Diego Damas & Ilian Arvelo
GLACSYSTEM ART LAB
STATEMENT
We are confronted with the need to ponder, reinterpret, and take over of the invisible commonness of the Latin-American cities, dismembering it in a sensitive space, with all its symbolic, chaotic, and transgressive load. The visual art is our expressive vehicle which allows communicating our deepest thoughts. Performance is the starting point of my all of my work, appealing to sculptural and pictorial principles for a more philosophical vision, in which content comes finally expressed through public events that includes photography, video, art, and the setup.
Our proposals reflect particularly plastic elements belonging to sculpture and architecture, in which filled and empty are used, the historical nomadism, the permanent pollution among art, architecture and design as esthetic resources, and the way in which these languages dialogue with the Latin-American society.
Our plastic research explores the socio-cultural space that is in continuous alternation between the formal and informal of the urban tissue, which oscillating condition notably enriches its identity, elevating in a pedestal the cities´ transformations from a “no landscape” perspective. In this process I take the frequent idealization of scenery in the collective memory through emptiness, those interstices that apparently embrace a lack of sense.
We don´t worship the tropical exuberance or the perfect conjunction of elements that it’s supposed to be a romantic vision of the tropic and that at the end becomes the urban context of the NO LANDSCAPE. The urban is the scenery of pondering and conflict. We explore that constant improvisation and the spontaneous events arising therefrom, typical of the Latin-American cities.
