Installation

︎︎︎HabitaciónNúmero Gallery

“In this site-specific installation, Negrín mixes elements of the past with our image of the future by materialising a virtual landscape that does not exist: an artifice between beach and lake, where elements built by the artist are integrated with natural elements. In this landscape, the artist plays with our perception of the future to highlight the relationship between the past and our desire to make predictions about future events. The ruins that Negrín builds indicate the ways in which our imagined future is nothing but our current image of it, which is already fossilised and turned into past. In this sense, 2020. Wasted Panorama confronts us with an artificial dystopian landscape loaded with predictive corpses, ruins of a future that are nothing more than the remains of what we had imagined. They do not speak accurately of who we will be, but of who we were. Through this landscape experiment, Negrín invites us to question the existing relation between technology and future as well as between nature and past, combining both in his fossils and implying that these pairings are much closer than what it might seem. Negrín´s fossils underline not only how our landscape is altered by the physical incidence of the digital but also how, in the future, the digital remains of the present will become physical, tangible vestiges, with a material geological impact. By evoking both natural and technological elements, the artist blurs any distinction between past and future: the virtual landscape resulting from this artificial construction reflects and generates an image of our society that bases its faith upon technology’s progress as well as upon its ability to foresee and anticipate the future. Ultimately, these 2020 predictive corpses constitute Negrín’s way of telling us that all the predictions we made for this year were only partially fulfilled, turning into images in a state of perpetual becoming.”

Text by Paula Ramos Mollá
Curated by Lava Art Project