Landscape on Reserve. Disassembled metal structure, polyurethane paint, anchor bolts, hexagonal bolts, red light beacon. 2.5 x 2.5 x 10 meters. 2009. MORO Contemporary Art Gallery.
The project Landscape on Reserve by the artist Christian Salineros develops around the imagery of the high voltage towers in terms of its logics of connectivity, the constitution of a form of landscape, the conveyance of energy and the social and governmental structures that can be associated with these structures.
The power transmission towers make up an organic system established on the basis of the power grid of which they form part and the connections between spaces that construct territories that are almost beyond measure. These structures move over the landscape, coming down from the mountains in order to penetrate the city like the irruption of totemic mega-structures full of cross-sectional meanings, both political as well as social.
The constructive systems of these structures propose the enunciation of a nomadic practice and yet they are installed immovable, like territorial landmarks that both in the landscape and the city determine the reading of the spaces where they are deployed.
The constructive situation of these structures is an interesting subject in the paradigmatic logic that would allow us to break free from the relationship of the grid and at the same time reinterpret the meanings of this structure in its various contexts, establishing tensions that are both formal (weights, structures, colours, material situations, placement, gravity, calculation, etc.) as well as the referential paradigms linked to social stratification and the common locations where these mega structures are found. To establish these relationships from the standpoint of the exhibition gallery in itself involves a strategy of entropies and a rebellion against the conditioned logics of the network but which from the standpoint of the gallery are established as a unitary situation, engaging the viewer, generating a common territory based on the imaginary that each one of these towers proposes.
The dynamics of tension is not given on the basis of its conductivity and its eminent resonance but from its (horizontal) position, which in itself establishes a critical point. However, what is being questioned is not its stability but the logic reading that this should have both in the landscape and in the urban space and the crisis of the system to which the towers belong, proposing a new context that involves a crossover between social systems and their stratification.
To submit a vertical structure with a marked structural presence to a critical situation also involves a questioning of the institutions and their precarious equilibrium, in the understanding that social super-structures as a form of functional order inhabit a political context that is sensitive and permeable to the inclusions that might erode the structures that support them.
In the gallery’s large hall, Cristián Salineros F. deploys the structure of a high voltage tower that is 10 metres long, with a 2.5 metres square base. What is troubling about this situation is that the tower is not installed vertically on the floor (as logic mandates) but on the eastern wall (mountains), this large structure is suspended horizontally throughout the space of the gallery, upsetting the logics of deployment of these towers and at the same time disorienting and generating uncertainty in the viewer. The metal structure is subjected to a constant and exhausting tension, thus referencing the imminent fatigue of institutions.
On the other hand, the upper part of the tower has changed its original form to utilize the space of the hall with greater precision, allowing the observer to walk along and even “enter it.”
A series of small towers have been placed in the small room. In a noticeably smaller scale, they illustrate the various possibilities that these structures offer the artist to modify and propose spatial developments based on them, as well as including a series of embossed paper images developing the imagery surrounding this project.
Photo credits / Álvaro Mardones