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Paradigmas em processo

Marina Cortés

2019

No Nation Gallery

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Paradigmas em processo is a form of material archive with writings, images, and material elements conforming my research from the past year, tracing paths and connection from memory and fascism, access, power, the digital condition, language, rupture, fragmentation, private and public spheres, censorship, agency, the virtual, the real and the political. The process is performative. The process is what is behind and what remains, the process is the final piece. 

The materials range from found objects, academic sources, internet images, personal writing in both Spanish and English track the thought process and diverse paths from the research that has given birth to my senior thesis, but to other work and iterations of the thesis. The work is meant to be a collection or archive of key elements in the construction of a final piece, yet dismissable after the piece is completed

It provides the audience members with unshaped materials and sources outside the contextualization of my thesis, allowing them to re-imagining and playing with them, creating new paths and connections, elaborating a different thought process and therefore; a radically different final result. Paradigms in process is, therefore, a dissection of the creative process or more accurately, a re-imagination of the understanding of the process. It is an outline for an artwork or for an essay that never happened, or whether it happened, it does not matter. The unfamiliarity with the artist’s work or thesis will be an opportunity for audience members to detach the archival from a framed paper and treat each element outside the artist’s gaze, resignifying it. It almost feels like a game, if we all are given the same tools, prompts or premises, what do the multiple versions of what each person makes with the same indications look like? What are the paths and connections different brains make into something cohesive? How do different creative processes work and evolve?

Inspired by Derrida’s strategy of deconstruction, Paradigms in Process  questions and challenges the dichotomic understanding of the creative process, and whether the steps of the process are not static and polar opposites, as they intertwine, overlap, transform and become reconfigured. The show goes as far as to claim that the final product and the process are not separated from each other; in fact, process is the final product, it is what matters and what remains, and the final product is just one more step of the process, which is in constant motion and has no end. All artwork, writing pieces, creations are unfinished as they never attain, because there is not, a final stage. The creative process is hybrid and fluid. The creative process is as made of as much of absence or gaps as it is made of presence; of materiality and immateriality. In Paradigms in Process, most of the thoughts are materialised, however, it opens up a space for audience members to discuss in the room their thoughts through oral communication, where the process is not being physically materialised, which are the absence or gaps in the process, opening up the floor to rethink on how much of the oral, the absence the process is made of and is often los

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