OFLUXO

For his first exhibition with Habitación Número 34, a non-profit art space located in the neighbourhood of Usera, Madrid, multidisciplinary artist Yosi Negrín draws on his futurologist 2020 series to present a landscape experiment exploring the relationship between technology and future as well as nature and past. The exhibition focusses on the year 2020, first conceived by the artist as a fictitious turning point, a temporal gap with a future that we had already consumed with our hunger for predicting everything: from the weather to technological forecasts. However, his prophecy of 2020 has become a crushing reality.

Curated by Lava Art Project, who have selected a program of eleven emerging artists to carry out a series of site-specific installations as part of “Habitación 34 x LAVA” during 2020-2021, the exhibition is part of the wider project Habitación Número, an initiative by artist RGB (a.k.a. ©®38191613162016135195209451435) aimed to promote emerging artists based in Spain. Viewable only through the glass windows covering the space (that is, from the streets surrounding it), Habitación Número 34 brings the work of the most exciting young representatives of the contemporary Spanish art scene to the public realm, while offering visitors a safe and socially-distant art experience.

In his new 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.