Mariela's practice takes place at different times and locations simultaneously; matter is flexible and timeless, time is not linear, nor space a place restricted to a measure. By means of diverse materials of common use, Mariela generates domestic architectures, some made to exist during a moment or even to be replicated as an echo in different moments. The pieces presented in PEANA have their echo in the Museum of the City of
Queretaro, they are “contained natures”, as she defines them.
For this project divided into two venues, the axis that communicates both spaces is light and how it can be shaped to build a kind of nomadic architecture. “Any place is accessible to everyone. The whole planet becomes the home of the earth's inhabitants. Everyone changes places when they wish. Life is an endless journey through a world that transforms so rapidly that each time it seems different”. In the New Babylon
project, the artist Constant poses the assumptions of a nomadic future in a world without borders, the same considerations that Mariela uses in her production. Architectural structures represent a strong load of identity and values of a community; using domestic and everyday materials, the structures generated by the artist become modern representations of a reality present in each home, built through light.
Light is an element that exists naturally and —increasingly— artificially. It is precisely artificial light that dictates intimate and collective patterns of behaviour. If in the past humankind organized its existence around sunlight, now it is the light of the multiple screens that controls modern rituals and the surface on which we move. Because it is precisely the delimitation of the surface by means of light that generates new spatial and temporal possibilities. The new world order makes us sedentary: nomadic architecture contained in intelligent architecture. Humans, at the center of their existence, transmit live non-stop, even when asleep. The transmission of data is a ritual increasingly rooted in the hyper-capitalist culture.
Every protocol starting in private and occurring through a screen is doomed to be public. In one year, 1.5 billion smartphones are sold, and it is virtually impossible to calculate the amount of data they generate without counting existing data. The result can be infinite.
Dense clusters of electromagnetic waves leave our planet every second. Our letters and photos, intimate and official communications, television broadcasts and text messages distance themselves from the Earth in rings; a tectonic architecture of the desires and fears of our time. In a few hundred years, forms of extraterrestrial intelligence could scrutinize our wireless communications in disbelief. But imagine the perplexity of those
creatures when they look closely at that material; for a huge percentage of the images inadvertently sent into outer space is actually spam. If Steyerl's prediction is correct, and the waves and data produced by Mariela get into the hands of extraterrestrial intelligence, they will no doubt find themselves among a deep and delicate testimony about a society in decay.
Ixel Rion Lora