Space as a Dionysian Machine

Curatorial text for the exhibition "Habitable Continuum" by Jesús Moreno-Granados. Latin American Center "Rómulo Gallegos", CELARG, NG Room.

The exhibition Continuo habitable by the young Venezuelan artist Jesús Moreno allows us to experience the gestures of a contemporary, nomadic sensibility, one increasingly shaped by a relational culture in which the distance between subjects becomes ever more virtual and paradoxical.

From an aesthetic point of view, we may be facing a “return of the real” that reframes Hal Foster’s proposal of the artist as ethnographer, since in this case any type of documentalism is omitted in order to create metaphors about contemporary subjectivity through a hybrid recreation of the constructivist tradition.

Here, the concern for space goes beyond the strictly phenomenological and is contextualized within the urban experience, as lived space or an integral place of habitation. This series of constructive metaphors reshapes the cube and volumetric forms, contaminating them with diverse elements that allude to communication networks. We observe a real and symbolic materiality regarding the interconnectivity derived from the virtual figure of the communication network. As Simón Marchán Fiz has noted, “virtuality in general establishes possible worlds,” because it functions as a potential that produces an effect, and therefore, the boundaries of the representational field of the real, as a social fact, become blurred. For Jesús Moreno, space is constructed from sound cartographies and can be understood as a virtual cartography that produces a sense of reality.

The intrusion of the sound universe appears in the materials used as interstices pointing toward temporal limits. In addition, a web of audio unfolds, at times playfully, like the “Dionysian machine” described by Deleuze in relation to simulation as the instaurator of nomadic distributions and crowned anarchies.

The different drawn characters, mostly young people, introduce the sense of habitat, and although the scale is quite reduced, an organic quality is perceived in the ensemble. Nevertheless, each enclosed space can be appreciated individually—as an autonomous entity or portrait—in a circular and at the same time continuous manner.

In Continuo habitable, the artist reveals this newly expanded notion of space that contemporary urban subjects are constructing for themselves, in constant connection with the external world through interactive communication extensions. With this proposal, Moreno approaches the vision of Henri Lefebvre, who advocated overcoming the atomized space promoted by modernity (logical-epistemological space, the space of social practices, the space of sensory phenomena, including the products of imagination such as projects, projections, symbols, and utopias). For this French philosopher, the role of space is active: “as knowledge and action, in the existing mode of production.” Each culture produces its own representation of space, which implies processes of signification. Contemporary practices—both theoretical and social—also produce a certain type of space associated with interconnectivity. This might be defined as a cyberspace that challenges the notions of inside and outside, identity and alterity… With the advantages of social interaction facilitated by technology, we may indeed be facing a new rituality, more organic and playful, more gestural and tribal, more Dionysian.