Colombian artist duo Mazenett Quiroga (Lina Mazenett and David Quiroga) was invited this year to do a residency at Utopiana in Switzerland. During their residency, the artists have been conducting research for the project Consanguinity, where they explore how the body, as well as the forest and each plant are chemical laboratories, where complex processes of energy transformation occur.

 

Based on Amazonian cosmologies and the process of salt extraction from plants, that they learned from several Indigenous Huitoto people in the Colombian Amazonia, Mazenett Quiroga visited different forests in Switzerland where they collected, processed and extracted salt from oak trees. Especially interested in the idea of consubstantiality –the solidarity of matter–, they explore how humans share the same constitution with other beings that generally are perceived distant and inanimate things, such as rocks, stars or plants, and how this has enormous consequences on the way we conceive ourselves as humans, as well as how we conceive our relation to the environment and the cosmos.The alchemy-like process of salt extraction aims to explore different ways of living our relationships with other living beings, mainly through the permanent and inevitable exchange of energy, substances, and information.

 

The installation at la_cápsula is an attempt to reveal kinship relationships with objects and beings beyond the human realm, especially through potassium salt, which is a vital substance for the metabolism of different bodies. A substance that flows from rocks to the soil, groundwaters, animals, and humans, in an endless circulation. 

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The artists' residency was made possible with the generous support of Coincidencia / ProHelvetia South America and Utopiana.