SINCRETOS
Baerum Kunsthall, 2024
Paola Torres Núnez del Prado works with painting, weaving, sculpture, performance and interactive works where bioart and artificial intelligence intentionally create a shared ecology of meanings and an interplay of narratives and experiences. She has developed a transdisciplinary framework for her project Weaving Gardens (of sonic delights): del Prado researches textile tools and implements that are developed for use in sound manipulation, specifically with “Usnea living textiles”: interactive, living textiles made by weaving Usnea lichen (strylichen) together with electronics, so that the works emit sound when touched. These living textiles harness the lichen’s sensorial quality as a marker of clean air, and extend it to the development of bioelectric textile synths. In del Prado’s practice, technology and traditional materials are intertwined, breaking the imagined dividing line between traditional crafts and computer science.
The exhibition in Bærum Kunsthall has been named Sincretos, after a neologism that Paola Torres Núnez del Prado uses to describe a syncretic thing, in this case the art object (including the non-object, the immaterial and conceptual art). The word Sincreto emerged as a way of linking symbiotic and syncretistic processes, the former a term used in the natural sciences, and the latter in the social sciences. In this way, the processes, when transferred to the social sphere, can make it possible for different knowledge systems to not only coexist, but also to create an emerging “third thing”; something new that is independent of its components. This new thing will be a shared common good of cultural progression for humanity.
The term Sincreto stems from the Spanish word for syncretism; sincretismo. By adding -s it becomes plural. Syncretism refers to the fusion of different beliefs or cultural traditions, when characteristics of different societies are brought together to create a new system of ideas or practices.
Everything on display in this exhibition is a sincreto. In fact, Paola goes so far as to claim that all art objects (or non-objects) in contemporary art are sincretos. This radical claim follows the recognition that at this point in human history there can be no artistic expression that is completely free from a certain degree of cultural fusion. And not only that: some of the works presented in the Sincretos exhibition transcend the division between nature and culture by being part of the cultural, technological, and natural spheres at the same time. Their value ultimately depends on their being alive. For real. This offers a glimpse of a possible future beyond traditional divisions. A future that can give us access to other value systems, to a different ethics (and aesthetics) than the one the market economy imposes on us, which is extremely necessary in the time of the climate crisis.
Text from solo show at Baerum Kunsthall, Norway, 2024