OFLUXO

As a starting point, Red Sandoval took the narrow space between the bottom of our cars and the pavement that covers the depths of our sewage systems. In the exhibition, the underside of the cars become the atmosphere or the sky, while below, the gallery floor is wired with a tubular network. The pipelines draw the drainage map of Mexico City, displaying the veins of the urban body. A horizon is formed by scanned images of shoe soles. Through the whole network gas is distributed and leads to a set of sewer lids made of different materials, with highly textured and anthropomorphic motifs. The gas itself comes from a pipeline that is directly connected to the gallery’s gas infrastructure, pointing at the mundane, yet hidden processes of extraction, production and distribution of fluids. Towards a lower sky converts the underworld into a fertile ground where things breathe and emerge from.

Grim approaches to Towards a Lower Sky
a text by Helena Lugo

The world forgetting, by the world forgotten
-Alexander Pope

As if wanting to reduce the world, Towards a Lower Sky takes us into a desolate labyrinth where the first centimetres of the surface of the earth become the entirety of the universe. In this change of perspective, a car’s underside is our upper most limit, and the subsoil becomes endless. Fragments of an abandoned city crowded with industrial ruins, human remains, sewers and debris seem to have replaced the horizon. The sky has disappeared; the confines have been shortened. Here, there is only below.

Where we are? This world, like all invented ones, awakens irresistible memories of the real. Perhaps we find ourselves in a neglected, devastated landscape. Perhaps it is a map with forking paths that lead us towards nothingness and reminds us that we are hopelessly lost. The apocalypse is no longer imagined, it is inhabited. We are the world forgetting, by the world forgotten.

The order of things is reversed. The periphery is the center and the geological layers cease to be inside the earth. Sewer lids become portals to the times that escaped us: the past that was not, the future that has already been. These holes lead into the unknown in two directions; they evoke the path to underworld and a new primitive soup, the point where life emerges. These anthropomorphic sewer lids breathe.

In these cities of piped rivers, water has been taken away from us. Nature is lost. We inhabit, travel and walk the exhaustion of a late capitalist failed state; the spectacle of inhumanity, the logic of the market, the consequences of the illegal, the exploitation of resources, the anaesthesia of entertainment. The search for a better place fades before we have settled. The world is drowning in an excess of things we have no control over, it burns as it is being consumed.

We are here. In these labyrinthine paths we can glimpse the limits of our consciousness, our language, our symbols, our meanings and possibilities. Red Sandoval constricts the space to simultaneously expand it. Predicting fate, he invites us to inhabit the landscape we are building.

Towards a Lower Sky by Red Sandoval is an installation that takes as its starting point the drainage map of Mexico City.