Practicar un pensamiento by Arturo Cerda: at Project Room in collaboration with TAJO

With the purpose of giving visibility to young artists and accompany them in the development of their work from the initial stages of their career, the TAJO-SAENGER Residency is pleased to present Practicing a thought, solo exhibition of Arturo Cerda, first resident artist of this program.

During this summer, Cerda made both a study on a plant species, daily called Thought, and a reflection on the action of thinking about certain human -and posthuman- events today.

Arturo Cerda's general lines of work arise from his interest in new models of image production and the revision of phenomena such as waiting, territory and memory. Currently, his practice investigates interspecies dynamics and around more than human presences. An example of this is the body of work she developed at the Tajo-Saenger Residency, in which she explores the confluence of art with technology, botany, gardening and the history of science with the purpose of approaching, knowing and generating a relationship with a plant (which in turn is many plants, even a garden) from the chance encounter with it.  

Popularly called Pansy, the Viola x wittrockiana species analyzed by Cerda is distinguished by its yellow, violet and white coloration, with small flowers and compact body, of ornamental use and suitable for human consumption; it is also a species recognized for being a hybrid organism, artificially emerged due to crosses of other varieties at the beginning of the 19th century.

Similarly, the studies that comprise the series Herbario de la demora: 100 pensamientos (so far a hundred small drawings devised and traced digitally by the artist and executed in ink on paper by a Computer Numerical Control machine, known as CNC) are the result of the crossing between the tradition of scientific illustration and robotics: a work that despite being unique can be replicated; a hybrid specimen, like the argument that supports it. A thought, be it vegetable or human, has the potential to germinate another thought and at the same time preserve its own identity. Herbarium of delay... takes to a concrete dimension what was thought to be exclusive to metafiction and tacitly, while the artist together with the machine draw a thought, the resulting thought allows us to reflect on thinking.

Of a different nature is the sculptural installation A garden is not a plant, sometimes a plant is a garden, which goes back to the carpets or islands of flowers that are planted at ground level. Arranged on the floor within a diameter determined by the artist, this work, while alluding from folklore to minimal art due to the repetition of the same form, the reduced selection of color and its partly random and partly regulated distribution, also appeals to the human capacity to contain a landscape and the possibility of summoning the presence of one in the other; that is, it is a work that attempts to reconcile human and non-human presences, as was the case with ancient rites: a garden is a human creation and humanity is part of nature.

Often the vegetable, as well as human, pansies are small and of medium to short duration. Even so, in its fifteen centimeters of height, occasionally up to twenty-five, a Viola x wittrockiana plant is enough to proliferate in a wild state and suitable for cultivating gardens and greenhouses in a domestic state, as is the case of the third and last work created by Arturo Cerda during his stay at the Tajo-Saenger Residence, El mundo ha partido (The world has departed). Composed of different elements hidden from view that have been organized as a Chinese box or a tower of blocks, Cerda's greenhouse contains an example of Living Thought, which has, through an Internet of Things (IoT) technology system designed by the artist himself, all the basic care for its survival. Even so, its existence depends on the communication and digital interaction that viewers maintain with the plant. Inevitably, irony appears; engaging in a dialogue, even a brief and silent one every day, can save the existence of both the one who stops to think and the thought that awaits.

Practicar un pensamiento, to study it, to contemplate it and to rehearse it, perhaps that is what it is: to discover the synchrony between delay and waiting. What other meaning does the presence of a garden also emanate?

— Christian Barragan