Es un cuerpo [It is a body], 2022

Cement, steel, and plant matter

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It is a body. A desiring body that feeds relentlessly, devouring what it finds around it, asking no permission, and chewing forcefully:

 

"Haaam, haaam, haaam!"

 

It swallows, transforms, and expels it—but in a different form. It molds it to its own needs, fiercely appropriating what already exists.

 

This body moves slowly, enveloping whatever supports it as it goes. It has gone so far as to trap the very thing that made it function, causing it to vanish. The density of its silvery matter has rendered that element invisible and obliterated what constituted its own being: what gave it shape, defined its contours, and set its limits. It is a body that, like cities, is riddled with connections—circuits through which water, gas, and data flow. And shit, too. It is a body that has withdrawn its entire tentacular network from the visible realm and surrendered to the hidden, yet has failed to control what lies beyond its materiality and what makes it truly alive: its stench.

 

A hinge between two eras, it is the stuff of fieldwork—of the hoe, the rake, and the bucket; of dust in the eyes, the bent back, and the sun beating down. Yet it also belongs to the world of factory labor, of the steelworks producing pipes of cast iron, steel, brass, or lead.

 

It is a body that lives, even though cement has buried it. Vegetation has forced its way through—fig trees and climbing bindweed. Thanks to the traces of water this body has retained within, small, opportunistic, ruderal plants have taken root. Along its banks, hollow-stemmed reeds and underground stems have also proliferated; their interwoven networks are known as "rhizomes"—structures that, true to their name, form an uncontrollable, expansive, and challenging internal architecture.

 

This body is a formless mass, lacking head or tail. It is a body whose beginning and end cannot be precisely determined. Like history itself, it has no single origin; instead, it appears and disappears, capable of beginning and ending in the very same place. It is a body riddled with resurfacings and multiple births.

 

It is a body that is, in reality, an image. It arises from the absence of another body—from a materiality that has already perished—yet it is capable of expanding the phenomenal field of what once was.

 

Mercedes Pimiento has created a body out of dissemination. She has constructed an amalgam teeming with the questions that run through it. Es un cuerpo reflects on the infrastructures shaping our lives and on how we perceive them; on how they penetrate and transform spatial environments; and on how they participate in the urban and material makeup of a territory, influencing everything from its economy to its customs. Yet, this body also reflects on the spectral presence of a material reality—such as the Infanta Canal—which, though no longer in use, continues to generate stories, desires, and narratives.

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Blanca del Río