Materials of the Future
Materials of the Future approaches the mechanisms from which we construct our cultural archetypes related to the idea of the future from the field of speculative fiction.
These Materials of the Future, which we refer to in the title of our exhibition, as well as the sound piece Which materials do we construct the future with?, refer back to substances which exist in the present but will revolutionize the future. These materials: vantablack, grapheme, upsalite... are of enormous potential and will bring huge advances in sectors such as space, defence, transport, construction or technology, transforming society, politics and the economy.
In Which Materials do we construct the future with?, a distorted voice confronts us the terrible consequences of progress. Its echoes tell us of how these materials may become an illness, appearing as a reflexion of dystopian reality. This illness, the stains of the future, are the result of multiple chemical sensitivity produced by these materials of the future, and reveal the uneasiness produced, which transcends the physical, impregnating each and every pore of the social body. On the walls of the gallery we find the correlate to this story, presented as a discoloured, sick body. Its stains bring us into an uncomfortable pictorial field, where an interplay between appearance and contradiction takes place. Thus we observe the lack of clear definition between pixelated brushstroke and its manual correspondent or contradictions of the swellings worked into glass whose opacity seems to deny its very nature.
On the other hand, the Materials of the Future directs us to the area of ideas, hypotheses which foreshadow a vision of the future. Starting out from these assumptions, pieces like the sculpture M is W? or the installation Strings have been inspired by graphic representations of String Theory. This theory unifies macro with micro. That is, the, until now incompatible, theories of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. String Theory imagines a universe made up, not of particulars, but of vibrating strings in concert. This theory has never been demonstrated. However, it has served for us to imagine time travel, parallel worlds, additional dimensions, feeding in this way the literary and filmic spaces of Sci-fi. In M is W?, this speculation starts at the title which plays with the initial of the surname of Ed Witten, precursor of the M theory. The speculation proceeds with the very de-contextualization of logic and scientific speculation of the piece in order to take up space in the gallery as Heterotopia. In Strings the idea of different dimensions which articulate the exhibition, different realities which interconnect, show themselves in the strings which emerge from or penetrate the spaces blurring their own limits.