Argentina

In Hope the Doors Collapse, Luciana Lamothe intertwines pieces of wood and pipes, people and structures, and mutability and permanence to create spaces inside spaces that modulate forms of violence and care in a tense balance of interdependent bodies. The work establishes matter as the principle of the real to effect a series of changes in traditional construction methods and in the relationships we form with our environments and with each other. The artist extends her research into the functions, limitations, and potentials of materials and their interactions with architecture to subvert some of its imperatives. The tangle of steel and wood thus positions us in an environment whose material forces manifest their agency and erode the anthropocentric ontology of modernity. Each of the four sculptures serves as an enveloping and habitable space proposing a different way of conceiving our connection with the material world. They contain both forms of care and aggression that appear in the cuts, slashes, assemblages, and twists required for the work to maintain its shape: a series of wounds and sutures that recognize the weight of centuries of social, spatial, and material conditioning. The work’s entanglement enunciates an ecology in which bodies, objects, and structures fracture the borders separating culture and nature, human and non-human, to imagine material alliances for other possible ways of living together.