inhabit it. For this, Salineros uses specimens of canaries in captivity that from the beginning are assumed to be the natural inhabitants of the cage and, therefore, have the ability to dimension the way in which the distribution of space is designed. With their flight paths, the birds trace ephemeral drawings that are contained in it and thus generate new ways of perceiving it.
Cuatro pautas para un paisaje sin tiempo consists of a large cage located in the center of the room, inhabited by two red canaries. It is the presence of life within the sculpture, the movement generated by the birds as they move through the space and their evolution within the spatio-temporal dimension in which the object is framed, precisely what articulates the rest of the exhibition.

The center of the work is undoubtedly the sculpture that emanates life, while the periphery is defined by the presence of works that allude to memory, both of the material and of the event: sculptures made with bird excrement; eggs cast in bronze that reveal anomalies produced when they are cooked in water, and drawings on stainless steel.
This is how the artist constructs a non-landscape landscape and a non-place, a space with habitable characteristics that can only be measured through the presence of the canaries. The nature of the work forces us to pay special attention to the details: those invisible lines that cut the volume contained in the cage, the social dynamics that the birds undertake from the day they take the living sculpture as their home, and the sounds that transcend their confinement and break with the physical limits of the object to evolve in time and, after all, materialize their memory.