Ritual in NYC - 2003/2004

"During her stay in New York, Paola Torres Núñez del Prado 
waits for the city to calm down so to walk by Central Park late at night. 
This immersion in the nature of the city is nourished by her readings on physics, particularly on string theory. 
This is the element that Torres returns, quite explicitly, for the action he carried out in 2004, at dawn, and 
which consisted of uniting the branches of a tree with ropes. This new composition sought to reveal the energy
invisible that unites each element of our environment, but also and above all, emphasize - through
mimetic reproduction- the structure of the plant world. Branches created by knots seek
integrate with the existing ones, in Torres's words as a web that tries to integrate with the
tree ”, tells Elisa Arca about my experience living in New York, in the article published in the
Ansible magazine[1]


My night walks in the Park became the only efficient escape I had from the
suffocating oppression of my 17 m2 bedroom on top of an elegant Jewish cultural center in
the corner of Lexington and 92st. The whisper of the breeze through the dark trees, whether bringing warm
messages about the advent of a summer I would not experience there or a winter I would only miss
partially due to my vacation trips back to Peru, became the most calming whisper I could get in those days. 
I was forced to see it as a blessing, as it was the dream of any future artist to spend the last portions of their
education in what was depicted as the most captivating, vibrant, enriching, and culturally
varied city in the world.

"The ritual component is present, but precisely not in the materiality of the object of (or in)
the cult, but in the action itself and the physical sacrifice that it represents for the artist. Made in a
preset time, the rope net, Torres says, also refers to the pre-Columbian tradition of
writing with knots, in clear reference to the Quipu. Not knowing the encoding and decoding method
of the Quipu, Torres chooses to recover the principle of the structure in Braille (points engraved in relief 
replaced by knots) to write the word "Vessel". Vessel: container, net
communication, vehicle, Torres lists, is a summary word that condenses the multiple roles
performed by the artist, including that of the mediator. Vessel refers to transportation and physical 
communication, as well as the ramifications created by the interconnection of these paths. The artist-vehicle, 
"possessed" both by some kind of force of nature and by the process of creation itself, is able to recreate 
the complex network of natural shapes. "You become a meansto interpretthose natural orders," says Torres."


The truth was, even in that bleak winter of 2003/2004, New York City
was quite advanced in the gentrification process that converted the city of Basquiat and Haring
in a kind of adult Disneyland, so in addition to sporadic visits to the Museum
Guggenheim a few blocks away, or the Met, and my favourite of all, the Museum of Natural History, as any 
other well-preserved art space, carefully placed and controlled to reflect the artificial spirit of the 
surrounding environment with its dessicated animals, my interest in discovering what was behind phrases 
like "The city that never sleeps" was almost null, except for
my lonely walks through Central Park. So once the illusion of freedom being alone in the Great
City par excellence vanished (as soon as it seemed to me as smaller and more redundant than my native Lima) 
I experienced my own new-millenium Bell Jar: I passed most of the time inside my room, stay only interrupted 
by these scattered walks, if I was not at the University exposed to a completely different art school
backed by Minimalism, Concrete Art, Earth-Art, Conceptual Art and, of course, 
Digital Art, which particularly captivated me. Every time I walked between the skyscrapers claustrophobically 
situated at my sides, my mind was opened by the contradictions of a city so clean on the surface that
contrasted dramatically with the vegetation that was still in the Park, and the dirty but still authentic 
labyrinth of its subway, protecting both average citizens, pop stars and madmen 
that not so occasionally rode it, as well as by the streets of the East Side that confronted the memories of the 
coastal huacas and stone temples in the Andes, which became increasingly present in the distance 
...Eventually the images began to intertwine and became entangled in an encrypted knot whose processdecoding 
would become the seed of my entire body of work ever since.

"The intrinsic unity of all things is related, in Torres's work, to the idea of
a pattern that spontaneously (and similarly) replicates in the various structures present in the
plant life. Both the action in Central Park and some of her later works can
read under the concept of "universal intellect", which Giordano Bruno describes as "what permeates the
matter of their forms "and which is comparable to the organized production of rational human beings.
(Bruno 2010: 75). This rationality of forms can, and indeed are, the case with Torres' work,
expressed through codes that are no more than possible translations of the same phenomenon. The
technology in this process becomes an ally when it comes to exploring the possibilities that
coding offers. Also, in the project she carried out in 2004, called Musical Coordinates, Paola
Torres projected light onto taut strings across a space, in musical notes, emphasizing the
synaesthetic nature of translations made possible by technological tools. Going back to the
intervention in Central Park, we can reread Torres' action as an "analog" translation; The
artist is the coding tool, as well as the one that prints this code on the subject (thanks to the
strings). Art, technology, code, and ritual intermingle and are discussed in these early works in
which, according to Torres, her intentions were not yet clear. Her obsessions, (...) drawing ramifications,
would give way to works increasingly focused on one or another aspect of the technology-code-ritual triad "

[1] “Principio Vegetal”, Elisa Arca - Revista Ansible, 2018