Raquel Quevedo presents the organic performance 'Fluid Crust Surgery'

Etage Projects is pleased to announce the opening of Fluid Crust Surgery, an organic performative installation by Raquel Quevedo. The artist’s show consists of a streamed installation, the exhibition of 100 sculptures, and her book’s launch.

Fluid Crust Surgery

Raquel Quevedo is a Barcelona-based multimedia artist and graphic designer. Her practice runs mixing sculpture, installation, spatial interventions, digital art, typography, publishing & artist books, focusing on process and glitches.
Recently she has worked for Eli Russell Linnetz, Comme Des Garçon, Loewe, Icon Design, CCCB and artists such as Najwa Nimri and Dulceida. Her work has been shown, among other places, at L&B Gallery Barcelona (2019), Matadero Madrid (2019), Axel Arigato Gallery London & Göteborg (2018) and Etage Projects Gallery Copenhagen (2018).

The performance consists of a series of transformative actions in the installation, conceived as an extractive landscape caused by the artist and the climatic changes.

The project reveals the superficial crust of life and aims to change it by surgery, using fluid as a magnetic force. “Fluid makes us mutate, keeps us together and at the same time separates us in a circular motion”, says Quevedo. The project works with concepts of organic, sense of time, permeability and movement, reflecting the mutability of existence. Like a shaman that can inhabit other bodies and allow us to live circumstantially in different bodies, the matter is here the object of intersection between the computing space (digital technologies); cultural systems (visual language and science) and the identity multi-space.

The matter is presented as a natural construction, an energy source and a virtual image: a rendering of a rendering. It is constructed by extracting data from the work of its physical and virtual dimensions. Along with other data generated by digital technologies, visual language and science, the matter generates more matter in different contexts of time and space than the original.

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This project uses matter as a symbiotic human/object relationship. Far from avoiding the capitalist practice of extraction, it is used to its maximum consequences, stretching matter in its multiple forms, ideas, images and renderings: a logic of extraction to the point of turning matter into data to convert it into new matter. As a result, this project aims to be a library of symbols, samples and figures; “a cell that becomes a superstructure, a loop of warped concentric circles”.

It proposes a tentacular itinerary through extractive landscapes; through this scenario where this generation of matter-data takes place, creates a network, a deformation mesh, a new relief, through which we observe and experience matter and its nature. These extractive landscapes are hybrid scenes, where the works speak of growth and fragility, anchoring and flexibility of the object-nature/culture-human relationship. In a broader context, they work with metaphors of development and the physical-virtual construction of being.

In this sense, it is living in this scenario that allows for another cybernetic network, a laboratory simulation, a speculative environment, connecting concepts of matter, organisms, the science of nature, ecosystems, landscapes, territories, energy, subsistence, extraction, data and assets.

This connection allows new narratives in light of the interpellation, which is human, objective and natural in the current social and cultural context.