ABYSSAL CREATURES 

Damián Linossi

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Entry

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With an interest in capturing the state of the public in contemporary societies, Damián Linossi constructs model spaces that highlight the symbols organizing urban areas intended for common habitation. In doing so, his works point to the expansive, subtle yet drastic transformations we are subjected to by the increasingly rapid changes of contemporary capitalism. To reveal these shifts, he proposes trajectories in which perceptual and bodily impulses emerge from a specific ordering of space and its objects, of architecture and its lighting. His interior spaces are always in conflict between protection and abandonment. In them, spaces expose the strangeness that habitability and comfort adopt when the immateriality of light and sound transform shelter into helplessness. These works express the utopian need to sustain the agora, to pull us out of the narrow corridor in which we are confined by sensations of coming from a past without answers and moving toward an uncertain future. This new project further complicates the oppositions between home and street, refuge and danger, public and expropriated, as it unfolds in two distinct spaces that could, at the same time, be the same.

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Home

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In the depths, in the dark abysses of the oceans where there is almost nothing resembling surface life, something has survived the gloom, the scarcity of nutrients, the most extreme climatic conditions of this world. As a limiting horizon of survival, abyssal creatures seem to be beyond what we can imagine. These beings develop the most diverse physical forms, often monstrous; from a figuration close to the stony, the cold, or the almost geometric, to forms of a purity similar to innocence. Sometimes they are beings that proliferate when crisis situations accelerate. As if, faced with the spreading extreme living conditions, the induced response were precarious shelter, informal housing, temporary refuge. Is this minimal shelter enough to overcome catastrophe? Does overcoming truly mean prevailing? Is Freedom the current euphemism for over-adaptation to the effects of crises?

These creatures develop specific capacities to overcome the hostility of catastrophe. Large openings, deployed limbs, extensible and flexible internal cavities, and, in some cases, mutations. Producing luminescence is the most particular of their capacities. They generate their own light, which not only serves to cope with extreme darkness and environmental opacity, or to attract the attention of something that could soon become their prey, but also to manifest the presence of a precarious life that hides a luminous void within. In these beings, the state of fragility corresponds, however, with smooth, pristine, and soft surfaces, with curved and polished finishes. As if the monstrousness of the catastrophe resembled a uniform and soft figure more than the aberrant and formless. Perhaps this smoothness of the surfaces leads us to a misconception about their abominable nature. Perhaps, even, this misunderstanding is the cause of an over-adaptation to horror, a form of amnesia through slow and silent drainage that leads us to stillness, imposing the forgetting of the capacity for movement, transformation, and metamorphosis. Is the leaden surface evidence of the endemic crisis?

The home, which is our security and refuge from hostile weather, is imploding. In the explosion, the abyss opens towards the unfathomable or incomprehensible, like the idea once held of God, or the mystery of existence, or even the unpredictable future. The abyssal is also the imposing depth, a dimension that prefigures a deep, widening crack. In the depths, a luminous space of metallic violet or leaden red emerges, a color at the limit of human perception. We can peek into this space through the windows, or we can enter and traverse it. Inside, we see replicas of recognizable architectural elements, characteristic of an imprecise historical period of public space. Plazas are the quintessential spaces of resistance. They have been created as places for discussion, for common gathering. Even when some conceive them as a commodity that speculation has not yet been able to appropriate. In this plaza, however, lie the remnants of a recognizable ruin, which makes the monumental insignificant amidst the storm.

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Threshold

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From that zone of conflict and crisis, we move to a threshold. The precise area that represents a passage, a zone in transit. The threshold element allows one to pass from one place to another with only a small alteration. In this case, in addition to the change of scale, it disturbs us to see that, when we thought we were inside, we were, in reality, deeper inside. To leave does not truly or necessarily mean to leave. Perhaps there are hundreds of successive caverns we will never cross. That primary truth we thought we saw is nothing more than the passage through the first of the shadowy veils. Some kind of obstinacy will be required to attempt to corrupt the next layers of the infinite container, apparently pristine and comfortable.

Two elements could be pointed out as the thresholds: a lamp in the public exterior of a ruined plaza and the aged and stale panes of the grey constructions. These are the only surfaces that escape the smooth and homogeneous. The threshold is, then, less a stage in the succession of crises than a site that rehearses an imperative pause. The worn and dilapidated panes, features of irregularity against the formalist norm, transform into the only material in a state of resistance. Their dilapidated condition implies that one must be intermittently exposed to the elements to, truly or finally, find oneself. In a double call, these windows invite us both to peer in and see the lead-red abyss within, and to pay attention to the stains on their surface, which divert us from linear perception. In this seemingly binary movement, the urgent political exercise of the present when observing abyssal creatures is to ask about their ways of life, the place they inhabit, whether they build community, whether they devour each other, whether they ever tried to rise to the surface.

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Clarisa Appendino