M Reme Silvestre at Galeria Fran Reus / Palma de Mallorca

 […] passar, rebre, fer i desfer […]  / M Reme Silvestre

September – December 2020


Galeria Fran Reus

Passeig de Mallorca, 4

07012 Palma

Illes Balears, Spain




[…] passar, rebre, fer i desfer […] – M Reme Silvestre
[…] passar, rebre, fer i desfer […] is a proposition that explores the touch and the contact as forms of transmission, and that redirects the attention to skin and there molecular, in an attempt to locate the contradictions and conflicts of the idea of healthy life to narrative of neoliberalism, which organizes bodies, cares and affects. It is a project about the body, on which it dissolves both physically and conceptually to be reduced to elemental fragments that make it vulnerable and at the expense of cultural processes and consumption of late capitalism.
This dissolution of the body is referenced cryptically by images observed on the gallery floor, which present a microbiological study of Keratolysis Punctata, a bacterial disease that causes superficial pits in the epidermis in the human being due to excessive sweating or hyperhidrosis.
The second element that makes up this exhibition is a geometric structure with an aluminum finish that consists of a network of perforations whose pattern corresponds to the design of a drainage trim. This structure is located on a padded PVC floor. It serves as an anchor point between the elements of the exhibition since it refers to a wet space -for example, the shower in a gym- where compliance with the policies of body control is staged, a space where also microscopic processes take place that erode, modify and colonize the body. The viewer is invited to perceive the installation not only through sight but also through touch, requiring remove the shoes, to experience the materials under bare feet and refer back to the sensation of wandering through one of these humid spaces.
Finally, a series of hoods-vessels are presented as a metaphor of body-container where biological and chemical processes occur, where information is stored and transmitted. They are hoods of technical sports material solidified with resin and paraffin and stained with Methylene Blue, in reference to the processes where biological tissue samples are prepared – extracted by shaving the surface layer of the skin – to identify bacterial infections: the sample is joined in paraffin or resin and cut into thin layers that are afterwards stained with substances such as Methylene Blue and observed under a microscope. We find in these hoods other elements such as boric acid, which is used to control microorganisms and treatment of hyperhidrosis, or silica gel, used to absorb moisture. The pieces also present biological material: hairs, remains of dead skin or perforations resulting from erosion caused by microorganisms that occurs in aquatic environments.
The project proposes a confluence of the biological with the technological and scientific, in a dirty, mixed and non-hierarchical way, where the different materials coexist in a hybrid environment just like beings, -humans or not, visible at first sight or microscopic, alive or not-,  they are mixed into a formless and uncritical mass that is the consequence of evolutionary history and whose purpose is biological perpetuation.
The treatment of materials proposed by M Reme Silvestre unifies two aspects: that of signified materiality -the materials refer to processes external to art in which they participate, either because of their conceptual, physical or chemical qualities, as well as their functional applications- and, on the other hand, that of figurative representation -the materials build objects and ideas that refer us to strange or common elements of our daily life.-
The project is a superposition of layers that frees the body from its unity and its physical dimensions. It presents microscopic images, references to body volumes but from their absence (hoods), as well as references to the spaces it inhabits and that modify it (showers, gym). It is a deconstruction that uses the change of scale (zoom, technology) and cross references (physical body, space) to investigate possibilities of abstract representation that expand the idea of body, a body that is a storage place, transmission and exchange of information and that it is subject to and is a consequence of the power structures and control mechanisms designed by bio-capitalism.
The body controlled by market interests, which takes new forms and expands its limits to conform to ever-increasing productivity demands. A high-performance aseptic ideal that requires controlling and taming bodily functions by all means necessary: exercise, chemistry, surgery, and digital….]
[…] passar, rebre, fer i desfer […] (passing, receiving, doing and undoing) is a work of scales, both physically scalable, such as the reference to the body in its real size – or the presence of the artist’s body or of the public – as opposed to the presentation of fragments of the same magnified thousands of times by a microscope; as well as the globally scalable: make it clear how macroeconomic processes and market pressure – through advertising, through public health policies, among others – really affect the individual and consequently their body, in the same way that the body itself relates and affects each other with a whole microscopic environment that it inhabits and of which it is also the host.
Text by Andreu Porcar