Tempietto

“TEMPIETTO” (Soluble Temple) “Everything that possesses innate movement possesses knowledge, and any matter that possesses this innate movement is cognizant. However, different forms of knowledge arise in accordance with different movements. For knowledge dwells in movement just as movement dwells in matter.” Margaret Cavendish. The first image that emerged, like a reflection in a mental mirror, was that of a flock of birds flying over the sea, their path tracing the undulating curves of the waves. It was as if there were a sliver of unchanging air between the water’s surface and the flock of birds, a space that never shrinks or expands. The soft, feathered bellies are reflected in the sea as if they were designs of moving aerial geometries. In Alonso Bello’s exhibition “Tempietto” at LOCAL Arte Contemporáneo, this movement is neutralized, presenting a sculptural version of this flight that extends parallel to the water’s surface, now as an emerging gesture, a verticality that fixes a point. That flight, a line so horizontal and in constant motion, is now frozen, as if rendered through rigidity and stillness. The limb as an obelisk, an arm, a head, a wing. Body parts that stand erect, stiff as when the body seeks to extend upward, mimicking an antenna. These parts emerge, in this case, from the water, somewhat like when someone swims and their limbs break horizontality, or when someone is drowning and their arms rise from the liquid, driven by desperation. Away from the danger of submerging to the point of suffocation, a raised arm is a gesture to get noticed, to stand tall. I think of Brancusi and his fixation on the vertical, on that feat of matter in defying the tendency toward the horizontal, tracing material lines, towers that balance themselves to stretch as close as possible to the sky, thereby realizing the spiritual metaphysical desire to connect the earthly and celestial planes (through material towers). In Alonso’s case, his towers are a kind of superimposition of elements, a sandwich of things. They always begin as machines and end up organic, forms that mimic (or are, in fact, simply) body parts. The tower is thus an association between two things: the lower one acts as a support; the upper one rises using the first as a platform. That lower part of each piece, which could well be a plinth, is, in this case, a machine—bulky printers. Let’s not forget that LOCAL, since 2025, is a flooded space; the lower half of each sculpture remains submerged, holding the upper half above the water level. The submerged part is distorted by the movement of the water, which plays with our perception, making us see the machine as if it were a sunken ship, a wreck, the testimony of a failure. In our time, we have witnessed how one of technology’s missions is to shrink every technical and functional entity until it is nearly obliterated. The extreme digitization of the world has become an endeavor to compress and dissolve matter. These devices that are part of the exhibition (the printers), a sort of futuristic relic and material testimony that technology, too, is composed as a corpus, become islands that keep the organic part afloat, dry, safe from drowning. This figure (the structural framework of the exhibition) seems to propose a catastrophic view of the present; human life appears to be constructing islands of survival associated with technology, which, like icebergs, are shrinking (disintegrating). Every component of the technological system seems to be in the process of redesigning its corporeality, making it resemble an effervescent tablet in contact with water: in a state of exponential reduction. The question is, will the moment come when that foundation that sustains us will merge indistinctly with the environment? And, impossible to distinguish from the world, will it flood everything? Occupy every imaginable space? Will this omnipresence be a form of suffocation? What part of the known world could drown in an environment filled with the trans-corporeal presence of technology, and what islands will we have to invent to propel ourselves far beyond its reach? Just as the deep diver that ascends rapidly runs the risk of physically collapsing, bursting at the slightest breath, we may be transforming every environment we inhabit into a setting from which, should we attempt to escape, the only possible outcome is catastrophe. A robot bird, acting as if it were an immigration officer, scans our features and recites us an algorithmic poem. “Tempietto” by Alonso Bello has transformed LOCAL into a space where the body of obsolete machines act as a platform for breathing, and a cyborg bird improvises personalized, artificially intelligent poems. When nature is overtaken by technology, the corpses of robots (de-electrified hardware) will be the stones of the future and the ideal fossils for uncovering the testimonies and traces that speak of our life in the present. Let’s return to the opening image. That flock of birds, which seems to trace the depth of some unknown biological information -like a choreography of flight and the connection between living beings and the natural environment- might be a situation on the brink of extinction. If 5G technology and its invisible waves can disorient bees to the point of extinction, could it be that the millennia-old tradition of coastal birds of flying over the sea in mysterious and beautiful choreographies is being replaced by the technical codes of a world technologized to its very limits? The nature of the digital world and that of the natural world come to life in mysterious interconnected systems as blending. The vestiges and gestures of digital reality are gaining ground while replacing other forms of existence. We are at a point in the development of human technology where it is not implausible to think that the future of the landscape might be animated by an interplay of natural and artificial gestures and materials. We may be entering an era where the expanded biology of the world´s destiny is to become cyborg. Javier González Pesce