Through four rooms of the MAC, we accompany an imagined crustacean in its material drift. At Concha en ácido, we become participants in the story of dissolution. In a dialogue with the architecture (both material and symbolic) of the museum, this exhibition presents a fable about the dissolution organic materialities in the ocean, as well as certain symbolic structures of culture. Through a series of works, including sculptures, installations and spatial interventions, our scale or self-perception is distorted around more-than-human bodies, creatures and phenomena.

Polluting gases that accumulate rapidly since the industrialisation of human life are eventually deposited in the ocean. A series of chemical processes cause the waters to increase in temperature, and consequently in acidity. One of the consequences of this acidification is the dissolution of calcium carbonate structures. This mineral is found in small creatures such as crabs, molluscs and planktonic communities. These creatures are currently suffering from the dissolution of their shells.

We decided to travel to Tongoy and isolate ourselves as a residence to think about our exhibition. In this way, the beach, as an ambivalent territory —a fantasy that borders on culture and nature— was our refuge and our point of view. It was during this retrear that we visualised the multiple destinies of dissolution. Legs, pieces, claws and skins of crabs, as well as shells scattered on the sand told us their life history as well as their decline. In general we could understand that these ruined materialities, once autonomous creatures, had been part of a delicate ecosystem: food for birds, food for humans, merchandise or even organic waste deposited by the tides. Sometimes rubbish, sometimes treasure, as Elizabeth mentions. Progressively, each time we returned to the beach we became part of the dissolution of these creatures, understanding that there was no distance between their fate and our daily lives. That we were not passive beings, and never had been. 

As indicated in the name of the exhibition, we borrow ideas from the essay Your Shell on Acid by Stacy Alaimo. This text seeks to decentralise our thinking in order to consider other (non-human) forms of existence with which we could establish alliances and imagine forms of existence beyond anthropocentrism.

Alaimo invites us to include, within our reflections on the crises of the present, small creatures that are currently experiencing the catastrophic dissolution of their own bodies in the ocean. This exhibition adds to this search for and encounter with biological and material processes that are more-than-human. Both the essay and this exhibition take the acidification of the seas and its consequences as their point of departure. We decided to imagine materially our transcorporality in the drift of these ignored stories and thus approach a multitude of creatures that suffer other kinds of catastrophes; extinctions and/or irreversible dissolutions that at first glance do not seem to affect us. 

With the intention of exceeding a passive contemplation of these scenes of extinction, Elizabeth Burmann’s “Concha en ácido” materially constructs a narrative to self-perceive ourselves as bodies exposed to the dissolution of our own shells. First from the material imagination, as the mineral that is most present in our bodies is calcium carbonate (in bones, nails and teeth). But also to dilute a series of symbolic shells that determine us as individual subjects, alienated and sometimes lacking in empathy; absolutely immersed in harmful ideologies (very human) such as neoliberal capitalism.

Sergio Soto Maulén